Old thread ressurection, apologies!
I too have recently completed a Win98SE build on an Inspiron 8100. What a machine! Win98 flies on it - perfect for retro gaming IMHO but that’s a topic for another post.
I’ve into the same issues as outlined here when it comes to DOS drivers for the onboard ESS chip. Either, go with VXD drivers, which can improve the situation in pure MSDOS, but then break Windows sound as that relies on WDM. I’ve not given up - yet - but have essentially put workarounds in place which does give me sound in my favourite DOS games. I’m not going to give a full on tutorial as it’s a bit of fiddling and differing method dependent on the game, but thought it may offer some alternatives to anyone else wanting to play some Retro DOS classics on this awesome laptop.
ScummVM
I’m throwing this out there first as honestly, it’s saved a lot of hassle for the maximum game coverage. There is still a maintained working Windows98 version of ScummVM and you can literally configure the game files the same as you would on a later version of Windows, then just swap out the version of ScummVM to the Win98 one and hey presto! I’ve mad a few .bat files to launch the games from the same instance of ScummVM to save on HDD space. Full sound support now available. Secret of Monkey Island, Toonstruck, Simon the Sorcerer and many many more all working great and with the DOS CD sound version running where available. Highly recommended to use for DOS sound where pure DOS gives you a headache.
One thing worth mentioning - I have had conflicts/issues with the Nvidia Graphics drivers and ScummVM. I’ve got version 70.71.84 of NVidia installed which is a later version that the Dell driver which is supported on Win98. I found a little workaround which lets you actually run the game and allow you to Alt+Enter between full screen and windowed mode of ScummVM working a treat with these NVidia drivers. Simply add the following parameters to your command line when launching ScummVM:
-- gfx-mode=software --no-fullscreen
VDMSound
For some other DOS games, I’ve found VDMSound works a treat. Again I’ve written .bat files to invoke prior to launching each game within Windows which initialises VDMSound and boots into the game. Discworld 1 & 2, Doom, Eye of the Beholder - all working a treat. Just be sure to exit the game from within the game to terminate the Windows DOS session gracefully, else you may experience some VDMSound related VXD Blue Screens. Not a biggie, just reboot and all is well.
Honorouble Mention ID Software Games
For some odd reason, when attempting to use any workarounds for some ID Software games to run in DOS with full sound, such as Quake, it just - well, doesn’t. From what I can tell something within the engine of these games shuts down any attempt to emulate a DOS sound card. Quake has always needed the SET BLASTER variable for sound in DOS, so suspect it has some additional checks it performs or steals some resource not currently being emulated. You can go the VXD driver route and break Windows sound and boot to pure DOS but not worth it in my opinion. I just use WinQuake and have sound that way. One thing to note again here though, I had an odd issue where Quake would cause the Inspiron to hang on exit and require a power off/on to resolve. Not great - doing something odd for sure this game with system resources, but another workaround I found to make it behave nicely was to add the following to command line when launching Quake:
-dibonly
With the above, that’s pretty much DOS sound sorted on the 8100 without the need to add a PCMCIA sound card for me - at least for all the Retro games from my collection I want to play. 100% success rate so far via the above methods.
Hope this helps!
