Sound Blaster Emulator for DOS
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 มี.ค. 2024
- The SBEMU project emulates a Sound Blaster and works with real DOS on a range of obsolete computers. Instead of getting only PC speaker sound, we now have FM music and Sound Blaster sound effects!
🛠 Resources 🛠
Github: github.com/crazii/SBEMU
Vogons: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?...
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Finally! I can finally put my 5800X3D machine to use for real gaming! DOS gaming!
Please benchmark that thing with old DOS Benchmarks! ;)
I wanna see how much it cries as all cache is disabled!
@@dracoony 4500 MHz AMD Pentium 2 with MMX technology detected.
@@Redmage913You don't need RAM. CPU has enough cache to run DOS and DOS games in cache entirely.
That is weird. As my 8700k machine has built in sound blaster 16 support at least for dos. Not awe 32 or 64 unfortunately though which resulted in far better music.
This is a great project.
It might distract people from the disastrous Dragons Dogma 2 launch where even on a 4090 as soon as you get to town it runs like a 3 legged dog on crutches lol.
People need to stop preordering and making AAA devs rich and support people who actually care about gaming such as one’s doing these sorts of projects for free.
Now all we need is a DOS display driver that makes widescreen LCD panels keep the aspect ratio! It would make a huge amount of free/cheap old laptops retro gaming beasts! 😀
Well....one can dream at least, hehe
Don't think it's possible 😕
It seems unprobable to intervene video range memory and VGA bank access by software due to bareboneness of DOS applications. Hardware approach might be more promising.
Yes with integer scaling and adjustable settings. That would be so cool!
At minimum, should work with g31 chipset, performance wise they're better than 3dfx voodoo IIRC
@@jamesmillerjo the mclassic hdmi dongle can do it but it upscales when doing it so ymmv on whats acceptable, it's got a switch to switch to 4:3 aspect ratio
Luckily my tvs game mode has a setting that works perfect.
I remember in the past about VBE extensions for allowing games like Quake to run in higher resolutions in DOS.
I think a parallel project to this awesome one is needed to bring VBE to more recent GPUs, even if the acceleration is crude would still be better.
Though, funny that even to this day Microsoft still can't kill off DOS.
Once all BIOS?MBR machines are mostly compatible, then we need another project in a decade's time to create a shim for UEFI that takes calls and interrupts to translate them into their UEFI counterparts. That way, we can bodge DOS to work on even newer systems just for the challenge.
So many projects 😄
We can't let DOS die!
@@IntegerOfDoom Never!
Can't UNIVBE be used with modern video cards? (On the same note, a 3DFXEMU would be also something interesting.. though that's probably lot easier implementing through emulation with a thin Linux OS).
I don't think it supports these graphics chips!@
But half the fun is configuring sound cards in DOS for every game!
half the fun, or more like, half of a day for each machine/project ;)
Half the fun, indeed - with the other half being cursing. ;-)
Such drivers can be heaven sent.
Anybody who owned a Gravis Ultra Sound knows that game. Boot discs, specialized configuration files, whatever it took to squeeze out just a few more k of free memory.
@@billcook4768 I did that, at first, but quickly learned that sbos and co. are a lost cause and started using a soundblaster pro clone where native GUS sound was missing. Using the GUS for midi and the sbp clone for everything else, worked very well too - though the GUS sounded way better quality and sample wise.
SBEMU is the GOAT. Myriads of On-board sound age PCs got new life!
It’s amazing how important the right sound card can be for retro gaming. I’ll never forget installing my 1st sound blaster in my Packard Bell 486sx. Just amazing for the time.
Agreed!
Thanks for making a video about this! I was wondering when this would appear!!!
So much effort to do all these tests. Thank you
Yea took me a few days ☺️
This is miles better than my current method to get Soundblaster emulation working on pure Dos which involve using HX extender and a special build of Dosbox which support AC97 codec.
Been there, tried that!
Great Video Phil! Seems like a very interesting project.
The Wyse cx0 you covered in the past actually works quite well in sbemu, particularly since the speed throttling in cpuspd is well supported with its Via C7 CPU. A few things to note though:
a) freeDOS conventional memory management and shoving things into high/upper memory blocks on those old machines are...a challenge. In some cases you still need to make whatever you run play well with only 580k of conventional RAM. Even if it does, well, it might still run into issues with Origin's memory manager for certain titles like Wing commander privateer or Strike commander.
b) CPU throttling in DOS will always be an issue when it comes to the old titles like Test Drive 3 or Monkey island (the divide by zero bug in the old SCUMM games were due to the CPU being too fast). Via C3s and C7s tend to do well here...AMD's Jaguar APUs (like the old E350s)...less good. Unsure about the oldschool first gen Atoms.
c) even if sbemu works, those old machines often had another stumbling block in DOS applications: VESA BIOS support for SVGA titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator 5, Rowan's Airpower, and others. In most cases those old games cannot run due to VESA BIOS incompatibilities.
It's an amazing project. Now the only thing missing is a VGA/VESA driver for newer hardware to use with freedos.
Yes that would be awesome.
So the project to run BIOS-based software on UEFI without CSM is ready?
Thanks for the coverage.
Brilliant! Thank you for bringing this to our attention!
You bet!
Agree this is one of the most consequential retro gaming projects we've seen lately. Tried it on a Vaio P a while back and it was hit and miss, but excited to try the newest bits again soon.
I've used SBemu on several retro projects and it's a Godsend.
Happy Friday Phil!
Wow, that's actually pretty awesome!
IVAN 'IRONMAN' STEWART'S SUPER OFF ROAD one of my all time favourites from the good old day of DOS
Loved those "Nitros" but it didn't always mean you won the race.
WOOOOOOOW ... Raptor ... totally forget about the game ... Thanks for showing it!
I used SBEMU with various computers, most of them with Realtek HD Audio and the program worked very well. The only issue I had was the memory manager, Jemmex, maybe because of the huge amount of RAM (2G+), there were no high memory available so all was loaded in the conventional memory, making so some games unable to run. An example is Betrayal at Krondor.
16-bit x86 real mode has 20-bit address space, which is exactly 1 MB. The famous quote about 640 KB was (probably) about people complaining why almost half of the address space (384KB) was reserved for hardware on IBM PCs.
Actually first 640 KB was (almost!) exclusively for RAM, but the rest of 384 KB was for anything else. BIOS was mapped at the end and ISA expansion cards could use that address space.
With time 640 KB of RAM become increasingly limiting and new ways to deal with that were developed. Newer motherboard chipsets could map additional memory into gaps in this address space and various types of additional memory was added. This allowed to load DOS and 3rd party TSRs 'high' above first 640 KB.
Earlier EMS was developed. At first it was just a hardware expansion card that would map 64 KB window in that upper 384 KB space. This allowed to use even 16 MB of RAM in real mode 8086, but only through a small window.
Later boards had EMS hardware built-in and 386 and never got virtual addressing which allowed for EMM386 or Jemmex to freely allocate any memory in that region.
However they still need free address space in upper 384 KB. Newer PCs have very limited support for DOS. Usually Himem works, but EMS might not.
EMM386 might not load at all, while Jemmex will work in somewhat limited way.
I would say newer AMD hardware has better compatibility than Intel.
Interesting... Thank you captain.@@Leeki85
@@Leeki85The famous quote about 640k was Bill Gates boasting that DOS could address 10x as much memory as an Apple II or CP/M system. Of course software ate it all within a few years
You can switch jemmex for Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager QEMM
@@PaulsComputerEmp I will try, because I find QEMM on winworld. However, I am not sure if SBEMU will work with QEMM.
Looks very cool, nice vid😊 I just happen to have an old Netbook that I was going to toss out but will now give this a whirl!
Man, was hoping that project would bear fruit. That's awesome.
One of the most important TH-cam videos here and in general.
Fantastic! Thank you!
Hey mate, greetings from Australia.
I still have my old 486 Dx266 running at 100 mhz. It has an Awe32 with a TNT 32mb card with a Voodoo 2. I played so many flight sims on it back in the day but my all time favourite was Bladerunner which I still have on CD Rom.
This new project is just amazing if it gives people the ability to hear some of these old sound effects and music from classic DOS games whilst playing.
I was lucky enough to never have to worry about pc speaker sound only apart from when I was at school and we used the Apple 2C and was playing wavy navy lol.
Good memories.
Keep that 486, they are getting hard to find!
Wow thanks Phil.
This should work well on my old Dell Inspiron 3500 C366GT. Thank you so much Phil.😊
Good to see you got Stunts going. I am yet to get it to run with SBEmu on any of my newer Via chipset itx boards.
Wow! This is a nice SB emulator Phil. I tried DosBox 0.74 with Wolfenstein 3D Spear of Destiny. The audio struggles. When U get to the 1st Boss fight in Duke Nukem 3D (a Battle Lord) the DosBox 0.74 sound emulation has tinny bass background music, but on a genuine SB AWE64 it rocks. Sounds like this SB emulator can do a better job on some games. Thank U Phil.😂
DOSBox 0.74 is years behind in development. Try the newest DOSBox Staging and report back here if you like.
Reminds me of Gravis Ultrasound SBOS. A Roland SoundCanvas or similar emulation in addition would be phenomenal, A vst plugin host and a midi port emulation would do.
Seems to be some kind of solutions in the dosbox wiki.
I have that exact thin client! I'll have to drag it out and try some stuff out
This is a revolutionary project for PC gaming. It could make an impact in 1997-2000 when new PC hardware started loosing SB compatibility.
Today it's fun to play, but overall it's just better to use DOSBox, PCem or other emulator on modern hardware.
We all have a retro PC anyway with hardware Sound Blaster compatible sound device.
The most interesting part is that it should be possible to emulate different devices that way. I would love to see Gravis Ultrasound emu. Creative CMS, Tandy and maybe even software MT32 or General Midi.
This approach can work on older PCs too. Even using real Sound Blaster as an output device for emulated Wave Table, Tandy or MT32. With 400-1200 MHz CPUs there's a lot cycles to spare to emulate sound devices in software.
It's another option and having options is awesome! Agreed DOSbox is awesome but this is in real hardware, absolutely terrific!
Dune 1 sometimes autodetects the audio card incorrectly but you can change the settings by editing comm.bat, there is a config line and one entry is the sound card with irq/dma numbers.
Oh nice, good to know!
This is great news, because I just picked up a free core 2 duo dell pc from my son's school, getting rid of old obsolete machines
Thank you for this info, now i can play Strike Commander again. :D
That game is apparently speed sensitive with the AI. If your rockets don't seem to hit anything, it's related to this... So you might be better off playing it with DOSBox and a cycle speed of around 20000.
EPIC Pinball. ❤ My 1st game I bought myself...
Thank you.
Damn, that’s awesome! I can finally run some DOS games on my 98 laptop! If I can get the processor slow enough, if it runs with 1GB of RAM, and if the specific weird sound chip it has actually works with it
I'll see if I can run it on some of my netbooks. Would be nice to have a portable little dos gaming system.
Yes netbooks work great I've been told!
I tried SBEMU a few months ago on an old HP system (Athlon XP era) but the onboard sound chip was not supported so it only kinda worked, sometimes.
This feels more a review of the disk image, and thus of FreeDOS and its memory manager, than integrating the driver into an MS-DOS with emm386 installation. I'm surprised you didn't go back and test some of the games that crashed with the memory manager.
Afaik it doesn't work with EMM386. The image is awesome as it lowers barriers of entry and makes DOS gaming more accessible.
Amazing video, thank you so much! Could you please list the drivers you used for installing win98se?
IntelHDA is the big one here, in my proper retro PC I have proper sound cards so while I can imagine this may be a useful extention for the Audigy I don't see it ever being better than the ESS Solo-1 in that system. But this project isn't for that system, this is for getting more of my T5710 and especially on newer PC's that have Intel HDA based audio which is anything modern.
Got a follow-up challenge for you Phil, does this work with things like Windows 311 - 98 as an underlying driver for the Sound Blaster in that OS?
Someone on the vintage computer forum called “wolters world” released intel hdi drivers for windows 3.x!
I wonder if you can also do the same thing for Professional equipment- emulate professional hardware such as audio interfaces, onto consumer hardware. I remember 20 years ago, the sound blaster was more professional and had more professional features than the on board sound card.
I guess it's possible but likely a very small group of customers...
Cool project, i will try it on some netbooks I have. My 'Stunts Default' all time record is 1:12:05. :D
Nice! That game is so epic, I remember using it to sort of benchmark computers at the time.
Damn, this is a game changer for post-win 9x era PCs.
Yes!
04:58 - I know I'm being silly, but the division by zero error really made me laugh. Sounds like someone's failed to do the homework 😁😆😂.
Thanks, you made my day, Phil 😉👍!
Turbo Pascal I believe had this bug beyond 200 MHz.
You can fix the issue with a hex editor. The solution is posted on Vogons.
I also have one of these HP thin clients but there is something wrong with it because the lights are on but nobody is home..will someday sort it out because it would make a nice DOS machine
It's not DOS, but I've been using a Lenovo M92p "Tiny PC" as my cheap/easy to get retro XP pc project. It's Ivy Bridge based with an i3 or i5 factory, but I upgraded the processor to an i7-3770T for the bump up to Intel HD 4000 graphics up from the HD 2500 I had with the factory i5 (no issues so far, the internal cooling seems fine and powerbrick easily handles the extra 10 watt rating (35 > 45w with power supply supporting I think 65w). There's official XP support drivers wise, all you need is easy2boot to simplify the installation. I've had zero issues with support, and performance for early to even a chunk of later XP era titles is great. I mainly play the Sims and Sims 2, but Doom 3 works fine and Crysis for a laugh will run fine mostly on max settings aside from shaders/shadow/water detail set to medium or low. I use a 20 inch Dell UltraSharp 4:3 2007FP with it, 1600x1200 at 60hz is amazing for XP era IMO. I also have a 20 inch 16:10 1680x1050 60hz monitor from when I actually ran XP I've kept all these years.
I have a m92p also! Great little machine 😎
Wish such machines had better graphics options. That's why I really like the SFF size as you can put in a dedicated GPU. But then I haven't looked deeper in HD4000 compatibility more than just testing my usual games
@@philscomputerlab I super agree with this! SFF with an expansion slot is such a great combo. I regularly use my HP T5710 with a Voodoo 2 😎
Are you aware of any more modern SFF devices with an expansion slot? I think Miniforum does one but it’s expensive. 😢
Also Phil have you heard of the HDA driver for Windows 3.x? Someone on the msfn forums has modified the driver to be easily installed on win 9x. After a bit of troubleshooting with the driver creator in the forum I was able to get it running on my t420! Now my laptop can boot into Windows 10, Windows 98 and msdos allowing for playing of nearly all the games i miss. With the vbem driver i can get VESA graphics with 32 Bit so no hardware acceleration but with the i5 processor that’s in the t420 i get silky smooth frame rates with games such as ms flight sim 98, simcopter, etc all with sound!
Amazing! The community is amazing, always cooking up something new.
@@philscomputerlab it sure is! I can now play my windows 98 games too, (Caesar iii simcity 3000, tomb raider ii/iii, transport tycoon etc) and I installed the Yamaha xg softsynth. Sounds amazing! It’s great isn’t it? It’s finally been done. Sound for msdos AND win3.x/9x!!!
All that’s left is for someone to develop the „soft-gpu“ for virtual box (emulates a voodoo2) for actual real hardware and we will finally have it cracked
If you want to try it yourself simply head over to the windows 9x section of the msfn forums. And there are walkthroughs for many different systems (through troubleshooting of course) as every modern pc could end up with a hda codec from realtek, connexant, idt, etc but I’d imagine eventually one could package each configuration for each brand of codec. They all work according to the intel hda specification, but how they initialize are unique
Roland MT32 and other MIDI devices is expensive today and hard to find good working. What’s a Good Budget Setup for playing DOS games on a 486 ? Or is it better to use a NON-486 computer ?……
While I have a specially built machine for DOS gaming, this is great for those that don't, and want a dedicated machine without building one out of period correct parts. I am curious, that since the thinclient you're using has a Via CPU, does SetMul work on it for speed control?
Setmul works for disabling the Cache, it's quite a slow down.
Wonder if you can run windows 3.1 with sound using that disk image & driver ? 🤔
I tried SBEMU on an emachines em350 netbook (Atom processor) with a floppy and CD version of Dune, music and digital sound work cleanly without errors. On a motherboard with a VIA processor, the sound is interrupted and stutters
I WISH they add support for the "Realtek HD Audio" chip. All my old systems have that on the motherboard,
Do more games work in MS-Dos? Or are the problems mostly with SBEMU? I don't mind putting in the work for a MS-Dos setup.
It's more that you have to use the freeDOS memory driver that's likely causing issues.
Di you also manage to get some demo's to run on FreeDOS/SBEMU ? In my experiences FreeDOS does not go very well with 1990s PC-demo's
Nope didn't try any demos I'm afraid.
What about using Ram Drive to reduce the total amount of ram to 8MB?
What version did you used . A user build or the beta 3?
I wanna know. Is there a DOS IPX driver that would work with these thin clients?
Hmm good question. You would need a DOS packet driver and that's it?
Is my DosBox setup about to be challenged? 🤔 perhaps
It's just awesome that have another good OPTION!
@@philscomputerlab true. More options good, less options bad
It has option of running more recent OSs 😁
@@jamesmillerjo options good. I would be nice if it works for windows games too
EY Phil i have a question which i7 can i put into a hp elitedesk 800 g1 white a i5 4590 😅
Officially I can see the i7-4770 listed 😊
@@philscomputerlabthank you
I've got a netbook that I wanted to put a lite linux version on it and use dosbox. I tried and it turns out there is a issue with the keyboard in linux that requireds a bios update (which needs to be run in windows).
I might try this instead... I've been meaning to look at FreeDos too...
Keyboard issue? Wow that's something I haven't heard of. Yes netbooks have been reported to work well with this project.
@@philscomputerlab Not freedos, the issue was with the Linux/dosbox setup.
I'm gonna try Freedos today.
@@iamimiPod Ah got it. Hope it works out for you and can breathe some life into that machine.
How did he get it to work?! Iv'e been troubleshooting it for 2w now and when SBEMU is being run it completely breaks everything
This is really cool. I've got three of these thin clients laying about.
Phil, I don't suppose modern USB XInput drivers exist?
Not (yet)! But there are projects like Pico GUS that has a USB port for some pads like the PC Xbox 360.
Anyone know why an obscure AC’97 based laptop chip might only output sound at full volume via the headphone jack and never through the internal speakers? I’ve always assumed it’s a driver issue, but I don’t really want to mess with the drivers because it took forever to find a working one and now I’ve since lost the file. Could be that the speakers are broken, but that doesn’t explain the lack of volume adjustment. It was made to run XP, and XP drivers are easier to find, but the issue persists. It’s an absolute dog on XP, though. At least with 98 it can game fairly well.
Does this depend on JEMMX? Or does it just need "an" extended memory manager? If it doesn't require JEMMX, I'd be curious to see the results of manually installing it into MSDOS with EMM386.
Yes it requires it, won't work without it!
"If you don't load JEMM+QPIEMU (or QEMM), only protected mode applications will be supported." From Github project page.
Looks like with EMM386 you will lose half of the compatibility.
Does it have better compatibility or sound emulation than in dosbox?
Note that this runs on real DOS, the games aren't emulated....
True story. If you know DOS commands you can run Linux. Great video Phil.
?
I find it's a bit of a hindrance, actually. I keep finding myself typing the wrong commands when going between DOSBox and the Linux Mint terminal. Go a couple of months without doing anything in DOSBox, and I'll end up typing Linux commands into it. Go to do something in the terminal after a session in DOSBox, and I'll end up typing DOS commands.
@@Roxor128 lol that's hilarious.
@@retropcscotland4645 Eloquently summed up with four words: "Damn you, Muscle Memory!"
I know you said that FreeDOS doesn't have good compatibility, but have you tried The unofficial MS-DOS 7.10 version? It was a version released by a group a long time ago and utilizes the MS-DOS versions from Windows 9.x so with that you get fat 32 support even though you didn't in the official MSDOS 6.22
7.1 is part of 98 and yes, covered it extensively on the channel!
This is really neat. Thanks for the video. I had an idea if you wanna test it, since a lot of these machines might not be able to run PCem or DOSbox full speed; if the PC has XP or Win7 drivers, I wonder how well MS Virtual PC 2007 would work? Iirc it presented an S3 VGA and Sound Blaster that worked with DOS/Win3.x and Virtualization is faster than emulation.
Might be useful for machines with poor compatibility that are fast enough for XP/Win7 but not fast enough for full blown emulation.
Cool don't think I've ever used that specific emulator!
@@philscomputerlab I did a bit of searching, the 2004 version supported older things, but the 2007 version's Win98 preset uses a sound blaster. And It seems you can use the driver disk from 2004 with 2007 VMs if you want mouse integration, etc. Microsoft released both for free, and used a modified version of 2007 for "XP Mode" on Win7. 2004 is software virtualization only, so will work on anything, 2007 supports hardware virtualization but can be run in software mode.
I remember using them years ago when messing with older Windows as it presented hardware that you could use normal drivers for with sound, video and I think network too, and it supported OS/2 which I was messing around with too. There's no 3-d acceleration, you only got some kind of S3 card, from what I recall. But I think it did work with directdraw.
I just remember it being the best way I'd found to run Windows 3.x at the time, because the S3 video just worked, and I recall it working well with Dos stuff. Way better than VMware or Virtualbox were.. are? Those you had use something like a generic modified SVGA driver for Win 3.x and it always felt a bit hacky.
@@Raletia That's interesting for sure, might check it out one day!
This would actually make Sound Blaster Live a good soundcard both for windows 9x and DOS right?
@@Witchling86 Well I didn't do much testing with the Live! but yes, if it checks out, could elevate the Live! in the retro sound card food chain 😁
Cool, I havr an old pentium 3 lying in the attic. Its got only pci slots and Ive not had great success with getting sound cards to work.
On Intel atom n26000. FreeDOS booted but SBEMU won't start
That's a shame.
I tried it for weeks, but on one notebook it wasn't possible to run at all (This 'Gericom' notebook also is 100% incompatible with QEMM and JEMM, while himem.sys is working fine), and on another one where it was just compatible with very few games :(
Yea it doesn't work withe very single machine I'm afraid.
There is of course several projects that emulate an optical drive in DOS. An mscdex replacement that loads iso files, forget what it's called, and also some others.
Yup!
Just for reference one of them is called SHSUCDHD. From what I tested it can only mount .iso files. Sadly most of the games with disk images from GoG/Steam are not in .iso format so it has limited use cases.
These xms/jemmx memory errors are odd. I got some of those too, when I used the latest version of sbemu. I reverted back to an older version from last year and got less such errors. The sound is just as good.
interesting project! dosbox handles most of this
This is in real hardware, not inside emulator! It's amazing 🤩
@@philscomputerlab for sure. no i get that, something different using actual hardware
I'm excited that SBEMU project means that people will start looking closely into fixing freedos for DOS game compatibility. Be it patching the OS directly or patching the game or even coming up with compatibility layers like SBEMU itself. freedos compatibility is kind of hit or miss due to it being for maintaining non gaming software but i really hope that improves.
That is a fair comment, and yes, it can only get better!
Maybe in the future there will be whole gaming based distributions of freedos.
Awesome! Would these games run well on FreeDOS? For example, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Sim City 2000, etc. Would this emulator work on a first-generation Intel NUC? I also have a motherboard with an integrated AMD E350 CPU, someone know if will it work?
It is best to write yourself a USB and boot from it. It will tell you if it detects the audio chip! Then you can load games.
When I saw this video to be released soon, while being at work, I right away had to dig out my HP Thin Client, which I still had in the cupboards at work ( for storage while moving house last year). Now I just have to find out where I put the power supply...
Going into holidays now, I will try it after returning to work. Most likely with MS-DOS. Have to check the BIOS if it still has the Memory Hole at 15-16M option, as this one is limiting the RAM to 15MB on my "normal" DOS PC (the HP I have has 512MB I believe). Also need to see what SETMUL can do on this system.
Already have a Win98SE PC and two Win98SE laptops at work. Still missing a DOS PC there. Good thing to be the IT guy as nobody will ask questions when more PCs and laptops are appearing. xD
Happy holidays! Nothing better than to tinker in the lab 😊
@@philscomputerlab Danke danke! :D
Sadly the HP and the Pentium 2 laptop that I want to try out SBEmu on (also need to reinstall Win98SE on the latter) are still at work. I'm tempted to go there to pick them up but also don't really want to go to work while being off, even though it's not far away.
Might create a new DOS DVD though with more drivers, tools and games as it has been a few years now and quite a few tools and drivers have been added (also thanks to you). Always nice to have everything important on one disk.
Also found DOS 3.x, 6.2 and Windows 3.1 floppy disks at work that I still need to test and make backups off if still in working condition. Plus a disk called "Neueste Spiele - Beck Software im dtv" from the German publishing company dtv, where I don't know the contents off.
In some cases this project can be held back by FreeDOS due to the lack of compatibility due to the memory manager. Hopefully the developer or developers behind FreeDOS can some how emulate whatever memory management that DOS 6.22 uses for better compatibility. With me however while this is a very cool piece of software I am going to stick with the tride and true DOSbox via the eXo DOS project.
I believe that memory manager is needed to trap ports and interrupts or something like that.
I wonder if replacing JEMMX with EMM386 might fix some of those specific errors?
It needs it though, so not an option. At least that's my understanding....
"If you don't load JEMM+QPIEMU (or QEMM), only protected mode applications will be supported." From Github project page.
Looks like with EMM386 you will lose half of the compatibility.
@@hyoenmadan Hmm I didn't test this, but could mean at least some games could start working ...
It would have been also interesting to compare audio latency of SBEMU vs DOSBox (both set to the lowest buffer possible) vs original hardware...
And while at it, one could also test differences in video and input latency of DOSBox vs original hardware.
Give it a spin! It's easy to test. In terms of from my side, beyond the "I didn't notice anything off" I don't have more detailed information 😊
Hello Phil what is the name of the first pinball game and the last racing game?
Thanks a lot
I think it's Epic Pinball and Stunts.
I mentioned all the games!
For DOS enthusiasts with a little extra expendable money, take a look at the MiSTer fpga project for simulation of a 486sx They also have a device that connects to it for full MT-32 MIDI emulation, called the Pi-Hat
I do have to wonder why they stopped at an SX (meaning no Quake). Is the FPU really that difficult to implement? I know it _is_ somewhat complicated, given I tried my hand at making a 32-bit floating-point adder in Logisim (definitely not IEEE754 compliant, and probably not very efficient, but it does otherwise work), but is it really more complicated than the rest of the CPU?
@@Roxor128 it's about interest of developing it. The Ao486 is a core somehow auto-generated from bochs and improved by a developer, but starting it from scratch could add an FPU. The thing is getting some core developer interested on it.
Wing Commander was so fast that I randomly laughed, not sure why 😅
I wonder if The Settlers II could run, I'm guessing it wouldn't because it could complain about VESA driver and say the "OUTER MAIN LOOP ERROR! No VESA-Driver found!!" Error Message.
Yea graphics chip in these VIA powered thin clients aren't that great with some DOS games. Settlers is a game I've never played actually 🙂
@@philscomputerlab True, I would much rather to run that on something with NVIDIA or Radeon Graphics. (Not sure about Intel Graphics for DOS, But I suspect this isn't ideal either.)
If you find building your city relaxing with some ocassional battles with enemy cities then I would say it's a very good choice.😄
But I find The Settlers II better with more text which helps you know which building is which, and explains that to you, the 1993 one is not bad by any means, but you'd have to own a manual somewhere to know which building is what for etc. I understand that probably it was limited thanks to being a Amiga & PC game, but yeah... I grew up on II so I have my own bias sort of speak
😅
I'd try it on my Acer Aspire One (they have different models in the compatibility list). Problem is, I don't have any of my old DOS games anymore (what few I had anyway).
I would definitely want to attempt the games that didn't run with MSDOS and/or HIMEM.SYS and EMM386 instead, and see if that helps. Or see if there are known problems with the games that have nothing to do with the emulator.
That divide by 0 error sounds like an error I got all the time due to a problem with a compiler. I think there was a patching program or something to fix it.
And, of course, there were all those CPU slowdown utilities that could help with games running too fast.
JEMMEX is required for real mode games, so that's one constraint. I didn't try that other memory manager that is mentioned, worth a shot but it's not freely available. EMM386 not compatible I'm afraid...
@@philscomputerlab I was just meaning running the emulator on regular MSDOS which has that stuff built in, instead of FreeDOS.
That is, assuming these computers are even MSDOS compatible.
@@ZipplyZane I don't think that changes much as the issue is JEMMEX. JEMMEX is also needed with MS-DOS
@@philscomputerlab Ah. It seems I have misunderstood what JEMMEX is. It actually replaces both HIMEM.SYS and EMM386. Though there is also JEMM386, which can run with Himem
Anyways, my recommendation of trying proper MS-DOS is really just to rule out any incompatibilities with the game and FreeDOS, since the games were originally written with (a particular version of ) MS-DOS in mind.
Heck, I even wonder if running a slowdown app might help, in case the problem involves a race conditiom. Or limiting memory availability. But, if course, you may have already tried all of that.
the divide by zero in Lotus is just caused by a Fast CPU. I also got the same error on my Pentium 3. Any slowdown utility fixes it.
I also did a video over SBEMU, and the only game that had weird behaviour for me was Shadow Warrior. But I didn't tested all your games.
Amazing what machine did you run this on? What is the hp machine?
HP T55xx something along those lines. HP T5530!
@@philscomputerlab so this might work with a t5710 with the via chip you reviewed in the past?
@@systemchris It might!
Drink a shot everytime something „working fine“ in this video 😂
The issue I have had with the SBEMU project is that is require Jemmex, which causes issues every time I try it. I stick with Himem.sys and emm386.exe, since I rarely have issue but have encounter a motherboard that was using all the conventional memory for ROMS. Although I have not used it since sbemu 1.0 beta 3 also an outdate version of Jemmex. I think I should try the newest version of Jemmex and see if it works better for me.
Yea it's a requirement for SBEMU I believe.
Dosen't Dosbox already have Sound Blaster?
DOSbox runs on windows. This runs on real DOS!
Curious to see how the DOS versions of Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon, and Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise would work. (Don't ask me why I'm curious about those specific games.)
Make yourself a USB and test it on random machines!
would be amazing if works on a PCJr! doubt it as no DMA though...
Haha well that machine is not fast enough to run sound emulation.
Does work with Windows 9x ?
For windows 9x you need to use the windows drivers, these DOS drivers will not work.
Now all I need is a USB port emulator lol.
I wonder, how does this run under KVM on Linux? If it runs well, then pretty much any Linux machine will get native CPU speed for DOS games via virtualization.
I'm not sure what you mean as DOS and Linux are totally different things. This is real DOS, not VM.
@@philscomputerlab Thanks for replying! Sure, I meant, I wonder if the soundblaster emulator will work under a VM, running, say, DOS 6.22.
@@philscomputerlab Actually, now that I think of it, this wasn't a good question to ask, because the VM itself could be emulating a DOS-compatible soundblaster card.
Not first!
I'm just hoping this sound emulator will let my E-box 3350 and 3360 with Vortex86+ processor run some games 😄. Seems it has "Realtek compatible" sound. Whatever that means. Seems like it might go. Also JEMMEX is optional.