I'm sure I am not the only person who has struggled with trying to install one of Creative Labs' Sound Blaster AWE64 cards under OS/2 Warp. For me, this took about two dozen reboots with as many uninstalls and reinstalls of the OS/2 multimedia subsystem. In order to assist others attempting the same installation, I've put together a few tips which have been compiled from email's sent back and forth between myself and Daniel Caetano, the author of the installation routine used to install the AWE64 drivers discussed in the next paragraph. By following the instructions in Daniel's install routine, and applying the tips I have at the bottom of this page, you should have your system up and running with the AWE64 card in only three or four reboots, depending on what card you have installed now and whether you need to apply both of the fixes I list below.

The first step to correctly installing the AWE64 card is to download these drivers. These are actually the latest beta drivers which were available from Creative Labs before they discontinued OS/2 support. If you follow these directions, the drivers work pretty well and the sound quality is acceptable.

Once you have downloaded the drivers, you need to make sure you have already installed the correct OS/2 driver for your card via the OS/2 installation routine. If you have a regular AWE64 card, use the AWE32 driver. If you have the AWE64 PnP card, you should select the AWE32 PnP card. Once you have the correct card installed, reboot your machine.

Note that upon reboot these drivers will not correctly load. This is fine. Continue with the installation by unzipping the driver pack which you downloaded to a temporary directory and run the installation with the command install x: where x = Drive Where MMPM / MMOS2 is installed. For example, if MMPM is installed on d:, run install d:. Follow the directions that are provided by the installation routine. When you are prompted to enter data about the card, you can ignore this if your card is a PnP type. Once complete, and you have made the changes to your config.sys file, reboot. If your card still fails to load, here are a couple of things you can try:

• Add a "/G" parameter to the end of the config.sys line that loads the driver for the card.
• If this still doesn't work, change your config.sys line to look like:
  DEVICE=X:\SBOS2\SBAWED2.SYS /C:1 /D:1 /H:5 /I:5 /A:220 /B:8 /M:330 /N:SBAUD1$ /P /G
  Where X = The drive that MMPM is installed to and where the SBOS2 directory was created
  

Once you have the OS/2 drivers up and running, you can install the WinOS/2 drivers by following these instructions.

This page last updated July 25, 1998