DOS ain't dead

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.

> 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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> 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.

> > 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).

> 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.