Old DOS Games Needing Sound Drivers, Plz Help!

[spacey 0]

I want to play Wacky Wheels, and old DOS racing game by Apogee. Owns Mario Kart. Anyway, it works in Win2K except for the sound, when I run the setup says SoundCard not ready. Probably because I have no drivers really for it since I'm in Windows. Anyone have have ANY idea what I should do? I installed DOS drivers and even adjusted the properties of the PIF for the exe to the game to load special autoexec.nt and config.nt but I don't think they load the SoundCard right. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thx.

[Xiven 0]

Take a look at http://www.ece.mcgill.ca/~vromas/vdmsound/

[rgodart 0]

OMG!! Wacky wheels!! I loved that game back in the 486 days

[spacey 0]

yup, the one and only. best racing game ever

 

except i can't get any sound to work. i tried getting that emulation thing, it installs and everything fine but wacky wheels still seems not to detect the soundcard as a sb16

[vladr 0]

Search your hard-drive for the file GIVEIO.SYS; rename it and reboot. GIVEIO.SYS (used by Motherboard Monitor, and possibly a few other programs I'm not aware of) gives full I/O access to software running on your machine, thus interfering with VDMSound (for those wondering: full I/O access won't help you even if you have a real SB16 in your machine, since besides full I/O access you'd also need interrupt forwarding and DMA forwarding -- which GIVEIO.SYS does not provide --, plus you'd be conflicting with the Windows sound driver(s), which is asking for trouble, aka. BSOD).

 

Once you made sure GIVEIO.SYS is out of the way, use "Run with VDMS" from Explorer (right-click on the game's executables and select "Run with VDMS"), you should get sound. It is, however, possible that some games will have trouble with VDMSound, although these games are relatively few. Some games (Wolfenstein 3D, Goblins III, etc.) will not recognize the SB if FM emulation is not installed; FM/AdLib emulation is not included in VDMS 2.0.3, and is available separately as installable VDMS modules (see the Bravenet Forum). It will be included in the next VDMS version which is, as far as I can tell, due to come out very soon.

 

Cheers, Vlad.

[shassouneh 0]

Unfortunatley, if you wish to play any DOS games under windows, the best way to do it is using windows 95/98/Me. The reason is Windows 9x/Me are built on DOS and are in reality DOS with a nice GUI "shell"! Windows NT / 2000 is a pure from-scratch OS that is NOT built on DOS. This is probably the primary reason why you cannot get sound from DOS games under windows 2000 (or NT). Also bear in mind, that in DOS/Win9x/Me games and applications are allowed almost direct access to your hardware, so your sound hardware can be accessed directly under DOS/Win9x/Me, which is one other reason why it works fine there. HOWEVER, windows NT (and 2000) DO NOT ALLOW GAMES AND PROGRAMS ANY IMMEDIATE ACCESS to hardware. What this means is that a dos-based game needs to as WINDOWS 2000 (or NT) for access to the sound card and so forth. Windows NT was NEVER written to work specifically for games, and dos games were not written to ask "windows" for hardware access!

To keep a long story short, your BEST BET is VDMSound which was described earlier with the link someone gave you (above).

Good luck. I hope I'm not mistaken about any of this. If I am, someone please correct me. Also, I hope you benefitted from this info! :-)