Sound for DOS games on modern hardware?

From: Cameron Kaiser <spectre_at_floodgap.com>
Date: Wed Jun 18 14:20:01 2003

> In a fit of nostalgia, I was wanting to cruise around "Wolfenstein 3D"
> and "Spear of Destiny" - I still have my original *purchased* copies
> from 10+ years ago (on-topic!). What I'm having problems with is
> getting the sound to work. I've tried in two different machines,
> the "odder" one being my A7V motherboard with a PCI Turtle-Beach
> Montego Bay II card (it has no ISA slots). I've tried fiddling with
> the "SET BLASTER" statement in the AUTOEXEC.BAT, but I can't come up
> with a way to get either game to see the PCI sound card.

Were you able to find DOS drivers for this card at all? Or was it actually
advertised as being Sound Blaster compatible (specifically)?

I eventually had so much difficulty that I went and bought a real Sound
Blaster 16 (Fry's still sells them -- even for ISA!). This went in my
486DX4/133 that I reserve for old DOS games.

The Windows 98 machine around here does in fact have DOS emulation drivers
that make it look like a Sound Blaster Pro, which is sufficient for most
games to run on that, too. It's a bizarre AT&T specific card, although the
chipset doesn't look all that weird.

> Are there any good sound card probe programs for DOS that could
> go looking for my card and prove it can be found? I know the IRQ,
> but being a non-Creative Labs card, I can't verify the I/O setting,
> nor the DMA channel, and especially not the "T"ype for the BLASTER
> environment variable.

There was a program that Apogee used to distribute that did just that
(something like SetBlaster or something was the title). They might have
it for download, or it might be in one of their downloadable demos (I
think the Xenophage and/or Wacky Wheels games had some version of this).

-- 
---------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
 Cameron Kaiser, Floodgap Systems Ltd * So. Calif., USA * ckaiser_at_floodgap.com
-- "Another day, another dangling modifier" -----------------------------------
Received on Wed Jun 18 2003 - 14:20:01 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:36:08 BST