DOS ain't dead

Hi,
maybe you already know QuickView and that it support driver plugins...
I just discovered that there's native SB Live driver for QV, wow!
http://www.multimediaware.com/qv/snddrv/
# Adlib sound card
# Sound Blaster or compatible sound chip (you can try this one if the built in driver doesn't work)
# Creative EMU10K1 chips (used with Sound Blaster Live! cards)
# Cirrus Logic 4281
# PC speaker driver (Note that the quality is low and that it doesn't work under Windows)
# Driver for various motherboards with VIA chipset
# Sound Blaster Live 24

And it works fine on my legacy unfriendly sound setup. Also DivX videos are played pretty smooth but unfortunately I can play only one movie per reboot
When I return from playing to browse mode and try to play any next file it freeze and need to push HW reset. Doesn't matter on DOS version or memory manager or FAT16/32 where files are placed.

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

I thought that everybody on this forum knows about these drivers
QuickView is great, I've bought the licenced version and use it almost every day. I prefer it also when I am under windows.
Fortunately I haven't any problems with freezing computer. Well, in earlier versions existed two versions of QV. One with Zurenawa DOS extender which didn't wotk well with the external drivers. Because of that was some patching utility available which changed the extender to some another one.
But I am quite sure that last few versions exist only with the compatible extender.

---
DOS-u-akbar!

> Hi,
> maybe you already know QuickView and that it support driver plugins...
> I just discovered that there's native SB Live driver for QV, wow!

The drivers are provided by Alex Hint, but it seems that all the links from his home page are dead now. The drivers are in PE file format, and if you are interested in writting a driver for your sound card, you can contact QV PRO's author for the API. As there is no driver for my most used (AC97 ICH4) sound card this was my intention, but unfortunately I am not a licensed QV PRO user.

> I thought that everybody on this forum knows about these drivers

Missed it...

> QuickView is great, I've bought the licenced version and use it almost

What version? I tested on 2.58 (probably the latest) maybe I should some older.
I don't remember that QV freezed later on my previous hardware but I did not used it for some time.

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

Then buy a license... I don't want that QV die...

> Then buy a license... I don't want that QV die...

I would buy it, but first I want to have sound when I use it (Edit: QV PRO) with my prefered computer, which has an AC97 sound card. If the author informs me about the sound driver API even if I'm still not licensed, so that I can write myself an AC97 sound driver for it, there would be no problem. But unfortunately the author lacks the needed solicitude.

> QuickView is great, I've bought the licenced version ...

Me too, in order to support its author (Wolfgang). Although I no longer use it every day currently.

> Well, in earlier versions existed two versions of QV. One with Zurenawa DOS
> extender which didn't wotk well with the external drivers. Because of that
> was some patching utility available which changed the extender to some
> another one. But I am quite sure that last few versions exist only with the
> compatible extender.

Zurenawa DOS extender has a few problems. The most severe one is that it doesn't work at all with the driver for SB PCI 128, which I had on one of my older computers. Wolfgang thus wrote the patching utility called patchpmw to use the PMODE/W extender after I reported its problems. Later versions using PMODE/W or DOS32A had much better compatibilities.

I tried 2.54 and 2.57 eval with same drivers and both works fine without freeze :)

---
DOS gives me freedom to unlimited HW access.

> Zurenawa DOS extender has a few problems. The most severe one is that it
> doesn't work at all with the driver for SB PCI 128, which I had on one of
> my older computers. Wolfgang thus wrote the patching utility called
> patchpmw to use the PMODE/W extender after I reported its problems. Later
> versions using PMODE/W or DOS32A had much better compatibilities.

Well, Zurenava 0.50 is the latest, so maybe upgrading would help (if using 0.49). At least it's FOSS (unlike PMODE/W, although that is free even for commercial use now). But yeah, there are more compatible extenders (e.g. DOS/32A). ZRDX is used in C--, but AFAIK, it crashes upon exit in FreeDOS (unless you have some EMM386 loaded), dunno why. You can always override the built-in stub by typing "DOS32A myfile.exe" or "CWSTUB myfile.exe", and that should work instead of manually stubbing. (This workaround would potentially be good inside an alias or DOSKEY macro.) Just FYI.

EDIT: The latest QuickView Pro seems to be 2.58 (from March 1, 2007)

---
Know your limits.h

> Well, Zurenava 0.50 is the latest, so maybe upgrading would help (if using 0.49).

Thanks for the info, but recent versions of QuickView Pro use DOS/32A instead of Zurenava anyway, so no upgrading or patching is needed any more. FYI, I was talking about the problems with ZRDX and the patching utility as a reply to Laaca's message.

> EDIT: The latest QuickView Pro seems to be 2.58 (from March 1, 2007)

Latest QuickView Pro is indeed 2.58, which I have used for almost one year since March 2007 (not everyday like Laaca though).