Game Port Incompatibilities

The only known Game Port that is incompatible is the Suncom Technologies Gameport 2000. This is due to design incompatibilities.

There are however, a few sound card gameports that will experience problems. The Ensoniq Vivo series, ESS Soundcards and some OPTI chipsets. Some of the new PCI SoundCards seem not to be working. We are working with the manufacturers of these cards to resolve these few problems.

Some ESS cards have problems with either sound delays or choppy movement in games. We have been in contact with Ensoniq and are trying to work out the problems. It seems that the Direct Sound Drivers will take precedence over the joystick input. What you will need to do is to disable Direct Sound.
Some games will have a sound options where you can choose Direct Sound, or Wavetable sounds. For Quake you can try the command line option -snoforceformat, this seems to work most of the time. For Quake2 you can try Compatability mode for your sound options.

Known Problem cards are...
The Diamond Monster Sound M80 & MX200 (We have a beta fix available at the MonsterBetaFix page).

The A3D Type cards (We have a beta fix available email beta@fpgaming.com).

As far as the other A3D cards go, Aureal has two reference designs. One has a square card and the other card is notched. What this means is if you look at the card it's self, some are roughly square and some have a corner missing. As for examples all I have is the following...
Orchid NuSound (Notched), MagicWave PCI (Square), I believe the Turtle Beach Montego card is Square as it does not work. A3D Reference card (developer cards) (Square and Notched)
The notched cards seem to work in most systems. They will load up when too many different types of sounds are played through them and the joystick port will slow down or stop working. A Re-boot will put them back into ship shape. I have used the Orchid NuSound card for many hours with little problems.
The Square cards are having a problem and do not work. I could give you all the specifics as we recently worked hand in hand with the crew over at Aureal and discovered what the problem is, but it is not going to help you make it work. While working with Aureal it came down to two choices to fix the problem. They change the hardware design to fix problems with most digital joysticks or we make new drivers to fix it for the FPgaming A3D Technology Products. We will be trying a new set of drivers but the driver needs to be redone from scratch so it will take us some time to get it ready for testing.

Most of the time you can eliminate these problems by purchasing either a CH products Gamecard 3 Automatic (force set at 15), or a ThrustMaster ACM Card (set at 7).

Another and probably the best option would be to purchase a Sound Blaster 16, AWE32 or AWE64 Sound Card. If you are going to purchase a new sound card I recommend that you get a real SoundBlaster and not a clone. This will take care of any sound related problems and get you up and running in the quickest amount of time.

Note: We have seen a few cases with the Sound Blaster AWE16/32/64 where you will get the message Not Connected although everything looks ok. I have had a few customers remove the device from the Device Manager and upon rebooting it gets re-detected and works fine. See Removing the Gameport Joystick section from [Win95 Error Messages Page].

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This page was last updated 06/13/04