DOS sound support

Plain old Soundblaster support would be great!

 

Let's see, M$ dropped support for Win98&ME today and they have $billions. If memory servers, they dropped support for DOS 10-12 years ago! So you want a small vendor like Parallels to support an OS that doesn't even have .001% of the market, and has been declared dead by most all of the rational world? And particularily just to run games? You should use your talents to get about 100 of the american fortune 100 companies to do anything for a customer of theirs. It's just not rational to make a request like this! Better still, why don't you figure out what it would take to do that and implement it. Then post it here so that 1 or 2 others will know how to do it.

 

Being that DOS 6.22 is one of the supported OSes I think it's a perfectly rational request. Plus it doesn't hurt to ask.

 

tgrogan, not only M$ operating systems use SoundBlaster.
We think, that SB emulation will be present in next versions of our product.

 

Yes, but will you support it under DOS? And, explain how since DOS doesn't support it.

 

Dos doesn't support sound at all and never did. Applications were often SoundBlaster aware, and those apps wold be happy if they found a soundBlaster emulation.

 

Great news! I look forward to this

 

@Ynot: Excellent!

 

That pretty much is a requirement for me to consider Parallels over VirtualPC. Well, that plus fixing all the DOS games I've tried just crash your app.

'Looking forward to it.

Robert

 

And how will you do this for an OS that doesn't support SB?????

 

I imagine it would support it like any other PC with a Soundblaster in an ISA slot. Through DOS device drivers available from Creative Labs. Or if it emulates one of the older ones, just through a variable. VPC does this fine.

Robert

 

My god, you just keep em coming! Keep it up tgrogan, you make my day! Did'nt mommy ever tell you not to meddle with stuff you dont understand?

 

You must have real boring days if this is all that you can come up with. I respectfully asked YNOT to confirm what he said and he has not responded. Maybe he went back to the drawing board. I lived thru all the pathetic versions of DOS (and windoze) and installed those drivers on many machines. I post with my name and not some half-vast, meaningless title.

 

mmm, it seems that you are the one who is bored. It is you that has made the effort to wade yet again into this post after it had been dead for nearly a week. Once again without contributing anything useful to anyone.

I saw very little respect in your last reply to Ynot, in fact it was positively rude. This is probably why you have had no response.

As to your stance that DOS doesn't support sound, that is clearly ridiculous. Soundcards were available a long time before we able to get rid of DOS. Many games and Windows 3.1 (for example) ran on top of DOS and were clearly able to use soundcards.
The fact that someone asked for soundcard support under DOS, and that Parallels have acknowledged that this would be a useful enough feature to include makes your stance even more ridiculous.

What does that have do with anything when even primitive man can outwit you?

 

Quoting myself just because I realised that I hadn't contributed anything useful myself here either.

Whilst Creative Soundblaster cards tended to install on default masses of drivers, multimedia etc... most of this wasn't required at all by many SB supported apps and games of the time.
DOS (at least later versions) allowed ways of letting software access hardware as long as IRQs etc were set up properly...

Putting the following line in the Autoexec.bat file was often all that was needed. Other OSes of course have access to these calls too.

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T3 P330 H6 E620
| | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | | |_______ AWE 32 Only Parameter
| | | | | | | |__________ "High" DMA Channel
| | | | | | |_______________ MIDI Port
| | | | | |__________________ Type of Card
| | | | |_____________________ DMA Channel
| | | |________________________ Interrupt
| | |_____________________________ Port Address
| |___________________________________ Environment Variable
|________________________________________ DOS Command

Whilst it doesn't seem of immediate use to those of us using 2000/XP supporting emulation of Soundblaster would IMO be a good fix to opening sound support to many OSes on Parallels.

 

But setting the var doesn't help much.

The emulation itself hasn't been integrated (as far as i know).
So please, do it.. i want to play old games within a real dos not over dosbox or something else

 

OK, one last time. DOS does not, and never did, directly support sound. It contains no sound drivers, is not aware of sound cards, or anything else about sound, so asking for sound integration with DOS is a pointless waste of time.

Sound card manufacturers provided drivers for their cards, but these were not drivers in the modern sense. They were not installed in the OS, they were loaded into memory as needed, sometimes using a line in one of the OS startup files to do so.

But usually, they were integrated into APPLICATIONS which were aware of the card and had appropriate drivers. Since the physical address and other parameters of the card could be set by the user, it was often necessary to tell the application what settings were used, either as part of application startup or by setting an environment variable.

All Parallels can possibly do toward making sound work in a DOS application is document the sound card they are emulating, and if the application knows about that card, it will work, otherwise it won't. They could emulate a selection of old sound cards, but that is an economic issue, and if I were making the decision, it wouldn't happen because too few people need each old card. The generic soundblaster is already there, so if you can use it fine, if not, then not.

 

Then please offer the physical informations (Interrupt, DMA and so on) for the sound blaster.
And that no OS ever could provide sound support is clear. How should a System provide sound, if no suitable Hardware is found?

The emulation of the soundblaster is there, but what is the data for this? Where is the information about this. Not all apps could find a emulated sound card, when no information is provided. That is the point of this.

 

http://easymamecab.mameworld.net/html/snddosdr.htm
(About 45 seconds with Google)

 

Great link with no use.

Equal, i think a lot of people looking forward to get an ordinary EMULATED SOUND BLASTER for parallels
Then the "set blaster" var will work successfully.