Inspiron 2500 - AC'97 Legacy Audio Support?

Question

I've got a Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop. Far from top of the line.
I have some old DOS games that id like to be able to use on the laptop. A few of which simply WILL NOT run in windows 2000 (My OS of choice). So i've thrown together this boot disk which loads DOS, actually, windows 98 minus the GUI.
Ive been able to get everything that i need working under DOS, except for the sound card. According to Device manager i've got an Intel AC'97 codec card. I found a hardware ID program that gives me a more specific ID of "Intel 82801BA/BAM ICH2".

I've found MANY resources online that talk about using the AC'97 under DOS, the most consistant answer is to get a few TSR's that support this card, and load them in your autoexec.bat, along with a blaster environment variable. Which ive done. All seems to go well, except that one of the TSR's tells me that i need to enable legacy audio support in my BIOS. I;ve confirmed this in at least two of the online resources that i found, one refers to this as enabling "Sound blaster compatibility" and the other simply says "Enable legacy audio". So it seems that i may be just one step away from getting this working. However i've looked through every page of my Bios (Pheonix) setup, and there is nothing to be found along these lines. I even went and downloaded a bios update from Dell to see if this option was added in a later revision. the update helped a few other problems i was having (yippee!) but still no legacy audio support option in the BIOS.

Has anyone else accomplished this? Does anyone know if this option exists? Or even if i'm heading down the wrong path alltogether?

Thanks!

YJ Nate · Answer

Anyone?

4fluke · Answer

I'd guess that you'd have to find some windows 98 drivers for the sigmatel sound system.  If you can't see it in the BIOS, then changing that option is going to be difficult, unless you could find some sort of BIOS editor.

YJ Nate · Answer

I dont know that a '98 driver would do me much good.
I need a DOS native driver. If this were a desktop it would be as simple as swapping in an old SB or something, but being a Laptop thats not so easy.
Has anyone tried what i'm attempting to accomplish?
Maybe the AC'97 drivers arent the right way to go?

Thanks

4fluke · Answer

That's a tough one.   Any chance that you could dual boot the system, with two partitions: one being the Win98 one and the other being the Windows 2000 system?  If you could do this, then you would be able to use the win98 GUI and try running the games in the DOS shell?

YJ Nate · Answer

that could be possible, but the hard drive is just small enough to make that cumbersome (10GB). I used to dual boot linux and winME, and it got old, quick.
And on top of that, i dont know for sure if this game will even run using a windows dos shell. I;ll give it a shot though. I happen to have an old machine that i threw together running 98 to scavange files off of for this project. Heh, just need to get sound working on that now.

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Inspiron 2500 - AC'97 Legacy Audio Support?

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