Hi Damon!
I have an old Dell Optiplex 745 I'm trying to "FreeDos" and am having a couple of issues. I have yet to get the USB Laser mouse to work properly.
Try enabling USB legacy support in your BIOS. The mouse should then be visible to drivers like CUTEMOUSE as if it would be a PS/2 mouse.
The other issue is PCI sound cards. I have an Aureal Vortex2 and also a Soundblaster Audigy 4.
Vortex 2 = AU8830, Alsa for Linux would use AU88X0 drivers which do not seem to be AC97 or HDA. No SoundBlaster compatibility either? Audigy 4 with CA10300 DSP, also sounds sounds quite far away from DOS, but the original Audigy with EMU10K chipset was closer to SB PCI and SB PCI which came with DOS drivers. Those drivers were quite unusual because they provided a simulation of a DOS compatible ISA SoundBlaster for those non-ISA devices. If you just want to listen to media files such as OGG or MP3, then you can get a more or less generic HDA or AC97 compatible soundcard for PCI, maybe even PCIe, or mainboard with sound, and use those with MPXPLAY for DOS: https://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/ IF you want old DOS games to work with sound, then you will have to find a soundcard specifically designed for that, including the examples mentioned above. As the Optiplex 745 with Core2Duo CPU is probably too modern (!) to still support ISA features on PCI, soundcards from early PCI days with some HARDWARE compatibility ISA SoundBlaster will only work in very limited ways, for example without DMA or interrupts. Some games might be able to deal with that, or at least provide AdLib sound, but I have tried a whole collection of those on a dual core AMD board with little success. Games rarely support installing modern sound drivers later and DOS is not designed to help games with sound either, so FreeDOS will not be asked by the games. In theory, VESA/AI drivers might exist. Another option is to use drivers which create simulations of DOS compatible soundcard. Check out the recent SBEMU progress: https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=20131&page=0&order=time&category=0 The goal here is to support modern hardware, such as generic HDA or AC97 cards on the hardware side and create the illusion of classic SoundBlaster hardware on the software side visible to your old games :-) A classic way to do this can be running your games in a virtual DOS system inside another operating system, such as DOSBOX in Windows or Linux or DOSEMU2 in Linux (later MacOS and Android?) For DOSEMU2, you have to first add their PPA to your config: If you have for example Ubuntu 20.04, then you would add a file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dosemu2-ubuntu-ppa-focal.list with the line deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/dosemu2/ppa/ubuntu focal main to add DOSEMU2 and their repository to your software sources. You can then simply use Synaptic to install components of it and you will automatically get regular updates, too. If you have different versions of Ubuntu, you do roughly the same, but replace the word FOCAL by the name of your Ubuntu version. Of course you can also use Synaptic or other tools to enter the location of the PPA repository using a graphical menu.
The mouse driver(s) (I've tried many) load without error. But the mouse moves only to the right. No up, left, or down.
I assume it does work okay with other operating systems? Have you tried enabling or disabling wheel support? For CuteMouse, you can compare driver 1.9.x, 2.0.x and 2.1.x which all have different advantages and disadavantages.
The aureal card claims to initialize but there is no sound from any of the midi player apps (e.g. Cubic player).
Maybe a mixer problem? Or you need some specific init tool? Or the sound ends up coming from the wrong connector? MIDI music can mean two things: It could be rendering of the music using canned instruments to create a stream of PCM samples. It could also mean that the sequence of tone commands gets sent to a MIDI port or synthesizer chip you may have to connect to or init and support separately. Given that OpenCP also is a MOD Tracker player, I expect it to use the first style (MOD files are bundles of tone sequences and canned instrument data, so OpenCP already has the engine for that and will probably include canned generic instrument data for MIDI playing - MIDI files do not include instrument data themselves. Originally, OpenCP supported ISA SounBlaster, ESS688 and 1688, GUS and similar, in Windows also WSS and DirectX drivers. The current version uses TIMIDITY to "render" MIDI files: https://github.com/mywave82/opencubicplayer You could try whether it works better with MP3 or OGG, in case you have a problem with the rendering module. It can also play AdLib files and SID files and more :-) However, I do not see information about DOS ports there? Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
