DOS ain't dead

Hello there! I'm working on a little project at home, setting up a seperete computer i have as a ms-dos only machine, with windows 3.11 for networking and transferring files into the thing, then running stuff in real ms-dos mode like games and some older programs, just for fun for me.

That aside, i need to figure out a PCI-based sound card that's either an actual SoundBlaster or just in general any PCI-based sound card that will work as Sound-Blaster 16 compatable in ms-dos.

I have looked around ebay some, but i'm worried that most of the cards on there, even if PCI and < $5, most likely will be Win9x or higher only.

Sadly, i do have an original Sound Blaster AWE64 but the board i have is pci-only. If i'm unable to locate a PCI solution i may just look at finding a cheap 486 or early-pentium board on ebay and try to build one of those for dos, something to use my AWE64 and Eitherlink-III cards.

Has anyone else done anything like this in the past 5 years or so and can suggest a pci sound card?

I'm pretty resourceful at locating drivers for things, driverguide, googling, etc, so that shouldn't be too difficult if it was a somewhat main-stream brand that made the thing.

Lemme know... i'm gonna peek around ebay at old parts for a bit for a 486-ish option.

Best would be some ISA soundcard but if you want some for PCI slot buy Soundblaster Live! card.

The reason is good DOS compatibility with proper driver. Actualy, the first versions of driver weren't without problems but people on this forum have the latest version which behave very good.
Another reason is the native SBLive! support in few DOS programs.

Other choice is SB128 PCI but it doesn't work so good like SBLive!

You can of course use other PCI cards, some drivers are here:
http://vsynchmame.mameworld.info/

And some other informations you can read here:
http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0503736/php/drdoswiki/index.php?n=Main.SoundCardChip

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DOS-u-akbar!

Thank you for your reply, i'll look through this in a little while after coffee.


The problem is that no matter what card i select on creative's website, there's no drivers listed for any of em, Live, or otherwise for ms-dos unless i select the ISA-connected AWE64 card.

guess i'll have to look around for an ISA powered motherboard some time, the few i found on ebay were like $30 each, ouch... oh well, maybe something local later.

Do you know of some site that has dos drivers for like the Audigy 1? i have an audigy 4 and this other site suggests i could use audigy1 drivers for dos for it, but i can't find em yet.

FWIW, it is at least theoretically possible to "virtualize" something like a SB16 using a USB sound system and my DOS USB architecture (http://bretjohnson.us) as a foundation. Eventually, a sound system driver will be written to do just that. If somebody else doesn't do it first, I plan to eventually try to write such a driver (it's WAY down on my list of priorities right now, though).

I know it won't do you much good in the near future, but may be something to keep in mind for a few years down the road.

> Sadly, i do have an original Sound Blaster AWE64 but the board i have is
> pci-only. If i'm unable to locate a PCI solution i may just look at
> finding a cheap 486 or early-pentium board on ebay and try to build one of
> those for dos, something to use my AWE64 and Eitherlink-III cards.

What chipset does have your PCI-only mobo? If there's intel ICH6 and newer then forget the sound under DOS. Rather go for some mobo with ISA...
Here's my newer mobos with ISA list:
http://rayer.ic.cz/hardware/mbisa.htm

About SB-PCI cards - AFAIK there are drivers for DOS working with SB live, Audigy 1 and 2.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Thank you for the motherboard list, i actually found a few of em on ebay, and might look into that.

As to the audigy dos drivers, i haven't looked on driver guide yet, but they're not listed on creative's site, i've selected every audigy option and then went to drivers and nothing listed for ms-dos, maybe i'm doing it wrong, wouldn't be the first time.

> As to the audigy dos drivers, i haven't looked on driver guide yet, but
> they're not listed on creative's site.

Fortunately, people on this forum have DOS drivers for creative Cards.

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DOS-u-akbar!

> > As to the audigy dos drivers, i haven't looked on driver guide yet, but
> > they're not listed on creative's site.
>
> Fortunately, people on this forum have DOS drivers for creative Cards.

Do you have a link to the thread? Because i've searched the site with both it's internal searcher and google for things like sound, sound card, audigy, creative, and not found anything with dos drivers.

if i could just get my pci audigy card to work in dos, whatever drivers i have to use, i could just use my AthlonXP system for a dos machine. I know it's overkill for dos work but it's in peices over there in my closet and not being used, so And using existing hardware without spending money on something is always a plus for me.

> Do you have a link to the thread?

See http://www.japheth.de/Download/DOS/ and look for something with SB*

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MS-DOS forever!

> they're not listed on creative's site, i've selected every audigy option
> and then went to drivers and nothing listed for ms-dos, maybe i'm doing it
> wrong, wouldn't be the first time.

Unfortunatelly it's usual, that HW manufacturers are removing their drivers for unsupported OSes. First they removed DOS, then Win9x, WinXP will follow. The only chance is to get it from good people who host it on their own web sites but it's stored decentralized and maybe hard to find it. I don't know chipsets for AMD and its limitation but it seems it's not very new and sou it could work...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> That aside, i need to figure out a PCI-based sound card that's either an
> actual SoundBlaster or just in general any PCI-based sound card that will
> work as Sound-Blaster 16 compatable in ms-dos.

Some of the older Compaq EN's (when Compaq was still Compaq NOT HP) have both ISA and PCI. The EN's I have includes built in Intel audio and I've had zero issues with them under DOS including a demo that the demogroup that I was part of wrote our own SB player for. So if you look a getting a machine that may be a good choice as there were many around and also small foot print. Be aware many DOS programs will expect the BLASTER environment variable to exist.


> Sadly, i do have an original Sound Blaster AWE64 but the board i have is
> pci-only.
There is hardware available that may enable you to build a new DOS machine but use older Sound Blaster cards. e.g. USB 2.0 to ISA card ROHS (apparently supports DOS under Windows - note I haven't ever tested one so can't comment on these). Indeed the following informative thread reminded me you can buy "new" boards with ISA as well, e.g. ibase MB8880 - again I've not tested those.

I think my best bet is just going to be finding an older pentium-based board somewhere cheap and using that, or might be cheaper to just buy a sound blaster Live! card online and use my athlonXP board.

Regardless, it'll be a little while before i buy either, i have to sell some old hardware on ebay to get some money so, we'll see later.

Thank ya'll for all the useful information though :)

> I think my best bet is just going to be finding an older pentium-based
> board somewhere cheap and using that, or might be cheaper to just buy a
> sound blaster Live! card online and use my athlonXP board.
>
> Regardless, it'll be a little while before i buy either, i have to sell
> some old hardware on ebay to get some money so, we'll see later.
>
> Thank ya'll for all the useful information though :)

VDMSound? DOSBox? DOSEMU? Then you wouldn't need a separate machine set up or have to buy any additional "compatible" hardware (though they use emulation, of course).

I prefer DOSBox for DOS sound stuff since it works well (meant for games), supports SB or GUS or other stuff. But typically you need 1 Ghz cpu just to emulate a 486. DOSEMU is much faster (V86) but "somewhat" less compatible with things that fiddle with ports (SB). VDMSound is abandoned because of some modern Windows incompatibility, so it no longer works there (Vista, 7) from what I've heard. But perhaps you're using XP anyways, so it should? work there.

P.S. I do have an AWE64 on my old P166, and it's ISA PnP, I guess. It apparently needs drivers for Adlib sound (e.g. music in BioMenace), but I was able to (eventually) find that on Creative's site. But yeah, manufacturers are annoyingly closed minded about supporting third-party OSes. That's why emulation is much easier ... if admittedly less than ideal in some ways (ahem, DOS386).

> had zero issues with them under DOS including a demo that the demogroup
> that I was part of wrote our own SB player for.

Which demogroup? :)

> reminded me you can buy "new" boards with ISA as well, e.g.
> ibase MB8880 - again I've
> not tested those.

No, I have to warn again, this board WILL NOT WORK because of ICH6 doesn't support ISA DMA for PCI2ISA bridge. I already tried it with this mobo for which I paid a lot of money and it's useless :( Older mobos with up to ICH5 works fine, like this mobo that I bought some months ago for just 2e including the P4 CPU :)

BTW in our country is very easy to pickup some ISA mobo for pentium-pentiumII/III from trash for free. Just need to be on right place at right time :)

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> > Do you have a link to the thread?
>
> See http://www.japheth.de/Download/DOS/ and look for something with SB*

sb live is EMU10K1, Audigy 1..4 are EMU10K2. It might still work btw.

I do have some original Audigy 2 ZS CDs, can have a look.

> If there's intel ICH6 and newer then forget the sound under DOS

Explain please. Don't they work with MPXPLAY (it has some HDA support reportedly) ???

> VDMSound? DOSBox? DOSEMU?

Pure DOS solutions

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This is a LOGITECH mouse driver, but some software expect here
the following string:*** This is Copyright 1983 Microsoft ***

> > If there's intel ICH6 and newer then forget the sound under DOS
>
> Explain please. Don't they work with MPXPLAY (it has some HDA support
> reportedly) ???

Their ISA bridge doesn't support ISA DMA properly, as has been explained before. This breaks accessing sound cards by expecting to have a Sound-Blaster-compatible card, which, some people will assure you, is the native way of sound card access in DOS.

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l

> > If there's intel ICH6 and newer then forget the sound under DOS
>
> Explain please. Don't they work with MPXPLAY (it has some HDA support
> reportedly) ???

As cm said, when native drivers are used it will work of course. But existing SW relying on SB compat. no...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

I clarify it: The music syntesis (MIDI, FM) still works but sampling not.

And question: What about mainboards (chipsets) for AMD processors?

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DOS-u-akbar!

> And question: What about mainboards (chipsets) for AMD processors?

My AM2 board uses a chipset called nVidia nForce 590 SLI MCP (i.e. nForce 5). It doesn't work with my CMI8738-based PCI sound card in DOS, which works as SB-compatible on an older machine. I don't know whether that's because of the chipset or processor though, CMI8738's SB support generally is somewhat unreliable.

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l

> I clarify it: The music syntesis (MIDI, FM) still works but sampling not.

Yes.

> And question: What about mainboards (chipsets) for AMD processors?

I don't know, I had never any AMD system so I don't care. Also I'm not sure if there was/is available detailed tech. docs about used chipsets, itel documetation is quite good and freely available for years... And all insustrial mobo with ISA that I seen used intel.

BTW I think that on modern mobo it would be very possible to emulate SB by SMI mode handler on onboard AC'97 or HDA (like used in AMD geode systems - VSA, it works very well and independently on CPU mode and installed OS) but there's no strong demand so nobody (BIOS writter) put effort to implement this. It' would not be easy task to modify and extend the SMI handler (lot of ASM work, maybe Japheth could do this :) and it is different for each mobo model. And It may require BIOS patching if SMI handler is locked after boot...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> This breaks accessing sound cards by expecting to have a
> Sound-Blaster-compatible card, which, some people will assure you

maybe true but irrelevant and absolutely unable to trigger any surprise/WOW effect considering all the other absurdities and backwardnesses already posted by the "DOS community" in the past

> is the native way of sound card access in DOS.

Accessing hardware that you don't have is native?

http://www.mail-archive.com/freedos-user%40lists.sourceforge.net/msg10223.html

> I have a PacMan game, that is intended for Dos, it runs well with FreeDos,
> also,..but it never can detect "sound blaster"

It's just a question of time until G.R. gives up and goes back to Windaube where everything is 100% compatible and works 100% smoothly

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This is a LOGITECH mouse driver, but some software expect here
the following string:*** This is Copyright 1983 Microsoft ***

Does anyone here have links to Audigy 1-4 EMU10k2 drivers for ms-dos? I searched google all last night, the link posted further up in this thread has nothing, and there's nothing on driverguide. I run a small personal web server here in my house with low traffic, i could mirror it for whom ever wants to share it, for the dos community.

And to the earlier questions about why i don't use Dosemu, or some emulated thing, it's because i'd just rather use a real machine running real, native ms-dos mode, because i'm weird in the sense i want an actual functioning machine that can do dos work.

> Does anyone here have links to Audigy 1-4 EMU10k2 drivers for ms-dos? I
> searched google all last night, the link posted further up in this thread
> has nothing, and there's nothing on driverguide. I run a small personal web
> server here in my house with low traffic, i could mirror it for whom ever
> wants to share it, for the dos community.
>
> And to the earlier questions about why i don't use Dosemu, or some emulated
> thing, it's because i'd just rather use a real machine running real, native
> ms-dos mode, because i'm weird in the sense i want an actual functioning
> machine that can do dos work.


They are on MPXplay page, on the bottom.
There is also an unofficial patch for Audigy 2 cards.
http://www.freewebtown.com/mpxplay/

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DOS-u-akbar!

>
> They are on MPXplay page, on the bottom.
> There is also an unofficial patch for Audigy 2 cards.
> http://www.freewebtown.com/mpxplay/

BTW, seems beta 8 was just updated today!

> > had zero issues with them under DOS including a demo that the demogroup
> > that I was part of wrote our own SB player for.
> Which demogroup? :)
A small one which not many people heard of. Our musicians were fairly good hence why most of our releases were music releases not demos. Apart from some design ideas most of my input was uploading/locating/supplying tools (as SYSOP).

> No, I have to warn again, this board WILL NOT WORK because of ICH6
Ok, thanks for the info. Haven't needed these type of boards - yet.

> Just need to be on right place at right time :)
:)

> A small one which not many people heard of. Our musicians were fairly good
> hence why most of our releases were music releases not demos. Apart from
> some design ideas most of my input was uploading/locating/supplying tools
> (as SYSOP).

Well, is there some of yours music prodz available for download?

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> Well, is there some of yours music prodz available for download?
Certainly not my music :) I don't think much of the guys music is online. My board had most of their stuff (so on my drives/backups but as we are talking *full* height SCSI drives and lots of floppies... - don't expect uploads soon!)

However I used to regularly upload to Rob Barth's Sound and Vision BBS-so will be on those CDs!

From memory most of the music was MOD (one of the guys had an Amiga) and ST3 (Scream Tracker) before they both moved to XM (Fast Tracker). I think their entries for Wired96, the Music Contest are probably available online....

> BTW in our country is very easy to pickup some ISA mobo for
> pentium-pentiumII/III from trash for free. Just need to be on right place
> at right time :)

Or try a mobo with *LPC*-to-ISA bridge, because the southbridge do support ISA DMA via the LPC bus, just not PC/PCI DMA (PC/PCI is the protocol used by PCI-to-ISA bridge to simulate ISA DMA).

> Or try a mobo with *LPC*-to-ISA bridge, because the southbridge do support
> ISA DMA via the LPC bus, just not PC/PCI DMA (PC/PCI is the protocol used
> by PCI-to-ISA bridge to simulate ISA DMA).

As I said, this will not work. Read this http://www.intel.com/design/intarch/papers/318244.pdf I still have lying this piece of crap http://rayer.ic.cz/hardware/commp4la.htm at home without use for which I spent a lot of money but against all effort I was not able to produce sampled sound under DOS (tested various ISA soundcards and PCI SB live and PCI FortMedia). After this I completly gave up the idea of SB compatible sound under real DOS on new mobos, so I have to use emulator or second older PC.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

It is stil worth to try some mobo for AMD processors.

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DOS-u-akbar!

> It is stil worth to try some mobo for AMD processors.

I'm living in intel world :) I don't have access to any new AMD machine. But I very doubt if they care about legacy stuffs more than intel. Anyway I think that within few years new PC will become PC 100% incompatible and DOS will not run anymore...

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> > It is stil worth to try some mobo for AMD processors.
>
> I'm living in intel world :) I don't have access to any new AMD machine.
> But I very doubt if they care about legacy stuffs more than intel. Anyway I
> think that within few years new PC will become PC 100% incompatible and DOS
> will not run anymore...

Yeah, some people already want EFI to take over instead of the BIOS. At least one manufacturer is pushing that. I don't know, modern cpus are a mess.

However, somebody could (in theory) make a 486 clone (hopefully smaller and energy efficient, maybe even handheld a la PoqetPC) since 1989 -> 2010 means the patents have expired. Stick a classic SB in there, SVGA, and it should be good to go, at least for us "old timers". Though I imagine it might be easier to just use GP2X's successor (Wiz?), assuming they have a suitable emulator (not unlikely since DosPad for jailbroken iPod exists).

> Yeah, some people already want EFI to take over instead of the BIOS. At
> least one manufacturer is pushing that. I don't know, modern cpus are a
> mess.

If I understand well EFI can support some kind of BIOS emulation but it is optional feature which means that most of MOBO manufacturers suplying for common Win7 (&successors) users will not be interested in to pay for extra EFI coder who implement it. Sad reality :(

> However, somebody could (in theory) make a 486 clone (hopefully smaller and
> energy efficient, maybe even handheld a la PoqetPC) since 1989 -> 2010
> means the patents have expired. Stick a classic SB in there, SVGA, and it
> should be good to go, at least for us "old timers". Though I imagine
> it might be easier to just use GP2X's successor (Wiz?), assuming they have
> a suitable emulator (not unlikely since DosPad for jailbroken iPod exists).

Yes there are such toys for embedded comnputing, e.g. Vortex x86 - very small and low power SOC system but without good sound support ( I think only some AC97 codec). Yes we would need comething with true SB16 (maybe + GUS :) and SVGA with VBE 2.0. All that put into some small box like PSP or Dingoo but with bigger LCD, CF card instead of HDD, it would be cool toy that I'd like to pay for :)
I do some HW engineering at work with ARM CPUs so I have some skills designing el. circuits and PCB layouts but such thing would take a year to get some working prototype, depends on time. And then coding of own BIOS would be total mess. BTW see this nice project http://www.open-pandora.org. It is possible to do something like that but look how many time it had took them and it was done by more than 1 people.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> > Or try a mobo with *LPC*-to-ISA bridge, because the southbridge do
> support
> > ISA DMA via the LPC bus, just not PC/PCI DMA (PC/PCI is the protocol
> used
> > by PCI-to-ISA bridge to simulate ISA DMA).
>
> As I said, this will not work. Read this
> http://www.intel.com/design/intarch/papers/318244.pdf
> I still have lying this piece of crap
> http://rayer.ic.cz/hardware/commp4la.htm
> at home without use for which I spent a lot of money but against all effort
> I was not able to produce sampled sound under DOS (tested various ISA
> soundcards and PCI SB live and PCI FortMedia). After this I completly gave
> up the idea of SB compatible sound under real DOS on new mobos, so I have
> to use emulator or second older PC.

Well, did you read what I said carefully, particularly on the difference between *PCI*-to-ISA bridge and *LPC*-to-ISA bridge? Try to find the ISA bridge chip and look it up if you are not sure which one the motherboard is using.

> Well, did you read what I said carefully, particularly on the difference
> between *PCI*-to-ISA bridge and *LPC*-to-ISA bridge? Try to find the ISA
> bridge chip and look it up if you are not sure which one the motherboard is
> using.

Oh yes your're right. There are 2 different ISA bridges. But if there was available such MOBO with LPC2ISA, I would already bough it and test it. But that mentioned above was the only I could get with LGA775 and C2D support. It took about a month to go from china to czechrep. and I had to pay extra tax and spent some hours on tax office to finally get it in my hands. So I think that this one experience is enough for me...

If you have such MOBO available or may borrow it you can try it and let us know.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> If you have such MOBO available or may borrow it you can try it and let us
> know.5.3.1 ISA Bus

I quickly found one from KONTRON that may have CUSTOM support for LPC2ISA. This is written in manual:

The ETX-DC® is usually equipped with a PCI2ISA bridge which does not support DMA transfers; therefore e.g. the floppy interface of an external SuperI/O controller is not supported. Optionally a LPC2ISA bridge can be equipped as a customized version of the product, but then there is only very limited memory access on ISA bus possible.

But it seems that LPC2ISA bridge suffers with low bandwith/big latency that make it useless for realtime controll and I have a suspection it may also affect sound quality - audiable jitter, sound lags and quirks...

# Sometime after the Intel 815 chipset era, motherboards no longer have an ISA bus built into the chipset; the ISA bus has been replaced with the nominally compatible Low Pin Count bus used only for communications between the chipset chips and CPU. A newer motherboard's serial port, for example, connects to the processor via the LPC bus; as far as Windows is concerned, however, it still appears as an ISA device.
# Some newer motherboards (particularly those targeted to the embedded market) are specified as having an ISA or PC/104 connector, but these are almost always generated from the LPC bus with an LPC-to-ISA bridge chip. The LPC bus is a hybrid serial/parallel bus that collapses the ISA bus from 98 pins to 10 pins. The bridge chips expand the LPC packets back into a fully parallel 98-pin bus. For most desktop applications, these chips can work fairly well.
# Unfortunately, in real time applications, we have found that some of the bridge chips do not work well. In testing several different ISA and PC/104 servo interface cards, the PC stops responding to the card's interrupts within a few seconds or a minute. We have also had reports that some I/O cards may not work reliably with these bridge chips, as well.
# We and some of our customers have tested motherboards using the IT8888 or IT8889 LPC-to-ISA bridge chip; none of these have worked for real time control. Winbond also makes a bridge chip, the W83626, but we have not encountered a motherboard yet that uses it.

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DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.