1. IRQ 5 is unavailable in DOS mode for the Sound Blaster legacy device. Solution, move your sound card to a different PCI slot and make sure IRQ 5 is not reserved in your motherboard's bios settings. You can use PCI Sniffer to discover your IRQ settings.

2. You aren't using a standard Windows 98SE installation so the himem.sys and emm386.exe devices are not loaded at startup. Solution, find the latest version of himem.sys and emm386.exe and load them in your config.sys file at bootup.

3. Windows keeps changing my DOS driver configuration during bootup. Solution, uninstall your Sound Card drivers. Go to Start/Settings/Control Panel/Add Remove Programs, click on your Sound Card installation, click on Add/Remove, then click OK. Insert the Sound Blaster CD that came with your Sound Card into your cdrom drive and reboot your computer. When Windows reboots it will try to reinstall you sound card drivers. If it prompts for the location of a driver file, locate the required file on your Sound Blaster CD. You should now be able to install my driver set.

4. You need to update your bios. Rare, but possible on some VIA chipsets. Solution, update your bios.

5. Your sound card's hardware settings aren't automatically being updated at bootup. Solution, make sure that plug and play operating system is set to no in your motherboard's bios settings. Manually edit the PCIPort=0 and PCIIRQ=0 settings in your .ini file (located in the DOS driver directory) to reflect your sound card's hardware settings (these settings are stated when your sound card driver initializes). Thanks to Filipe Estima (Bugfinder) for nailing down this tricky solution on a picky VIBRA128 setup.

6. Your sound card model isn't supported by my drivers. Solution, contact me through the MAME message boards. Include your sound card's model information and a PCI Sniffer report (or lspci -v).