Ok I have Compaq Armada E500 with Win98 installed. This laptop has Maestro soundcard and it's drivers provide Soundblaster emulation. This is pretty good. The problem is when I try to setup sound in any game it fails. I tried it on Duke Nukem and it says "Invalid DMA channel" on every attempt even when I type incorrect IRQ, except when I type wrong adress. Note that music is working. Does anybody know how to make it working? Playing Doom and Duke without sound is pretty ugly.

Can you manually select the DMA channel(s)? SB16 cards have two DMA channels, a high and low. If you can select them, pick DMA1 for low, and DMA5 for high.

i think some of those programs use enviroment variables to detect dma irq and stuff, go to a dosbox and type set and examine what comes up.

Everything is seted by windows settings: adress 240, IRQ 5, DMA 8bit 1, 16bit 5 and it don't working. I know that DMA 5 is free.

I know this won't fix your hardware, but:

Check VDMSound. It emulates Soundblaster, Adlib, and such (and very well i might add). I'm never going to bother trying to get DOS sound working after switching to it. Not that it was hard... provided you still had your product manuals...

I'm looking to the manuals after when everything else fails
Anyway thanks for help I hope that it will work. The unfair thing is that on other laptop it works. That laptop is using Maestro sound card as well and when I type incorrect IRQ it tells me about invalid IRQ, on my laptop it still says invalid DMA .

EDIT: it needs Win NT or higher.

I believe setting the Windows settings isn't enough. You have to set an environment variable so that DOS programs know the settings too. The format is:

set BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5

where A denotes the base port, I denotes the IRQ channel, D denotes the low (8-bit) DMA channel and H denotes the high (16-bit) DMA channel. There is also a T parameter that indicates the Sound Blaster type, but I don't know what numbers are what. If the above doesn't work, try Googling for more information.

Try the above command in a DOS prompt, and run a game in the same prompt. If that works, put the command in autoexec.bat and reboot

what a shame, that doesn't work. I want to hear screaming of demons in Doom on Ultra Violence, I want to hear my precious chainsaw, I want to hear Dukes sarcastic messages...

You can get a PCMCIA form factor sound card and use it instead, something with '98 support and SB compatible.

[url http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=29-121-107&depa=0]
There are others but they are out of stock Bit pricy though for this puppy too, others were much cheaper but on the bright side it supports '98

The point is he needs a DOS compatible card, since he's using win98 i can't recommend VDMSound.

Well if you mean this I have 24bit SB Audigy NX2 connecting via USB on PC but I don't think that it's DOS compattible. Now I cannot just understand why it's working on DELL Lattitude with Maestro Sond card and don't on my Compaq.

Because the Dell's emulation is better.

Better in that it exists. Audigys don't support Sound Blaster emulation (at all). No point in supporting something so old when emulation exists.