> It currently has a Sound Blaster Audigy 4 PCI card. Unfortunately > after a couple hours scouring the web, It seems that card only has > Windows drivers. Has anyone been able to get one of them working > under FreeDOS as a Sound Blaster compatible card?
The Sound Blaster Live (the one before the Audigy 1 series) was the first Creative Labs card that was not hardware compatible with the Sound Blaster series. It did work through DOS but technically it wasn't via drivers, it was via an emulator - a lot of things were handled entirely in software, such as FM synthesis as the OPL-3 chip was no longer present. Consequently it was not compatible with a number of older games. > If not, do you know of any good Sound Baster compatible PCI cards? Anything from Creative with a Vibra chip on it should work (noting that there are both PCI and ISA versions), as well as anything with an SB-Link connector (providing your motherboard also has one of these). The Yamaha cards @Zbigniew mentioned are also good choices but they fetch high prices these days. I believe many Esoniq cards are compatible but I have never looked into it. The problem with PCI Sound Blaster compatibility is that the Sound Blaster uses DMA channels but these are not available over the PCI bus, with newer higher performance alternatives to DMA in use instead. So even PCI cards have to somehow emulate the lost DMA channel. Some cards use an SB-Link connector for this, but it requires a matching one on your motherboard. Some chipsets provide DDMA support instead of SB-Link but again they will only work with a card that uses DDMA. You'd have to check whether your motherboard has an SB-Link connector or whether it supports DDMA before deciding which card to buy, otherwise you won't be able to play digital audio and it will only function as an early Ad Lib card with FM synthesis available only. There's an article here that gives a good summary: http://www.retroisle.com/DOSDays/topics/pci_sound_cards_in_dos.php Cheers, Adam. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
