[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
As you know I play mostly "classic" games. I use 98SE with SB Live card. Can be very tricky to get sound to work, sometimes nearly impossible. Someone told me about VMDsound but that seems to be for NT, 2000, XP only. Is there something similar for 98SE? And/or something for TRUE DOS mode? I'm decent at this but can be a real headache, there has to be an easier way (yes I could use DOSBox but would like to know how to run without it if possible)
Unfortunately, you are at the mercy of two things: Your sound card's "legacy" emulation, and how the game was programmed. If the game supports a Sound Blaster 16 or AWE32, you have half the puzzle solved because they support IRQs above 7 and DMAs other than 1, which is what your sound card is probably going to use in Win98. The legacy emulation, on the other hand, depends completely on the card and the Live! is not as compatible as a Sound Blaster PCI. (Yes, the irony of both products having different levels of backward compatibility with the company's own products is not lost on me :-) Some cards require device drivers for legacy compatibility; since you are on a DOS-based windows (Win9x/WinME), you have the option of loading these drivers if applicable.
Sometimes the card provides legacy emulation through the existing Windows drivers. Under Win98, my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz did a passable imitation of a Sound Blaster Pro (not 16, ironically) and it also passed through General MIDI to Windows so I got to hear that too. When I switched to XP, that functionality went away, but DOSBox does a much better job anyway so I'm not crying over it.
DOSBox does such an amazing job of emulating both a slower PC and various sound cards that I think you should just abandon trying to get it to work natively. Unless the game was made after 1995, you should be using DOSBox. Which game are you trying to get running?
Finally, you can use an actual older card if your motherboard has an ISA slot. This only applies to computers 3 years old or older, of course. Which also leads to another option: Build yourself an older computer and fill it with legacy hardware. For several years I used a Pentium Pro 200 with both a Sound Blaster 16 (with wavetable addon) AND a Gravis Ultrasound in different slots with different settings so that I could play anything I wanted (it had a decent slowdown function). I also keep around a Tandy 1000 (best oldskool PC gaming machine!).
For those living in Illinois: I have a surplus of Pentium Pro 200s and also some 486 machines (and a few 386s too) that I am trying to get rid of. Tom and Chris, if you'd like a free "oldskool PC" to run older games on, you're welcome to drive on over and take your pick. Just give me a day of warning so that I can extract them from the crawlspace, clean them up, and test them. As for legacy sound cards, they go for peanuts on ebay.
--
Jim Leonard ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
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