Random rant or are you after advice?

If you want advice, post your system specs and exactly what you are trying to do.

If your motherboard is relatively new you won't be able to get anything but FM. I presume your southbridge is either nForce (all) or Intel (ICH6 and later).

I used to have a lot of issues with stable vanilla DOSBox. You may consider DOSBox-X which is more accuracy focused and addressed a good amount of issues.

ratfink wrote on 2022-07-16, 20:59:

Random rant or are you after advice?

If you want advice, post your system specs and exactly what you are trying to do.

More like the first, but I'll take the second if you have any:

Athlon 64 X2 3800+, Asus A8M2N-LA motherboard (pulled from a Compaq), Radeon HD 4650, 4 GB of RAM, and the FM801 card. I clearly overestimated the retro support of an AM2 platform.

Yesterday I installed XP. The volume on the sound card is low even at 100% (the motherboard never detected my Audigy SB0570 for some reason) and Chocolate Doom 3.x has something going on with XP (SDL2 hates XP, maybe?), but I returned to 2.3 and now it flies. ScummVM runs perfect, ECWolf runs perfect, haven't tried eDuke32 yet.

My original plan was to run some games on real DOS using a Covox clone (won't be happening, thanks customs!) and leave XP for things like The Journeyman Project, but I think I'll stick to XP for the time being. There has to be a cheap retro PC with an ISA slot locally somewhere...

LSS10999 wrote on 2022-07-17, 04:54:

If your motherboard is relatively new you won't be able to get anything but FM. I presume your southbridge is either nForce (all) or Intel (ICH6 and later).

I used to have a lot of issues with stable vanilla DOSBox. You may consider DOSBox-X which is more accuracy focused and addressed a good amount of issues.

Correct, it's an nForce chipset and southbridge.

I've tried DOSBox-X on Linux before. Maybe I'll use it for games without ports or engine replacements (Quarantine comes to mind).

Covox Speech Thing clones aren't hard to build for people with some soldering skills. Don't you know any people near you who could make you one?

DOS may run but the motherboard almost certainly won't support the kind of low level signal routing that DOS needs to sound cards - there might be recent boards that do, but they tend to be a limited number of very expensive industrial motherboard designs (and although 478 with ISA exist and will work, 775 boards with ISA don't universally support DOS sound).

Lack of sound support for DOS on recent hardware is a major reason to use DOSBOX (and I'd guess an important part of the background to it's design/ethos/genesis) - vogons began as the dosbox support forum, that's what Very Old Games On New Systems refers to.

Short of getting an (expensive) industrial board with fully working ISA slots, a motherboard with PCI slots and DDMA support, can be a good option . With that FM801, even boards some boards without DDMA support (ICH5) can work in DOS, but not as well (more incompatibilities). NForce is, unfortunately, a step too far and essentially a lost cause as far as audio DOS support goes, IMHO.

See
DDMA and PCPCI for Low IQ Individuals (Me included)
and
Re: PCI sound cards and Chipsets from various manufacturers...

digger wrote on 2022-07-17, 19:57:

Covox Speech Thing clones aren't hard to build for people with some soldering skills. Don't you know any people near you who could make you one?

Actually, I can build one. I wanted the PCBs to make it all cleaner/stable and save time, but... I guess it's perfboard all the way. 🙁

Ethaniel wrote on 2022-07-17, 19:41:

Athlon 64 X2 3800+, Asus A8M2N-LA motherboard (pulled from a Compaq), Radeon HD 4650, 4 GB of RAM, and the FM801 card. I clearly overestimated the retro support of an AM2 platform.

Socket 754/939/AM2 boards based on VIA K8T890 (with PCIe) can work with FM801 as far as I've tried. However, it was quite unstable so I didn't try it further.

For these motherboards, ESS Solo-1 is the best sound card to use for retro support. Despite no more DDMA support on VT8237x southbridges that card still worked nearly flawless with DOS games.

With your current system specs, you're very close to retro support, actually. It's just that nForce chipsets never had proper legacy audio support throughout its lifetime from what I know.