64-Bit Drivers for Legacy SCSI Cards and Adapters

For whatever reason, there are still a fair number of users out there that may have legacy (read “old”) SCSI adapters in their systems.  With the introduction of technologies such Firewire, SATA, PCI-e, and USB 3.0, all of which are (1) much faster; (2) have much larger bandwidth, and (3) provide much more functionality, the old SCSI bus standard is certainly on its last legs.  The fact that it still survives in today’s landscape (when it should have already gone the way of the serial and parallel ports) is a testament to the durability of the technology that was introduced in 1986.  SCSI is currently only popular on high-performance workstations and servers.  RAIDs on servers still often use SCSI hard disks, though a number of manufacturers now offer SATA-based RAID systems as a cheaper option.  Really, the only reason that SCSI adapters are still found on any systems today is because of the legacy hardware that those few die-hard users refuse to let go. 

Yes, I am one of those sad people.  Zip disks have long lost their usefulness.  Starting with the CD/DVD re-writables and, especially, after the USB drives became ubiquitous, Zip disks quickly became obselet.  I recognize this.  Yet, when the 100 MB (and then 250 MB and 750 MB) zip disk were king, I put zip drives in all our computers.  And I used them… a lot.  My wife still has a lot of her old manuscripts and drafts backed up on a ton of Zip disks.  Yes, I know we can simply go through and burn then onto a DVD-R, but we just simply have not had the motivation to undertake that large project.  There was never a pressing need since the Zips only contained backup copies and we, thankfully, have never had such a catastrophe that we had to go find the backups on the Zips.  This is also one minor convenience the zip drives have that I still enjoy.  As most new motherboards no longer come with a floppy connection option for floppy drives, the internal Zip drives (both parallel and SCSI versions) are a great way to enable a boot disk option.  I have used the Zip drives for such emergencies in the past.

Anyway, long story short, when we upgraded to Windows7 64-Bit on my wife’s computer, I could not find any drivers for her old internal SCSI ZIP drive.  The Zip drive, itself, did not need any drivers as Windows recognizes it as a removable media drive.  The Adaptec AVA-2904 SCSI adapter that I’ve had since the late 90’s was the problem.  A quick search of Adaptec’s website quickly told me that Adaptec did not have any 64-Bit drivers for this adapter (in any version of Windows).  A little research led me to a helpful forum post here.  This involves using a hacked version of drivers for "Adaptec AIC-7870 PCI SCSI Controller (Emulated)" driver for Vista 64-bit.  These drivers, once modded, appear to work on the AVA-2904 and several other Adaptec SCSI adapters.  The instruction are posted further in the post.  If you read through the post, there is a link to download the files and instructions on what to modify in the "inf" file.  I have gone ahead and modified the files and uploaded it here for convenience.

Remember, you will need to have “admin” privileges to install these drivers and it’s recommend that disable UAC before starting.  I always have it off, but you can certainly re-enable UAC after installation is completed, if you feel naked without your UAC.  You will need to manually install these drivers and Win7 will not automatically pick them up even when you point it to the correct folder.  Read the instructions in the forum link provided earlier.  If you still can’t get it to work, let me know and I may be able to help you out.  Good luck.

Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service Is A (Useless) Resource Hog

Have you ever been working in Windows 7 or Vista and your computer temporarily locks up with the swirling (rotating) icon telling you to wait.  There may not be much of a choice since you may be unable to click on (or activate) anything else on the desktop, and you are forced to wait patiently (or curse with the vulgar repertoire of a drunken sailor).  There are actually a number of issues that may cause this type of problem, and I’m not about to try to troubleshoot your computer, but I will discuss one of the potential causes of this type of problem. 

Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service (WMPNSS) is, for the most part, a useless and resource intensive hog that is present in Windows 7 and Vista.  This service allows Media Player to share media with other computers and UPnP capable appliances on the network.  I would hazard to guess that the majority of users do not use or will ever need this service.  For the small percentage of people that actually make use of this service, please feel free to disregard this advice and move on to something more interesting.

The problems with WMPNSS are:

• It’s always on . . . even when you’re not running Windows Media Player!
• It is resource intensive.  People on the web have reported anywhere between 20 -70 % of their processor usage being eaten up by the random bursts of background activity.  The CPU usage will, of course, depend on the quality of the processor you have.  It also may cause hard drive thrashing (at unexpected times) as it searches and catalogs your media for sharing.
• It wastes memory.  As service always running in the background, it use it a small amount of memory regardless of whether you ever (want to) use the service or not.  Sure, most modern computers have 4 GB or more of memory, but if you have less, or it just bugs you that a useless service is wasting your memory resources, then turn it off.  Users that have actually used WPMNSS (either intentionally or unintentionally) to share their media library on the network have reported memory usage of up to 50% (on a 3 GB RAM system) which, then leads to our next point...  
• It may cause disk thrashing, especially if you have other memory intensive programs (like Adobe Photoshop or video editing software) running.  When memory resources are eaten up, the operating system will have page out to the swapfile more often.  That is why you may encounter some disk thrashing while your system is “locked up” at the same time.

If you check the Services Control Panel, although, the service is set to “manual,” it is always started in Windows 7, which, in effect, makes it one of the “automatic” start services.  One reason for this is probably because of the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) nature of the service.  It needs to be active in order to poll or identify when an UPnP device is plugged in or becomes available on the network.

So, if you don’t intend to use the service, then there’s no reason to leave the service on, especially if it may also be one of the major (or at least contributes to) causes of the lock up problems described at the beginning of this article.  To disable this service, first make sure that it is not activated in WMP.  This step is only necessary for WMP 11 and earlier that came installed on Vista.  If you have WMP 12 or later, this step is unnecessary and you can skip to disabling the background service below.

1. Open WMP, click Tools, Options.
2. Select the "Library" tab, and click "Configure Sharing..."
3. Uncheck "Share my media" and "Find media that others are sharing" checkboxes.
4. Click “OK.”

Now disable the service that is always running in the background:

1.       Click Start.

2.       If you have enabled the show “Administrative Tools” on the Start Menu, click on that in order to find the “Services” option.  Next go to step 5.  If not, go to step 3.

3.       Click on Control Panel.

4.       Click on “System and Maintenance,” and then click “Administrative Tools.”

5.       Double-click Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service and click “Stop.”  Once the service has stopped, set it to “Disabled” and click “OK.”

If you ever have the need to turn the service back on, simply follow the instructions above and set the service to "manual" or "automatic."

Installing Creative Game Port Drivers for Windows 7

My pre-teen son’s computer still has an older Creative Labs Audigy 2 sound card with the game port controller.  The Audigy 2 is still a great sound card for the games and music that he is currently interested in.  Anyway, we recently upgraded him (along with several of the other computers in our home) to Windows 7 from Windows XP.  It was a relatively painless experience since I always do a fresh install after formatting the drives.  All my systems have a clean separate hard drive for the OS.  I decided to stick with Win7 32-bit for his computer because he does not have more than 4 GB of memory and there is greater driver compatibility with the 32-bit drivers than with the 64-bit drivers. 

Windows 7 had no trouble finding drivers for all the hardware, except . . . you guessed it, the game port controller on the Audigy.  With a little research, I discovered that Microsoft discontinued support of the game ports starting in Windows Vista.  WinXP was the last OS to provide support for this sound card.  Well, that should have been the end of it.  I could have easily ordered an inexpensive (or a higher quality) USB game controller for the PC and be done with it.  However, whether it was intellectual curiosity or a morbid nostalgic fondness for the Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad that I passed on to my son (the gamepad, not my my nostalgic fondness), I wanted to see if it was possible to still use our favorite gamepad under Win7.

Game port drivers are no longer supported by Windows

A little digging led me to a very helpful forum post on how to install Creative game ports under Windows Vista.  As the forum post states, although meant to work for Creative game ports, it will work with almost any game port from any vendor.  It uses hacked files and requires a manual install to force Windows to accept the (naturally) unsigned and unverified drivers.  By the way, I’ve run the files through the antivirus program and looked specifically into the “inf” files to ensure no viruses, trojans, or other malware.  They’re clean.  And from all the forum comments, they seem to work great under Vista.  However, after several attempts, it was clear that the instructions do not work under Win7.  As I came to realize, there is a slight difference in the way Win7 installs unverified drivers that won’t allow the method provided by the forum site to work.

Use hacked drivers to install in Windows 7 and Vista

So, after a little effort, I came up with a method to make it work in Win7.  Basically, it involves an additional step of manually installing the gamepad controller driver after installing the game port driver.  I’ve included these updated instructions along with the necessary files here.  This is based on the files and instructions in the package from Daniel Kawakami (daniel_k), the original poster on the Creative Labs forum.  I take no credit for the work of Daniel Kawakami other than to modify his instructions to allow it to work for Win7.  Since I had decided to make this available to others that may be in the same situation, I took the opportunity to update some of the files in the original package.  The original package had very old files (i.e., 2003), so I extracted the “ctgame.sys” files from the latest (2010) Audigy driver package from the Creative website.  These are now included (in lieu of the older "ctgame.sys" file) in the hacked package.  I also took the opportunity to modify the “inf” files to reflect the newer date of the files.  So when you go into “Device Manager” to look at the driver details, Windows doesn’t show that your drivers are dated “2000,” which makes it look like your drivers are from the Win9x era!  These are purely cosmetic changes (except for the updated “ctgame.sys” files), but I thought I would make it available since I was already going to post the modified instructions to get it to work under Win7.  The instructions are included with the driver package here. 

Remember, you will need to have “admin” privileges to install these drivers, and it’s recommend that you disable UAC before starting.  I always have it off, but you can certainly re-enable UAC after installation is completed, if you feel naked without your UAC.  This hack is confirmed to work with Windows 7 32-bit if the installation instructions are followed correctly.  This may also work in Windows 7 64-bit, but I haven’t tried it since none of my Win7 64-bit systems have game ports.  If you decide to try it with 64-bit Windows, please let me know if it works, and I will update the information on this blog. 

[Update 1]  Some users have reported that, while the controller and gamepads will install correctly, the gamepad may not actually work.  If that happens, the simple fix is to open the Control Panel.  Find and click on the Gameport Controller icon.  If it’s installed properly, your gamepad controller should be listed.  Select your controller and click “Properties.”  Click the “Test” tab.  Click on any button on your gamepad.  If the proper button on the “Test” lights up, your gamepad is now working correctly.  You may need to repeat this whenever the system needs to re-initiate the controller (usually after a reboot).

[Update 2] It's been confirmed that this hack will NOT work with Win7 64-bit.  Essentially, the WoW64 emulator will not work with 32-bit drivers.  The hacked drivers are all 32-bit drivers, and Win7 64 requires the 64-bit drivers.  For more information see my explanation in the comments section below.

[Update 3]  As most people know, the majority of file sharing sites such as "MegaUpload" and "Hotfiles" no longer allow access to all the files that have been previously uploaded.  Therefore, the link in the post to download the files no longer work.  If you would like a copy of the files, please provide a valid e-mail address that will allow you to accept attached files.  Gmail apparently does not allow zip files to include any type of "exe" file, so please provide something other than a Gmail address if you would like the a copy of the files.  If anyone can recommend a place to host these files so I don't have to constantly e-mail these files out, I would very much welcome any suggestion.

[Update 4 (as of January 21, 2013)]  A reader has generously offered to upload the files to a server for easy download.  Please click on the links in the post to download.  Let me know if the link is broken.  

 

[Update 5 (as of October 23, 2020)]  As you can see, I have not updated or monitored this site in years.  I cannot imagine anyone still having a game port controller, let alone trying to find drivers to use with these archaic controllers.  They were outdated when I created this post back in 2011!  Now that Win7 has reached the its End Of Life (EOL), I'm even more flabbergasted by the fact that I am still getting requests for these files every couple of months.  For the security of your systems, might I recommend you move up to Win10 or Linux?  In full disclosure, I have to admit that I was, like many people who found this blog, a true diehard Win7 user to the very end.  I only jumped onto Win10 last year, and that was only because Microsoft forced my hand by finally ending Win7 support on January 14, 2020.  I have experimented with various Linux distros, especially those that mimicked the look and feel of Win7... yes, I was still holding on to my Win7 love to the very end.  Although, some of the distros looked liked Win7, they just didn't give me all the options and control that I could customize and tailor with a Windows system.  Also, gaming was limited as well it lacked complete compatibility with the all the productivity applications I use for work.  I finally made the leap to Win10, and as annoying as some of the aspects of the OS is, I found that I could have almost as much customization and control as I did with Win7.  Certainly not as much control as Win7, but I learned to live with it.  I also have the added benefit of being able to use most, if not all, the programs that I used with Win7.  Also, the peace of mind of not running an outdated OS that was not receiving any security patches, made the decision to move to Win10 much more palatable.  

Anyway, this very long-winded updated is to simply say that the modified drivers are no longer being hosted anywhere.  Yes, I still have the files--I don't know why.  If you are one of the slightly insane people that still needs to use these drivers, please provide an email address (that will allow you to accept zip files) and I will send it to you whenever I get the chance.  If you do post, asking for the drivers, can you please explain why?!?  I kind of have to know at this point.

[Update 6 (as of November 30, 2021)]  This is just so crazy that I'm still getting random emails asking for these old driver packages.  I've finally uploaded them to 4Shared and the links should be active again.  You can download the files here.