Hello Marcolino,
> Apologize me for not being very specific, but i was going to ask about > sound drivers. My main idea is to use it for retrogaming, altough i'd > like to know if i could use an Image Viewer or even a Media Player. > Maybe even a eReader. You could probably use a media player and image viewer, as some with current updates exist. They might support AC97 and/or HDA sound with some common chipsets, but probably not a wide coverage of chipsets. > It's a shame however, since my idea was to play classic games in FreeDOS > (in special The Elder Scrolls), but since no Sound Driver for Soundmax > AD1984A exist, it won't be very worthful. https://www.analog.com/en/products/ad1984.html#product-overview says this is a HDA codec chip. I believe in HDA, you consider codecs and the chip which provides the bus separately, but let me know whether you get it to work in http://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/ or similar. For games, there are various work-arounds. A good way would be to run Linux and open a DOSEMU2 window there ;-) Of course, you could also use generic virtual PC apps like QEMU. Or you can use DOSBOX, which again is specifically for DOS apps, or use Windows as host OS instead of Linux. But DOSEMU2 probably works pretty well for you. Another way could be to use DOSBOX-X which you can interestingly run as a DOS app, using Japheth's HX DOS extender! So it lets you run a simulation of DOS inside a real DOS, giving you the ability to throw in some additional hardware emulations. Some very recent thing is that the source code of the VBE/AI SDK has been made open source: This is for an audio extension for VESA VBE which, while few graphics cards supported it in DOS times, does have support in a number of 1990s DOS games. So people will soon be able to write a "driver" which provides VBE/AI BIOS services to help old games to send sound data to modern sound hardware by using existing hardware driver source code for example from Linux. Still, this will be a rather complex project, so do not hold your breath. There also is the ancient VSB (virtual sound blaster) project which uses protected mode to grab attempts of games to communicate with the sound card in order to pretend that you have a very simplified sound blaster even if you have none. In the original version, the sound is then output via printer port D/A if I remember correctly. Also known as Covox. Again, this could be combined with code from modern sound drivers to simulate a sound blaster and make the sound audible on modern hardware. Actually SB LIVE and SB PCI sound cards used similar strategies to "pretend to be soundblaster compatible". I think the easiest way would be to use Linux and DOSEMU2 or similar "apps which run DOS and/or DOS apps in windows, while emulating some classic hardware which classic games expect to exist" :-) Of course it will be less "real", but even with your HP 2133, speed should be sufficient for a simulation instead of running directly on hardware. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
