Not really possible unfortunately. The PC was a second class citizen for games back then. Some would say the PC bkeeper adds to the flavour.

dr.zeissler wrote:

Some early Dos-Games used fine Sound and Music, but this was only available with an Tandy PC. No Soundcard ever emulated the Ta […]
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Some early Dos-Games used fine Sound and Music, but this was only available with an Tandy PC.
No Soundcard ever emulated the Tandymachines.

I don't linke DosBox, Scumm or whatever. Gaming on a real machine that's my flavour.

Would it not be nice to play Xenon,Last-Ninja, Testdrive, Speedball with nice sound effects on an 286-10 or 12MHz ?

I am not a programmer, I don't know if this possible...but it would be VERY NICE.

Its not feasible, and none of the games you mentioned support Tandy sound. Try Speedball 2, it supports Adlib, Tandy, Sound Blaster and Roland, or Xenon 2, which supports Adlib. Or better still get an Amiga.

I don't think Xenon 2 supports Adlib.

and if it did, Megablast would sound freaking terrible since Amiga ports skimp on having nice timbres 😁

though having transcribed xenon2.mod before I should try taking this into Adtracker2;;;

According to this it did :

http://www.mobygames.com/game/xenon-2-megablast/trivia

Doesn't sound like its a good example of Adlib though.

Adlib ? that must be wrong, it is the same with this one: http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/bomberman/techinfo i can't get it to work on EGA.

already discussed here Xenon 2 + adlib ?

Xenon 2 supports Adlib? How come I never heard it when I played it in my 286 and the Sound Blaster 1.5 those days?

I don't know if there were special versions of Xenon 2 that supported Adlib or the Trivia poster's memory got the better of him, because I cannot find any way to enable Adlib either. Nor can I find a way to get EGA graphics working in Dyna Blaster, although there may be a command line switch for it.

perhaps someone has the manual for dynablaster in order to get the command-line switch for EGA-Graphics ?

Thx!

If you're just talking music, there has been some success with some games. Well, OK, only 3 that I know of. Ultima 3-5 have "upgrade" patches that add in MIDI music taken from other system (C64,Amiga,Apple II,) and converted. The sound effects through the PC-Speaker remained though. You might look into those, and how they did it. You can get the Ultima upgrades Here on the Ultima Reconstruction web site. They also have links to the original sites that has a little detail on how they did it. As for the PC Speaker sounds, about the only way I could see something being done about that would be through a TSR that intercepts the PC-Speaker calls and re-directs them. The quality really wouldn't change, they'd just be coming from your sound system instead of the PC box. I'm not enough of a programmer to even start figuring out how to do that though. Someone might be able to take the PC Speaker code from DOSBox (it is open source,) and convert for use as a PC-Speaker emulator TSR in native DOS. I just don't know. If that can be done, maybe the code for the specialized systems (Tandy, PCjr,) could be used as well.

Not much of a programmer, so someone who is would probably have to:

1: Convert the windows audio calls to DOS audio calls - drivers for different sound cards, or just stay basic SB-8bit computable?
2: Re-route the interrupt or memory calls that usually go to the speaker to the TSR instead.
3: Could probably use the same code that converts the speaker to digital audio though.
4: Wrap it all into a TSR shell.

About the only part of that I would be capable of is the first one. The second one may not even be possible. I know the 4th one is possible (or there wouldn't be drivers for anything,) but don't know the first thing about actually doing it.

Allegro library would allow this. You'd need source code, midi and the sounds. Would probably need to add something else for the Amiga music; may have to play prerecorded tracks (wave files) for this.

FeedingDragon wrote:

If you're just talking music, there has been some success with some games. Well, OK, only 3 that I know of. Ultima 3-5 have "upgrade" patches that add in MIDI music taken from other system (C64,Amiga,Apple II,) and converted. The sound effects through the PC-Speaker remained though. You might look into those, and how they did it.

I'm not sure I would call those patches successful. I am pretty sure that they convert the games into running in 386 protected mode to run something like the Miles drivers. While the games see some kind of a slowdown, the sound effects become a casualty because they were not taken into consideration and run too fast. The result is that they are barely audible.

I'm not sure I would call those patches successful. I am pretty sure that they convert the games into running in 386 protected mode to run something like the Miles drivers.

That only applies to the SETUP program. The games themselves run the real-mode Miles' AIL 2.x drivers indirectly via the MIDPAK interface. All in all, I find the patches not particularly skillfully done, plus the General MIDI arrangements aren't that great either. If I had the time, I would recreate those update patches.

NewRisingSun wrote:

I'm not sure I would call those patches successful. I am pretty sure that they convert the games into running in 386 protected mode to run something like the Miles drivers.

That only applies to the SETUP program. The games themselves run the real-mode Miles' AIL 2.x drivers indirectly via the MIDPAK interface. All in all, I find the patches not particularly skillfully done, plus the General MIDI arrangements aren't that great either. If I had the time, I would recreate those update patches.

I do wish someone with more skill than me would at least look at the Ultima III patch 🙁 I like to play the games with DOSBox set so that the Speaker sounds come through correctly (or as close as I can get.) In Ultima IV and Ultima V there isn't any problem. But with U3... first you can't get "just" the music (I also prefer to play with original graphics - for the memories,) and second... between the graphics & the music, it bogs it down so much that I can't have DOSBox set slow enough to get the speaker sound anywhere near where they need to be 🙁 I don't remember off hand (and haven't re-installed it since my enforced Win7 install,) if U4 had the graphics patch linked in as part of the music patch, but I do remember it didn't make that big a difference, like it did with U3. I do seem to recall that the first music only patch for U3 didn't force me to adjust my slowdown program (don't remember which one it was,) But when I tried the graphics patch (was separate back then,) I had to really crank back on how much I was slowing my CPU down (this was before I'd heard of DOSBox.) I wish I still had that old patch, even though, IIRC, there were problems in switching to the "correct" songs at the "correct" events. I played U3 - U5 on the C64 & C128, I have to admit I was rather annoyed when I discovered that the PC versions didn't have music.