Hello FreeDOS developers, For quite a few years, DOS drivers for sound cards have been on the FreeDOS development wishlist <http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/(Free)DOS_development_wishlist>.
I've had a conversation with John W. Ratcliff, who as many of you know used to develop and maintain the DIGPAK and MIDPAK sound drivers under the company name "The Audio Solution". The DIGPAK driver model has been used in many DOS games back in the '90s and has a well-documented API, which can be accessed from most popular programming languages, as well as from assembly language through Interrupt 66h calls. There are DIGPAK drivers for many different sound cards, including all the popular ones, as well as a number of more obscure ones. A little known bonus feature of DIGPAK drivers is that they can also be used as drop-in replacements for Miles Design AIL2 (ADV) drivers, as a result of a cooperation between John Ratcliff and John Miles. John Ratcliff has given his blessing for people to freely use the source code of his DIGPAK drivers. He told us that "we can do anything we want with it", although he did add the caveat that the sources of some of the drivers contain third party code that was contributed by various sound card manufacturers, and that he did not own the rights to those specific portions of the source code. He specifically mentioned Creative Labs. Also, he made it clear that he was completely disinterested in any further cooperation or involvement w.r.t. further maintenance and development of this DOS era source code. Naturally, I respect that. Personally, I think it would be great to have FreeDOS bundle at least the DIGPAK drivers that are free of such third party sources, as well as to use the DIGPAK driver model as a standard and basis from which to develop drivers for more modern sound devices. Not only can they be used to develop new DOS games and other DOS software with support for newer sound devices, but support for such newer devices could be patched into older games that already rely on DIGPAK or AIL2 drivers. And the list of such games is actually a lot higher than many people may realize. Now most of the third party companies (aside from Creative Labs) of which there are copyrighted portions in the existing DIGPAK driver sources are defunct: Media Vision and Advanced Graphics and Forte Technologies. Turtle Beach and Creative Labs still exist as companies of course. If the FreeDOS developers and maintainers are indeed interested in adopting the DIGPAK sources, there are a few options we can consider: - Adopt and bundle only the sources of drivers deemed safe: Covox Speech Thing, Disney Sound Source, the NOSOUND dummy driver, the VBE/AI wrapper driver, and the Microsoft Windows Sound System driver (since that is an open sound card specification anyway, and Microsoft is quite open source friendly these days) - Adopt and bundle the sources of the above "safe" drivers *plus* the sources containing third party code of companies that no longer exist - Adopt and bundle all of the sources, assuming that no company will bother coming after us for such obsolete and niche source code One third party contributor to the DIGPAK drivers is John Miles, who not only has already released the source code to his AIL2 drivers years ago, but recently also explicitly gave his blessing for the release of any of his contributions to John Ratcliff's DIGPAK drivers. One additional thing to bear in mind is that the drivers are written in the TASM Ideal mode assembly language dialect. That means that some work would have to be done to port the source code to open source assemblers (NASM, FASM, WASM, JWASM, etc). What do you all think? Can FreeDOS adopt these drivers and include them in the distribution? And perhaps some of you know people who have worked (or currently work) at some of these sound card companies, and could vouch for the release of the drivers that partly contain code from those companies? I really hope we can give the DIGPAK drivers a new home within the FreeDOS project! Not just to solve the current lack of any hardware-independent sound support, but also to preserve this source code for its historic significance. Thank you all for your input on this matter. ☺
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