Have you tried Unisound driver?

UNISOUND - Universal ISA PnP Sound Card Driver for DOS v0.81b

You could try and find your Realtek audio chipset here: https://soggi.org/drivers/realtek.htm
This page contains plenty of supported drivers for Windows 98.

If your hardware is newer, it is unlikely to work unless you install a 3rd-party driver like UNISOUND, as somebody mentioned above.

I think this is what you want...

SBEMU: Sound Blaster emulation on AC97

no luck 🙁
i only can use VDMSound.... installed the Win95 drivers, i get the sound on options(speaking on Keen4) but no sound 🙁

"VDMSound is a modular, extendable soundcard (and other "legacy" hardware) emulator for MS Windows NT/2000 DOS boxes."

You're running 98. VDM sound isn't designed for it. Stop using it.

Does your PC beep when it boots?
I suspect you don't have the PC speaker plugged in.

Old 2d DOS games use direct calls to the PC speaker for pretty basic sound.
I don't believe 9x intercepts these calls and reroutes them to the sound card.

I've no idea of the definition of 2D and 3D sound in this context. It's been a while since I last used onboard AC97 with Win9x DOS box so I'm not 100% sure...

If your onboard AC97 uses WDM driver you may be able to get sound via SBEMUL.SYS but in this case it will not give you FM music. You may be able to utilize General MIDI through the preferred MIDI device set in the MIDI mapper, however.

On the other hand, I think most VxD drivers, even those without any native DOS capability, do provide some kind of wrapper to enable at least Sound Blaster audio for DOS box in a similar fashion to SBEMUL.

For FM (Adlib) music most drivers (VxD or WDM) simply reroutes it to actual FM hardware and you'll only get silence if the sound card (ISA or PCI) does not actually have one.

Could be a lack of an FM driver/chip.

Have they tried General Midi on 330 instead?

Usually, the windows wavetable audio driver will work for DOS applications wanting to produce midi on the mpu401 interface.

They should try that.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-08-02, 06:56:

Usually, the windows wavetable audio driver will work for DOS applications wanting to produce midi on the mpu401 interface.

Yeah, this works very well with Win9x. MIDI over 330h just works in Windows DOS box (as well as DOSBox), whereas you need real MIDI hardware such as a daughtercard for it to work in real DOS.

I never had a MIDI daughtercard until very late so this feature was very helpful back then.

Most AC97 do not have SB emulation. You can try using the inbuilt Win98 SB Emulation driver SBEMUL.SYS. This only works if you are using WDM drivers though AFAIK.

https://learn.microsoft.com/tr-tr/windows-har … udio-components

Note that this will NOT produce FM Synthesis music, only digital audio. You can rely on Win98's default MIDI capabilities (a simple Roland GS Synth) or find a proper SB compatible sound card.

If they REALLY want Faux FM synth, I understand that there are VSTi driver containers for win9x, and FM Synth modules for said drivers.

This would let you get the same "Joys" of FM synthesis using the midi subsystem. (Wouldnt be enough to catch adlib audio attempts from the dos application side of things, but would let you get FM music via the MPU401 emulation, as a dirty kludge)

when i execute a ms-dos game, what parameters i can use for force the sound blaster options?

Just manually install the sbemul.sys driver using the add new hardware wizard. (Go through the silly detection phase, then say "no listed or other" then pick it out of the list in "All devices".)

Then, tell your game that you have a soundblaster on IRQ5, DMA1, HighDMA5, and you are using General Midi / Roland MT32 on port 330.