New Vortex2 Drivers with Diamond MX300?

[Bohrn]

Has anyone gotten the new Vortex2 reference drivers to work with the Diamond MonsterSound MX300? I would really like the EAX stuff and the drivers (v.102)that I have are really old, from '98 or so. But I have alot of probs with them on my Diamond card. CanI make themrun or do I have to wait for Diamond to get off thier collective buttsky's?
Help!!

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AsusP2B ,iCeleron525(7x75), 128megs PC100, G40032megSH, Diamond MX300, 2 small HD's, 42X Sony CDrom and 98SE w/shutdown patch, PD 5.5010, 1 grey cat, one black cat and one calico

[Himself]

I have an MX300 here working fine with the reference drivers. Don't wait for Diamond for new drivers, and you'll have to do some serious purging to get rid of the Diamond drivers, I suggest reinstalling Windows.

Diamond driver == virus wannabe.

[HollyBerri]

I have a MX300 and the reference drivers seem to be running fine now... but I did have some problems installing them, as you can read in the new Vortex2 drivers thread below...

...but I haven't used the A3D or EAX features yet.

And Himself is right, if you leave any tiny bit of the Diamond drivers/utilities on your system, you won't get the Vortex drivers/utilities to work... and the Diamond crap doesn't like being removed at all.

One clue that you haven't got all the Diamond files off your system is that, despite having uninstalled the Diamond utilities, and installed the Aureal utilities... there's a little diamond in your system tray, rather than an "A"...

What problems are you having, exactly?

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Holly

[xortam]

I've never had problems switching between the reference drivers and Diamond's drivers for the MX300 (no remnants in the system tray, etc.). I was just about to uninstall the Diamond drivers to try out this latest reference driver. What remnants in particular should I look for when I do the uninstall (i.e. which leftover files, registry settings, etc.).

[HollyBerri]

I never had any problem updating the A3D component of the drivers (using the Device Manager, or Add New Hardware Wizard) either... but the Vortex part is something else again, being that it's the device descriptions and all.

So I would suggest using Diamond's uninstall utility (or Add/Remove Programs, whichever applies) to remove the main part of the drivers. There might be a separate entry for the utilities (Control Panel and tray applet).

Unzip the Aureal drivers (These suggestions refer to the "full" download, by the way; I don't know how the "upgrade" one is set up) to a temporary directory.

Then boot into Safe Mode and remove all the soundcard parts from Device Manager: Start with the "Multifunction PCI Audio Controller" under "Multifunction Adapters", which should also remove "Diamond Monster PCI Audio" in "Sound, Video and Game Controllers".

The Multifunction device is the parent of the PCI Audio device; you can't remove them in the reverse order, hopefully, and removing the parent should remove the child.

However, I have seen it happen that removing the parent does not remove the PCI Audio device, and then trying to remove that will give you a box telling you Windows can't do that because it is a child device, but no parent device is listed (the name of the parent device is blank). I think this happens when you have updated the drivers only to Aureals, mixing the drivers (Aureal's A3D drivers may not affect all the devices), so Windows no longer realizes that the 2 devices are connected. The way that I've found to solve it is to reinstall the Multifunction (as you would have to do on the next regular boot, when Windows finds the device) to the same drivers as the PCI Audio is using (Diamond's or Aureal's, you can find out which from the Device Manager's 'Driver details' if you don't know already), and then remove the Multifunction again.

Also remove the MPU-401, the gameport, and the SB Emulation devices.

Reboot into Windows. When Windows finds the Multimedia PCI Audio device, point it to the temporary folder (which is 2 levels in: \Driver\Win9x) and this will install the main device and I believe the others as well, but if not, just use the Add New HW wizard to find the PCI Audio device, which will install the SB Emulation and MPU-401 and the gameport.

If the Aureal tray applet isn't running, you can set it to do so from the Aureal Control Panel.

It is a rather tedious procedure, but I find the Aureal drivers to work much better and they seem to take up less resources as well. Now that they have EAX, they're close enough to perfect imo that I'm willing to deal with the rigorous install....

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Holly

[xortam]

Thanks Holly, but I didn't have to go to such extents. As usual, I just ran the Diamond uninstaller, rebooted, checked everything was gone, installed the reference drivers and everything was fine. Maybe I'm just lucky (or you're unlucky) with this card. One problem ... I don't care how it installs all of the software (demos included) onto the boot volume. I guess tomorrow I'll have to try to relocate the files or find a way to direct the install. Have you tried installing on other than the boot drive?

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• ASUS P2B-S, PIII 450MHz, Award ACPI BIOS v1010, 128 MB RAM
• MYLEX FlashPoint RAID+ (BIOS v2.02N) running RAID 0 on two 9 GB IBM DDRS 39130D Disks
• Diamond MX300 sound card, now with MX25 S/PDIF output
• Matrox Millennium G400 Max Dual Head - English
• NEC 5FG monitor
• YAMAHA CRW4416S and NEC Multispin 3x CDs
• 3Com Fast EtherLink XL 10/100Mb TX NIC (3C905B-TX)
• US Robotics 56K Voice FaxModem Pro
• Pioneer DVD-303S SCSI
• Note--All SCSI devices (except disk drives on RAID) are connected to onboard AIC7890 U2W SCSI
• Mainly running Win98 v4.10.1998

P.S. MX25 not installed (awaiting digital audio decoder)


[This message has been edited by xortam (edited 21 February 2000).]

[Bohrn]

Thabnx, all, specially Holly, for the rather
lengthy essay. I will try it out. I will try the "easy" way first as xortam seemed to get it to go. And if that fails, then I will do the great tedious annoying thing. P.S. Do the Aureal reference drivers have the graphic equaliser in them? I really like this feature?

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AsusP2B ,iCeleron525(7x75), 128megs PC100, G40032megSH, Diamond MX300, 2 small HD's, 42X Sony CDrom and 98SE w/shutdown patch, PD 5.5010, 1 grey cat, one black cat and one calico

[HollyBerri]

xortam, you might be right, this was certainly an unlucky install (or how did you think I learned all that stuff, anyway ?)

Read more about my trials in this thread...

Glad it went easier for the both of you.

Have you used the EAX yet? How is it?

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Holly

[xortam]

No Holly, I haven't gotten around to trying EAX (you don't mean the x86 register, right? ). I haven't even had the chance to play with A3D much except for the demos that were shipped with the drivers. Was wondering how well A3D works now with Q3A. Not even sure what I've got that uses EAX. Haven't you been able to try this yet?

[Bohrn]

Hey, folks. I did the uninstall of the Diamond stuff, and installed the Aureal drivers according to inst. All seemed well. I played alot of stuff with it. Then I tried Xwing Alliance. When a mission is almost loaded and the voice breifing begins, I get a blue screen and have to hit my reset button. Oh joy. Dunno what to do. Reinstalled XwA, and the latest patch, but samo-samo. Might have to go back to the old Diamond drivers. Poop. EAX is real nice in NFS4.

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AsusP2B ,iCeleron525(7x75), 128megs PC100, G40032megSH, Diamond MX300, 2 small HD's, 42X Sony CDrom and 98SE w/shutdown patch, PD 5.5010, 1 grey cat, one black cat and one calico