Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?

[Kahenraz]

I'd sure like THAT monster on every one of my MBs. That way I would be able to plugin in my good 'ol Sound Blaster 16 or SBAWE 32.

BUT! I did two days ago what my friend thought was the impossible. I got sound (midi) AND (( SPEECH )) working on Wing Commander Privateer on my p4 1.4 Ghz w/Sound Blaster Live! [PCI]. I have joystick and everything. :]

I love dos...
I remember one time spending over 6 hours straight trying to free up 6KB of conventional memory. Heh, I eventually did too.
This time it took me about 3minutes, and with a but of emm386 tweaking, gained the max of 650KB of free conventional memory in msdos 6.22.

I'm using System Commander 7.05 to dual boot Win2k Pro and msdos. Win2k pro is on a 80GB HDD, msdos on the primary 2gig FAT16 partition on a 4GB Maxtor. I'm still working on getting a tripple boot, win95 on the secondary FAT16 partition.

 

[Martin]

Deja vu.

Did anyone tell you the SB 16 is shite, btw?

 

[Remote]

And why would you want to use Win95?

 

[The Khan Artist]

the max of 650KB of free conventional memory in msdos 6.22.

And all this time I thought the max was 640KB...

 

[nephalim]

I remember several times trying to get the max memory as well...conventional vs. extended vs. enhanced? was it...it's been a while...I also remember it being 640k.

 

[URAMetroid]

I also love DOS, and just today I got Duke Nukem 3D working on my P4 1.7GHz PC in XP, OK it has bad digital audio, but good MIDI (emulated MIDI).
And the times I want to use DOS 6.2, I boot from a CD or a floppy, but I'm making a new boot CD to load up RAMDrive (or a modified Win98 floppy).

 

[Kahenraz]

Oops. 640kb. 4 and 5 are right next to each other on the keyB. My bad.

And sb16 is awsome because 99% of all dos games with midi and digital support it. But with the sound emulation that I'm using, I'm able to also emulate other sound hardware, enhancing quality.

 

[zorbid]

Did anyone tell you the SB 16 is shite, btw?

Well, SB32(AWE or not, doesn't really matters) is the very best sound card to play dos games... Ideally you may want a dual setup with a GUS, some games have better midi with GUS than with SB (non 32)...

And all this time I thought the max was 640KB...

I feel some sarcasm here... If I'm not mistaken, the max amount of free conventionnal memory you can get with the standard MS-DOS tools(Himem.sys and emm386.exe) is 629 KB (about 644000 bytes). With QEMM, or some other tools, you could get more, but it was often incompatible with apps.


640 KB of free conventionnal memory is simply impossible, since the first KB is used by the intrerrupt table... DOSBox provides 639 KB, the very max you can get. They achive to do this because their DOS and drivers are all HLEd, and so they don't take any palce in memory...


For the sound in old DOS games, you can try VDMSound (http://ntvdm.cjb.net), which emulates an SBpro (SB16 in the latest CVS on Sourceforge), and an MPU401 general midi adapter, in Windows NT/2k/XP (there is also a Win9x version, but it is alpha, and unsupported, although it seems to work quite well). There are some more things emulated taht sometimes allow to run DOS games that wouldn't run without it in NT...

 

[The Khan Artist]

Or you could try DOSBox, if your programs don't require protected mode.

 

[zorbid]

Or you could try DOSBox, if your programs don't require protected mode.

Yeah, DOSBox roxors The next version will run some protected mode games, will have partial FPU emulation, and VESA 1.2 support. Expect the protected mode and the VESA stuff to be slow, though...

There will also be a modem emulator, and some support for Tandy video modes...

 

[Kahenraz]

VDMSound dosn't work with Daggerfall. The sound works for ~20sec, then craps out.

Warcraft II requires protected mode, cancelling dosbox and mouse2k.exe to fix the mouse bug in win2k.

So the only way to get perfection with such games is to use configuration such as my setup or use a true ISA compatable sound card.

 

[URAMetroid]

Well, SB32(AWE or not, doesn't really matters) is the very best sound card to play dos games... Ideally you may want a dual setup with a GUS, some games have better midi with GUS than with SB (non 32)...

I just like to add something, I own both a SB16 (OEM) and SB AWE32 (the long and over size one), and they both use the SB16 chipset (or at lest mine do), and both sound the same to me.

 

[zorbid]

I just like to add something, I own both a SB16 (OEM) and SB AWE32 (the long and over size one), and they both use the SB16 chipset (or at lest mine do), and both sound the same to me.

They both have an OPL3 chip for FM synthesis.

The SB32 has one more chip which is capable of playing wavetable midi, which sounds much better than ths FM synthetised midi the SB16 can produce. The AWE32 is more or less an SB16+ a Bave Blaster. Try Little Big Adventure/Rentless, you'll hear the difference... Or any game that has a sb32/general midi music driver and a SB16/OPL3 driver.
Personnally, I have a SB32pnp, which requires a DOS driver (ctcm.exe? it's been a long time since I last used it). Dunno if you need one for the non pnp cards...

 

[zorbid]

VDMSound dosn't work with Daggerfall. The sound works for ~20sec, then craps out.

Is it a known problem? Did you report it at VOGONS? there is an unofficial win 2k/XP patch, which icludes VDMSound... http://dlh.net/cgi-bin/patdl.cgi?lang=eng&sys=pc&file=dagnt5x.zip

Warcraft II requires protected mode, cancelling dosbox and mouse2k.exe to fix the mouse bug in win2k.

Mouse2kv works theorically with protected mode games... Mouseset doesn't, though...

So the only way to get perfection with such games is to use configuration such as my setup or use a true ISA compatable sound card.

Of course, it's mosot of the time easier to run a game on it's origianl platform.
DOSBox, when it works, may save some headaches, though, because you don't have to configure the memory...

 

[Kahenraz]

Ugh... It took me an 2 hours or so, but I got win95 tripple booted on my p4. Win95 is so useless when it comes to assigning resources. You have to do everything yourself or else everything will cancel each other out.

 

[mrfcrougar]

My only real big acchevement was getting FXFighter to work on my 800. The game has no clock compensation system, and it ran insanley too fast. However, I am trying to find an excellent FAQ for getting things to run, it was called "10 minutes to run this game, or I think I'll die!" or something like that.

 

[nephalim]

What were the PCI Slots that were extra-long for graphics cards called? *nostalgia*

 

[Kahenraz]

AGP Pro.

I think that was a HP thing.

 

[URAMetroid]

What were the PCI Slots that were extra-long for graphics cards called? *nostalgia*

Do you mean VESA AKA: VL-Bus.
Well if not, they are long about the size of a ISA + PCI slot, you can use old 8-bit and ISA cards in VESA slots.
Note: my old 486 PC and my Pentium notebook use VL-Bus for the video.

 

[Kahenraz]

Hahahhaa!!! yesss! Today I have done it!! My p4 is now configured to tripple boot Win2k, Win95, and Dos 6.2, all w/joystick, sound (midi & digital 100% compat.), etc. It's even on the net in win95.

I had the most trouble with my sound card. I kept installing Sound Blaster live! drivers for it (that's what it says on the card), but it wouldn't detect it in win95!! I tried like a dozen different versions!
Heh, it wasn't until I called Creative that I found out that it was in fact a Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 Platinum. <-- Bonus.

Oh well. It's all working and I finished CD1 of my favorite flight sim: Wing Commander 4.