Problems and questions with my new Pulsar 2! (newbie warning

Sentriump · Post by **Sentriump** » Thu Jul 24, 2003 8:02 am

I have installed my new Pulsar 2 Plus card today. Some things didnt go so well..

I cant remember everything in detail so i will just explain what of the events i remember.

I inserted the card into the middle PCI slot of my a7n8x. Boots up.
Windows detects new PCI hardware. I follow the manual until the point
"10. In the subsequent Select Device dialog, the appropriate creamware DSP card should
already be selected. Click Ok"
It was not selected automatically!
I had to choose it from the list, and then windows said that i was
installing software that is unknown to the hardware or something like that.
But i have a pulsar 2 plus and choose the Pulsar 2 from the list.. So why !!??

From windows everything now looked okay (I see the Pulsar2 card in hardware devices, with no ! or x:es at all) so i tried to install the SFP software.
I got:

Hardware Cannot be setup properly. Installation error: Pulsar 2 SRAMTest failed:
data 0x00001000 read 0x00000000.
Please check hardware for conflicts

Anyway.. After some trys of reinstalling the drivers i finally installed a Pulsar2something.inf from C: and not the cd!
I didnt see anything in the manual about this.
After this i got no complaints from windows. I installed the SFP software correctly.

I tried to navigate around the SFP interface for the first time and relaxing
over that everything now seems to work ok.
Until... I choose file and opened a project named synths.
It loaded up alot of different devices, and if remember correctly shortly after
that i got a error that complains on something regarding the PCI (i should have
wrote this up)
Then there was the option of pressing cancel or retry or something like that..
The thing is just that i could not press any of them. Nothing happened when i tried to do
that. So i had to restart the system..

When i got back in windows, it seemed that windows had lost the pulsar 2 card
drivers and i had to reinstall the drivers again.

After installation windows said something like "the drivers for this card is not installed"
reboots, and then i got this message:

"Hardware Cannot be setup properly. Installation error: Pulsar 2 SRAMTest failed:
data 0x00001000 read 0x00000000.
Please check hardware for conflicts"

That seemed to be the SFP software that was trying to communicate with the card.
Are these errors telling me that the some of the DSP:s are faulty? Or is it a
common error message?

When i tried to uninstall the Scope SFP software i got:

"Hardware Cannot be setup properly. Installation error: Pulsar 2 SRAMTest failed:
data 0x00001000 read 0x00000000.
Please check hardware for conflicts"

and

"Cannot Start Creamware uninstaller (error code 0002)"

Somehow someway, after doing the same install of the drivers over and over (like 5 times)
suddenly when i restarted, the Pulsar 2 seemed to be installed
and SFP was not complaining. Since that install i have not really had any major issues. The drivers is still installed, and Scope is not giving me errors.

I can load the Synths project without problems. But still, what happened before was
not fun (15 driver installs, one crash and 4-5 error messages from SFP)

So what is it that i have done wrong? How do i avoid this behaviour in the future?!
And why does windows not choose the Pulsar2 card drivers automatically like the manual says, and complains when i choose the Pulsar2 from the list?
I got really scared with all those problems!
I just felt the smell of those 1000 euros burning...

(
So i really hope i can get down to the reasons why i had these problems.

If you have any ideas of whats causing this, or can help identify these problems.
Any help would be greatly appriciated!!

And sorry for my halfpoor english skills, its
not my first language! (swedish is!)

(Some info about my system)
Amd Xp1800+
256 Mb samsung Pc2700 ram
Asus A7N8X Rev 2.00 (Bios 1.003?)
(Serial, parallel ports as well as onboard LAn/Audio disabled. The only thing
besides that is that i changed the AGP Aperture size from 64mb to 128mb. Could
this be bad?)
Creamware Pulsar 2 Plus (On IRQ 10 - Windows says no conflicts) (Running SFP 3.1c)
Aopen Aeolus Geforce 4 Ti4200
Antec Powersupply
DirectX 8.1

Another strange thing ive noticed, but i dont think it is connected to the pulsar problems. Is that my disk drives doesnt show in device manager. :/
I can explore them and use them though, but they doesnt exist if you look in device manager.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Sentriump on 2003-07-25 10:35 ]</font>

Ricardo · Post by **Ricardo** » Thu Jul 24, 2003 8:48 am

Dear Sentriump,
You need to move this post to the problem solving area. There, some of the more technically minded Pulsarians may be able to help you. This area is general stuf only.
Good luck

Sentriump · Post by **Sentriump** » Thu Jul 24, 2003 9:29 am

On 2003-07-24 09:48, Ricardo wrote:
Dear Sentriump,
You need to move this post to the problem solving area. There, some of the more technically minded Pulsarians may be able to help you. This area is general stuf only.
Good luck

How do move it?! Should i only copy it and create a new post?

bassdude · Post by **bassdude** » Thu Jul 24, 2003 7:56 pm

John might move it sometime.

Anyway, Sentriump, don't lose heart. It looks to me that your best bet will be to start fresh with a clean (DAW optimised) windows installation before trying to install the pulsar. If you search these forums, you will find a wealth of information about this. Look for Nestor's posts as he recently had a go at building a new pc for himself and there is good info about what order to install everything.

I know it is a pain to go through this procedure, but 90% of problems come from bizzare OS/hardware installations. The way your installation is playing up, I would start clean for sure.
Also make sure you follow Creamware's instruction carefully. For instance, if you are using windows 2000 or XP, on bootup, select cancel when windows detects the card and then run the sfp install exe file and let it install the drivers for you.

Sentriump · Post by **Sentriump** » Fri Jul 25, 2003 9:44 am

On 2003-07-24 20:56, bassdude wrote:
John might move it sometime.

Anyway, Sentriump, don't lose heart. It looks to me that your best bet will be to start fresh with a clean (DAW optimised) windows installation before trying to install the pulsar. If you search these forums, you will find a wealth of information about this. Look for Nestor's posts as he recently had a go at building a new pc for himself and there is good info about what order to install everything.

I know it is a pain to go through this procedure, but 90% of problems come from bizzare OS/hardware installations. The way your installation is playing up, I would start clean for sure.
Also make sure you follow Creamware's instruction carefully. For instance, if you are using windows 2000 or XP, on bootup, select cancel when windows detects the card and then run the sfp install exe file and let it install the drivers for you.

I just got a bit unpatient. After i posted i didnt had any serious problems with SFP. But when i installed cubase and was trying to setup the ASIO settings i got alot of error messages.. After this i formatted C: and did another CLEAN install of windows 98SE, i did exactly as the first time, only installing calculator and wordpad with windows.. But this time the Pulsar card was in PCI slot during the whole installation of windows.
After this, the Pulsar drivers installed just like it should do, no problems at all. SFP was installed without any problems and has been running like it should do ever since. :]
But i still have the ASIO problems.
Check the problem solving forum for my post on that..