Hi!

> Is it possible to have sound on SoundBlaster Live!
> CT4830 for PCI slot in FreeDOS?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_Live!

This and SB PCI are effectively AC97 soundcards with a
DOS driver which traps attempts to access a classic
SoundBlaster and calculates the desired sound output:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq_AudioPCI

You may have to use a closed source EMM386 with it,
or no EMM386 at all, and not all games may work with
the driver, but apart from that, compatibility should
not depend on whether you use FreeDOS or another DOS.

There are also a number of other PCI soundcards which
provide some degree of DOS compatibility. They tend
to have a certain amount of hardware compatibility,
but usually depend on your mainboard chipset to have
support for certain workarounds in particular for DMA
for more similarity to ISA style access.

If your game only wants Adlib / OPL3 and  can deal
with having no or limited DMA or IRQ support, those
cards are still useful in modern mainboards which do
NOT have the mentioned workarounds any more, but in
general, you probably have to make sure to use an
OLDER mainboard. Still gives you a faster computer
than using a very old mainboard with ISA SoundBlaster,
I guess, but takes more effort to get it to work.

The easiest way to get sound in DOS probably is to
run DOS in a virtual computer in another operating
system, but of course that is less "pure" :-)

Note that games always have BUILT-IN drivers, so it
does not matter which DOS you have. In some cases,
the drivers follow some standard and can be replaced
by drivers for more modern soundcards, but that is
the exception, not the rule, in particular for older
DOS games.

A list of chipsets, mainboards and sound cards:

http://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/pci_sound_cards_in_dos.php

But again, the SB PCI / SB Live uses a different
approach, so it probably needs no DDMA mainboard.
Instead, it probably needs a compatible EMM386.

Regards, Eric



_______________________________________________
Freedos-user mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user

Reply via email to