Hi Damon!
I have an old Dell Optiplex 745 I'm trying to "FreeDos" and am having a couple
of issues.
I have yet to get the USB Laser mouse to work properly.
Try enabling USB legacy support in your BIOS. The mouse should then
be visible to drivers like CUTEMOUSE as if it would be a PS/2 mouse.
The other issue is PCI sound cards. I have an Aureal Vortex2 and
also a Soundblaster Audigy 4.
Vortex 2 = AU8830, Alsa for Linux would use AU88X0 drivers which do
not seem to be AC97 or HDA. No SoundBlaster compatibility either?
Audigy 4 with CA10300 DSP, also sounds sounds quite far away from
DOS, but the original Audigy with EMU10K chipset was closer to SB
PCI and SB PCI which came with DOS drivers. Those drivers were quite
unusual because they provided a simulation of a DOS compatible ISA
SoundBlaster for those non-ISA devices.
If you just want to listen to media files such as OGG or MP3, then
you can get a more or less generic HDA or AC97 compatible soundcard
for PCI, maybe even PCIe, or mainboard with sound, and use those
with MPXPLAY for DOS:
https://mpxplay.sourceforge.net/
IF you want old DOS games to work with sound, then you will have
to find a soundcard specifically designed for that, including the
examples mentioned above. As the Optiplex 745 with Core2Duo CPU
is probably too modern (!) to still support ISA features on PCI,
soundcards from early PCI days with some HARDWARE compatibility
ISA SoundBlaster will only work in very limited ways, for example
without DMA or interrupts. Some games might be able to deal with
that, or at least provide AdLib sound, but I have tried a whole
collection of those on a dual core AMD board with little success.
Games rarely support installing modern sound drivers later and
DOS is not designed to help games with sound either, so FreeDOS
will not be asked by the games. In theory, VESA/AI drivers might
exist. Another option is to use drivers which create simulations
of DOS compatible soundcard. Check out the recent SBEMU progress:
https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=20131=0=time=0
The goal here is to support modern hardware, such as generic HDA
or AC97 cards on the hardware side and create the illusion of
classic SoundBlaster hardware on the software side visible to
your old games :-)
A classic way to do this can be running your games in a virtual
DOS system inside another operating system, such as DOSBOX in
Windows or Linux or DOSEMU2 in Linux (later MacOS and Android?)
For DOSEMU2, you have to first add their PPA to your config:
If you have for example Ubuntu 20.04, then you would add a file
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/dosemu2-ubuntu-ppa-focal.list
with the line
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/dosemu2/ppa/ubuntu focal main
to add DOSEMU2 and their repository to your software sources.
You can then simply use Synaptic to install components of it
and you will automatically get regular updates, too. If you
have different versions of Ubuntu, you do roughly the same,
but replace the word FOCAL by the name of your Ubuntu version.
Of course you can also use Synaptic or other tools to enter
the location of the PPA repository using a graphical menu.
The mouse driver(s) (I've tried many) load without error.
But the mouse moves only to the right. No up, left, or down.
I assume it does work okay with other operating systems?
Have you tried enabling or disabling wheel support? For
CuteMouse, you can compare driver 1.9.x, 2.0.x and 2.1.x
which all have different advantages and disadavantages.
The aureal card claims to initialize but there is no sound
from any of the midi player apps (e.g. Cubic player).
Maybe a mixer problem? Or you need some specific init tool?
Or the sound ends up coming from the wrong connector?
MIDI music can mean two things: It could be rendering of
the music using canned instruments to create a stream of
PCM samples. It could also mean that the sequence of tone
commands gets sent to a MIDI port or synthesizer chip you
may have to connect to or init and support separately.
Given that OpenCP also is a MOD Tracker player, I expect
it to use the first style (MOD files are bundles of tone
sequences and canned instrument data, so OpenCP already
has the engine for that and will probably include canned
generic instrument data for MIDI playing - MIDI files do
not include instrument data themselves.
Originally, OpenCP supported ISA SounBlaster, ESS688 and
1688, GUS and similar, in Windows also WSS and DirectX
drivers. The current version uses TIMIDITY to "render"
MIDI files:
https://github.com/mywave82/opencubicplayer
You could try whether it works better with MP3 or OGG,
in case you have a problem with the rendering module.
It can also play AdLib files and SID files and more :-)
However, I do not see information about DOS ports there?
Regards, Eric
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