DOS ain't dead - vsbhda - BOOST demo with SB Live

vsbhda - BOOST demo with SB Live (Users)

posted by Japheth , Germany (South), 19.11.2025, 09:40

> OTOH, with Creative's SBEINIT the demo just crashes.
>
> Did you tried SBEMU too? If you get smooth playback? So you can replicate
> the problem and have a chance to improve VSBHDA...

SBEMU behaves as with HDA - sound stops after 1/2 second. I'm using a SBEMU binary from 29.4.2024, size 516096.

But I was able to run Boost with the Creative Driver SBEINIT.COM now ( by preloading hdpmi32 the demo no longer crashes ). Runs smooth...

The problem seems to be the value of the TIMER variable in the EMU10K1 - there's no documentation about it and hence it's initialized with a guessed value. VSBHDA initializes it with 0x1E0 ( copied that value from Win9x ), while SBEMU uses 0x1A. SBEINIT.COM doesn't set it at all!

You can experiment on your own. It's at offset 0x1A of EMU10K1's base address. On my system, that is 0xE400. So if I enter with DEBUG:

ow e41a 100

the demo sound significantly better with vsbhda on my "SB Live" machine (which is a P3 with 500 MHz)!

> But it seems that some demos that use original cwsdpmi can play sound
> with VSBHDA/SBEMU even with preference of VCPI so I wonder why it is
> different in case of PMODE/W...

Pretty unlikely, unless the programs use v86-mode for its sound code.

---
MS-DOS forever!

Post reply

Complete thread:

Jemm386 5.86 is great! - Laaca, 11.11.2025, 20:41
- Jemm386 5.86 is great! - Japheth, 12.11.2025, 07:19
  - Jemm386 5.86 is great! - RayeR, 12.11.2025, 15:28
    - Jemm386 5.86 is great! - Japheth, 12.11.2025, 18:34
      - VSBHDA is also great (was: Jemm386 5.86 is great!)! - SuperIlu, 12.11.2025, 22:48
      - Jemm386 5.86 is great! - RayeR, 13.11.2025, 16:22
        Jemm386 5.86 is great! - rr, 14.11.2025, 06:46
        Jemm386 5.86 is great! - Japheth, 14.11.2025, 08:35
        Jemm386 5.86 is great! - RayeR, 15.11.2025, 04:15
        Jemm386 5.86 is great! - Japheth, 15.11.2025, 09:02
        Jemm386 5.86 is great! - RayeR, 18.11.2025, 06:03
        Jemm386 5.86 is great! - Japheth, 18.11.2025, 12:41
        Jemm386 5.86 is great! - RayeR, 18.11.2025, 23:23
        vsbhda - BOOST demo with SB Live - Japheth, 19.11.2025, 09:40
        vsbhda - BOOST demo with SB Live - RayeR, 20.11.2025, 06:05
        vsbhda - BOOST demo with SB Live - Japheth, 20.11.2025, 11:24
        vsbhda - BOOST demo with SB Live - RayeR, 22.11.2025, 04:39
        vsbhda - BOOST demo with SB Live - Japheth, 22.11.2025, 18:20
        Jemm386 5.86 is great! - rr, 18.11.2025, 19:08
        Jemm386 5.86 is great! - RayeR, 18.11.2025, 23:24
  - Jemm386 5.86 is great! - Laaca, 12.11.2025, 22:41
    - Jemm386 5.86 is great! - Japheth, 13.11.2025, 04:23
- Jemm 5.86 now final - 25.1.2026 - Japheth, 25.01.2026, 07:09