Soundblaster on DOS games.

[Spectre630 0]

Just for shits and giggles I tried to play an old DOS game the other day and it detected my soundblaster but I couldn't get any sound. I had heard that WinXP was supposed to have native SB support in the DOS emulator instead of having to use VDMSound. Am I missing something..?

[Christianb 8]

I haven't heard anything to that effect, but in case you're right. Did you set the blaster variable?

Set Blaster=A220 I5 D1 T4

[Christianb 8]

I got this from PMistry, who was nice enough to post this in our newsgroup about 2 weeks ago.

Quote:

the set blaster variables stand for the following:

 

a=I/O address, usually the old Soundblaster 16 set it to 220.

 

i=irq, default usually at 5 or 7. I would use 5.

 

d=dma, which you already know, usually set to 1.

 

h=high dma, this is used for 16-bit audio transfer, the d variable is for low dma or 8-bit transfers,usually set to 5 or 7. Again I would use 5.

 

p=port, this is for the Wavetable MIDI port for General MIDI music, usually set to 330.

 

t=type of Soundblaster card

1=SoundBlaster v1.0 (8-bit mono) or compatible

2=SoundBlaster v2.0 clone (8-bit stereo) or compatible

3=SoundBlaster Pro (8-bit stereo) or SB Pro compatible

4=SoundBlaster 16/AWE32 or SB16 compatible

 

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T4

This will do the trick most of the time.

[DosFreak 2]

There is no 16bit DMA in the SoundBlaster emulated in XP's NTVDM.

 

It's recommended that you still use VDMSound will all updates applied in NT4/2K/XP for the best sound experience (well in NT anyway). It's HIGHLY recommended that you have an old DOS machine around if you want to play these games right.

[cb95amc 0]

Would VMWare be any good for this ?

 

I was thinking of creating a virtual DOS PC and was wondering whether VMWare would emulate a SB card.

 

Regards

 

Andrew

[DosFreak 2]

No. Do not use Vmware/VPC if you want Good sound. Windows sound will work fine due to Vmware/VPC emulation but almost ALL Dos games will sound like crap. Especially MIDI.

[Christianb 8]

I tried most recent versions of VMWare and Virtual PC Trial editions about a month ago. While I liked that you could take screenshots with VMWare and I'm sure a few other things (have since forgotten) the dos emulation isn't very stable. Virtual PC has problems emulating EMM386 and isn't very good either, but I can run a ton more apps with VPC than VMWare, however if you really want your games to run DosFreak is absolutely right, there's no substitute for the real thing. :x I would also like to note that Virtual PCs trial is fabulous you can use it for about 45 days. The integration for emulated Windows OS's is superb. YOu can drag and drop files into your VPC windows 98 from windows 2000. I love it! I think VMWare might be better for emulating Linux. I can't get the sound to work in RedHat 7.3 with VPC, but maybe it works in 8.0, who knows?

Good Luck,

Christian

[Christianb 8]

Hey DosFreak do you participate in the creation of Freedos at all? I play around with it every now and again, but really it's not that stable yet, and it seems to have poor compatiblity and timing. I'm not sure it's getting better either, it just seems to be changing. I wish they'd focus on a good core rather than a bunch of proprietary Semi-OS's like Seal. I mind that they're making seal I just don't care, because I simply want to run my old games, VB for dos, and 3d Studio, everything else is immaterial. If I want a good GUI I'll run Windows or Linux.