Need help with BIOS settings - mouse and soundcard

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Michal345
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Need help with BIOS settings - mouse and soundcard

Post by Michal345 »

Hello, I got an old pc, that I've planned to run DOS games on it. Recently I have added a RS232 mouse and an old SoundBlaster card to it. Everything was working fine, until I've accidentally reset BIOS to default values. Now mouse and sound card doesn't work. Could you tell me what settings should I change to make it work again? I got Award BIOS on my motherboard.
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Quadko
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Post by Quadko »

Ouch! Sorry to hear that, mate!

For the mouse I'd look for the onboard serial port, maybe under devices, make sure it's turned on.

I don't know why the soundblaster isn't working, unless that motherboard has a built-in sound card that got turned on. If so, turn it off.

Any chance you can get and share a picture of the motherboard, back of the computer, or find the motherboard model # and find images and details online? I'm mostly looking to see how old it really is, if it has built-in devices, etc. Any details or images you can get us will help us help you.
Michal345
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Post by Michal345 »

Ok, problem is mostly solved, I've changed the Onboard UART 1 & 2 to disabled, and after that mouse started to work, and after installing drivers to my SoundBlaster CT4170, I have music in games :)
Image
About my motherboard: only markings I found on it was VT-502, after googling, it looks like this.
Now, after installing drivers to sound card, everytime I start the computer, I have a message like that:
Image
Before installing drivers, the pc was just starting DOS and after that Norton Commander. Now I have to press the key to start it. Is there any way to skip that "press any key" part? I think it may be somewhere in autoexec.bat, but I don't want to remove random lines and make sound card not working again.
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Quadko
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Post by Quadko »

Glad you made progress! Good pictures, too.

I would say, make backup copies of autoexec.bat and config.sys, then remove different lines to trim them down to get what you want.

I often made a directory like BACKUP and copied them in, or copied them to files config.old and autoexec.old in the root c:\ drive.

Those win95 files sure have a lot of extra stuff in them if you only want dos! :)

You can also have different versions off the config & autoexec for different games and windows and etc. I used to copy them to the "real" ones and reboot depending on what I was up to.

For the sound blaster setup, usually it is files like SB???.exe (sbsetup? sbconfig?) and then SET BLASTER=??? in autoexec. If you leave those alone you should be fine! But if you have a backup of the files, it won't matter anyway, you can always go back.

That's a good looking dos motherboard! I hope you have lots of fun with it.

If you can post copies of the full autoexec.bat and config.sys, we might be able to help trim it, if you like.

And I recall finding optimized autoexec & configs online, or maybe on a boot disk I found online. You might be able to find something like that to help.
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