Hi Eric, The VESA audio is nice (on paper), I didn't know about it. But I understand it is an INT API, so it would require to have some kind of a TSR that sits in memory all the time, and responds to such INT calls.
The QV approach (if I got it right) seems to be about providing some kind of external files (*.SDR) that are used directly by the main program. I have no idea how it works under the hood, since there is no source code nor public API available online, but the basic principles looks sexy to me. Now, let's imagine that FreeDOS would come with *.SDR files stored in %FDOS%/drivers/sound, the location of the sound driver might even be advertised by a specific env variable (say, SDRDRV) - then, any SDR-aware program would only need to check the SDRDRV variable, and use some kind of (yet to be determined) API to hook on the target driver file. A little bit similar to how FreeDOS manages translation files. The basic idea is that since apparently there are still people investing time and effort into developing sound drivers for DOS (QV, MPXPLAY...), it would be great to somehow make this reusable for other projects. But again, I have no idea how QV uses these SDR files in the first place. Does anyone here have any idea how these SDR file work? cheers, Mateusz On 11/24/2014 08:30 PM, Eric Auer wrote: > > Hi Mateusz, DOSers, > >> I noticed that QV got some interesting support for external sound >> drivers. This looks really nice, I'm wondering whether it would make >> sense to design such an "official" API for newly created (and/or >> newly-ported) apps... > > How about the VESA audio API? Rarely supported by actual > audio/video card BIOSes but that is no reason to avoid it > as common API for drivers ;-) RBIL calls it "VESA VBE/AI" > and the AI stands for audio interface in this context. > > That would be int 10, ax=4f13 bx=0 to 6 - unfortunately, > RBIL details are not very complete, but maybe you find > other information about this or other existing APIs. > > I also remember that there were some driver frameworks > at least shared by SEVERAL games, maybe not many, but > still a starting point to "use something proven". Maybe > Rugxulo can dig up details from the list archive, I am > sure this topic has been pondered before, probably also > in context of AC97 (or HDA) soundcards and the lack of > drivers for them for old games. > > Regards, Eric > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server > from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards > with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more > Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
