BloodySword wrote:

Some years ago, I noticed something werid. I managed it to run a SB Live 5.1! under DOS. Commander Keen worked... But... The sound was really strange and crappy. I think the OPL commands were reinterpreded as GM or something. It sounded very strange, not as the good old FM sound from the Yamaha chips... I tested Prince Of Persia 1 (v1.0), too. The sound was as strange as of commander keen. Only the PCM-Sounds of Prince were normal.

It's possible that it was translating FM to GMIDI. It's also possible that the FM synth emulation just is horrible. It takes CPU power to do that and back then there wasn't much to go around.

You should note that the Live! uses the Ensoniq AudioPCI driver for DOS support. That's from 1997.

andwan0 wrote:

Yep... all we need are MS-DOS 16-bit C programmers 😖

Could fix MS-DOS sound drivers for ANY modern sound card...

Yeah see what wd said. 😁 DOS games don't look for drivers to access hardware. It's not Windows. The games access the hardware directly. Essentially games have their own "drivers" for various pieces of sound hardware and you can not update them.

I'm sure you can see why this was a really bad situation all around.

And not only were there a ton of different sound cards with their own way of doing things, but when we went to PCI things really became awful for DOS game sound. PCI cards can not work the same as ISA cards and so you need some form of emulation of an ISA card for games to work with them at all.

For an x86 machine that's smaller than a regular netbook and will fit in your pocket, check out this baby. When my tax return comes through, I want one 😁 It's not even ridiculously expensive, costing about the same as an average laptop.

Anyone here taken a look at the pandora yet? Great little machine that will in some time have acceptable performance running dosbox.
http://www.open-pandora.org/

Kippesoep wrote:

For an x86 machine that's smaller than a regular netbook and will fit in your pocket, check out this baby. When my tax return comes through, I want one 😁 It's not even ridiculously expensive, costing about the same as an average laptop.

Holy shit! Apple's iPad will have some competition, especially since this one is faster and cheaper, not to mention this one has a real keyboard.

Here is a good review about Toshiba Libretto as a Dos game laptop.
http://www.josephn.net/toshiba_libretto_110ct … ayout=printable
it says that all hardware in Libretto are dos compatible, even pcmcia slot.

That's not surprising. Almost everything from back then worked to some degree with DOS games.

What about PCMCIA SB compatible sound card? Did anybody find something?

Menkau_ra wrote:

What about PCMCIA SB compatible sound card? Did anybody find something?

According to SB website, the first PCMCIA SB card is the Audigy 2... but that's too recent/modern... to have DOS/95 drivers.

However, here's an article about SB emulated PCMCIA cards

http://www.newtale.com/pp/article216.html

I posted above about the PCMCIA cards. You see, PCMCIA does not do DMA like ISA does. So PCMCIA is not entirely unlike PCI in that DOS games can not see the card unless there is some sort of DMA emulation with a TSR or whatever. Yuck.

@andwan, please consider shortening your signature. This picture is highly annoying and just too big...

I posted above about the PCMCIA cards. You see, PCMCIA does not do DMA like ISA does. So PCMCIA is not entirely unlike PCI in that DOS games can not see the card unless there is some sort of DMA emulation with a TSR or whatever. Yuck.

Really yuck, then you will be in the same situation as with the PCI audio cards 🙁

He'll be kicked for that signature soon anyways. (don't know why vogons needs signatures 😀 )

Sorry about the sig. I just found the screen capture and thought it was funny seeing so many birthday wishes..

Just updating all my followers of finding a "Portable x86 Device to play MS-DOS games natively". Am quite happy with my Libretto 100CT (overclocked to 266MHz, 96MB EDO RAM, 8GB HD) that I bought off eBay. I wiped the harddisk and used MS-DOS 6.22 boot disk to create FAT16 partitions (each is max. 2GB). Why FAT16? Incase I am in MS-DOS 6.22 native mode and want to access ALL my partitions (MS-DOS 6.22 can't read FAT32).

However I installed Windows 98SE instead into C:\. Installation was quick and easy, and I didn't even need additional drivers. The generic Windows 98SE CD detected all Libretto's devices (sound/display/etc) and had drivers for them - (though I still update ALL drivers from updated drivers from Toshiba's website).

I carry about JUST the Libretto... minus the floppy disk peripheral... on 2 hour commute trains. How does one boot into native DOS (with sound/cdrom/mouse and memory ems/xms configurations... but have all those features OFF when booting into WINDOWS 98)?? Easy, Windows 95/98 comes with 2 NATIVE MS-DOS shortcuts (different from the prompt window).... found in:

C:\WINDOWS\MS-DOS for games.pif
C:\WINDOWS\MS-DOS for games with EMS/XMS.pif

The pif (shortcuts) contain configurations for memory/display, autoexec.bat & config.sys setup. One just needs to add the Sound Blaster Pro & mouse loadup lines into autoexec.bat and that's it! When you double-click on the MS-DOS shortcuts... it TEMPORARILY replaces io.sys, msdos.sys (the bootstrap loaders)... aswell as autoexec.bat & config.sys... then reboots.

When I want to go back into Windows 98 I just type restart (or reboot)... and it'll replace the original io.sys, msdos.sys, autoexec.bat & config.sys (the ones without loading DOS sound, DOS cdrom, DOS memory manager... hence saving memory in windows).

Small keyboard and crappy Libretto mouse? No problem. Just get a optical PS2 mouse and PS2 keyboard, plus 1 PS2 to COM1 (serial 9-pin convertor).

Games happily playing while commuting on 2 hour train:

Constructor
Die By The Sword
Dungeon Keeper 1
Lands of Lore 2
Magic Carpet 1 & 2
Starcraft
Syndicate Wars
Theme Hospital
Total Annihilation
Warcraft II

PS: Next device I'll buy is the asus eee pc 1005ha

How does it work in DOS with games? Did you have any problems to play 'em? How is the sound card? Is it FM synthesizer?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto & http://www.silverace.com/libretto/ the mini laptop has hardware Yamaha OPL3 SA3 chip. (My old Sound Blaster Pro in my 1996 big PC had similar sound card too).

Yamaha OPL3 SA3 chips are Sound Blaster Pro compatible and DOS & Windows 3.1 and Windows 95/98 can detect it without any additional drivers. - unfortunately modern sound cards in laptops and PCs are not Sound Blaster Pro compatible via DOS (well there won't be ready available DOS drivers..)

I had to enable the sound card within the BIOS but that was easy. Within BIOS we can also change the address (220), IRQ (5) and DMA (1).

andwan0,

Am quite happy with my Libretto 100CT

There is a perfect solution for your new baby - SCP-55 😀 this is a RAP-10 and SCC-1A in one PCMCIA card.

regarding OPL3 SA3, just read this: The Yamaha OPL YMF718-S chipset.
The chipset has my approval.

i skimmed through didn't see any one saying any thing about UMPCs. I saw umpc playing games like halflife 1 i'm sure it could run dos box well enough. and it not that much bigger than psp but, slimmer than libretto. plus it doesn't have lid and has a thumb stick like a psp.

these are not the one i remember seeing but, gives you an idea.

I am testing my Libretto 110CT 😀
Don't know why but yamaha sound drivers for Win98 doesn't work well with Dos games. I had to manually replace them with drivers for Win95. After that I could play Warcraft2 in Windows98 with sound 😀
Is it possible to turn off the MPU401? In the BIOS there are not choices, 330h only. I have a SCP-55 and when I installed it, Windows gave it 1330h address, which is not great for Dos games. With Duke3D I manully changed cfg file to port 1330h and it worked! 😀 Warcraft2 was better, since I could set it up from war2\setup.exe. So i don't know why my SCP-55 gets so strange addresses above 1000? I want to test it on a different laptop and see what's gonna happen.
I also had to connect an output from OPL3 to an input of my MCB-3 to to play both digital and midi in Dos games.
When I looked in Device Manager I found that there are 5(!) I/O's reserved for Yamaha. Ok, 1 for mpu, 1 for opl3, 1 for wss... But what for the other 2? When I had Windows98 drivers installed, there were something like MPU401 and MPU401 Output, but I couldn't find any midi connector on Libretto. Isn't it stange?