DOS ain't dead

Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD (Announce)

posted by PCGamingTimeMachine, 28.04.2026, 12:40

> Yes, your rational makes complete sense. Personally, my only use will be on
> "modern" systems with no PCI slots, no audio cables, no CD-ROM or DVD
> physical drives. Therefore, your program adds great functionality to these
> modern 'castrated' systems. It's now possible to have the full vintage DOS
> experience with 30-year-old DOS CD games on modern systems - bare metal -
> with VSBHDA / SBEMU, SHSUCD and your wrapper. Outstanding, a miracle,
> really. I like staying baremetal as much as possible, and abhor emulators
> such as DOSBOX, etc. For raw speed and elimination of additional
> abstraction layers and long loads, etc.
>
> However, there are many others who will want to try and get this working
> with vintage systems. I was thinking of those traditional DOS users.

I see what you mean. Btw the round robin dual buffer approach - earlier I thought you were talking about using it for enabling CD audio from images. A double buffer approach is already implemented in the current version for physical CD path (just that these buffers aren't in XMS). So if you use physical CD + modded shsucdx + vsbhda, then that scenario does use two buffers - one in conventional memory and the other in DPMI protected mode memory.

But if you indeed meant using a dual buffer approach for the CD image path, I guess that would involve doing file (i.e. image file) reads from shsucdhd while the game is running, and then putting that in XMS on the fly. I will keep this in mind..

My concern is that when I run my current version of shsucdhd + shsucdx + vsbhda in an 86box VM (allotted 2 gb RAM), even then it runs slowly, which may be a problem. Certainly the dual buffer approach would be a bit heavier on the CPU since it's using less memory. What do you think?

Complete thread:

• Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - PCGamingTimeMachine, 24.04.2026, 18:35 (Announce)
  • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - Laaca, 25.04.2026, 07:42
    • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - Japheth, 25.04.2026, 08:21
    • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - PCGamingTimeMachine, 25.04.2026, 10:53
  • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - Japheth, 25.04.2026, 08:20
    • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - PCGamingTimeMachine, 25.04.2026, 10:57
    • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - Japheth, 26.04.2026, 21:52
      • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - PCGamingTimeMachine, 26.04.2026, 23:02
        • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - Zyzzle, 27.04.2026, 05:28
          • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - PCGamingTimeMachine, 27.04.2026, 09:46
            • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - Zyzzle, 28.04.2026, 02:25
              • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - PCGamingTimeMachine, 28.04.2026, 12:40
                • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - Zyzzle, 29.04.2026, 01:30
        • Digital CD Audio in DOS games via modified VSBHDA and SHSUCD - Japheth, 27.04.2026, 16:55