Bryan,
Unfortunately, this is a difficult problem to solve. DOS didn't have a sound
API: programs just twiddled with the sound hardware directly. The PC speaker
was guaranteed to be present, and there was a good bet that any given PC used
for games would have one of the big name sound cards such as Sound Blaster or
Ad Lib present, so these provided a quasi-standard, but as Windows became more
prevalent and more and more games were written with the expectation of running
in a multitasking environment, they started using the Windows sound API
instead, which would work with any sound hardware that there was a Windows
driver for. So the standardization on sound-blaster et al. for sound hardware
went away, and none of the hardware that old DOS games had used was available
on newer systems, except the PC speaker. And the new hardware was so varied
that people that were still writing DOS software (such as the FreeDOS project)
couldn't really pick any one sound device that would work on more than a small
fraction of new machines, except for the PC speaker.
So for any machine more recent than 2000-ish, you won't get more than PC
speaker sound. To change that, you'd need to design a sound driver API for DOS,
and then you'd need to write a program that could intercept attempts to
communicate with Sound Blaster hardware (or some other DOS-era sound card) and
pretend to be a Sound Blaster card, and then call the sound API you'd designed
to play the necessary sounds, and then you'd need to write a *huge* bunch of
drivers that would accept calls to that sound API.
More realistically, you probably wouldn't be able to write all the sound
drivers you'd need for decent coverage of all the sound hardware ever used in a
PC in the past 20 years, so you'd need to use existing drivers for some other
operating system (likely Linux). The shim layer would need to, at a minimum,
supply all the internal kernel functions used by all the sound drivers for
whatever OS you were using as a driver source, and would also likely have to
translate between your sound API and the sound API for that OS, unless you
decided to just use that API as your DOS sound API.
It's not impossible, but it would take a huge amount of work to get working.
Jon Brase
-------- Original message --------
From: Bryan Kilgallin <kilgal...@iinet.net.au>
Date: 1/19/2020 01:15 (GMT-06:00)
To: freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Freedos-user] Game sound
I've installed FreeDOS in a 2003 Dell OptiPlex GX270 32-bit PC. The only
sound is from the built-in speaker. So when I play hangman, the beeps,
buzzes and tunes seem faintly distant.
I'd like to cable the motherboard's AC'97 sound, into an external
amplifier and so to speakers on my desk!
I've skimmed the source file HANGMAN.BAS. But I didn't recognise
anywhere to tweak sound output.
AUTOEXEC.BAT is in C\ and C\FDOS\. I've edited both as follows.
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T3 H6
--
members.iinet.net.au/~kilgallin/
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