Paladin PIP wrote on 2025-05-17, 04:35:
How does it operate in dos 6.22 , and win 3.1 can't see it , does Dos access the hardware directly but win 3.1 needs a middle man ?
DOS software needs a middleman too when specifically dealing with most PCI sound cards such as a Sound Blaster Live! That middleman is the emulation functionality provided by SBEINIT, for example.
DOS games and software mostly support specific sound cards by talking directly to the hardware connected to the ISA bus. This support is hardware specific. For example, a DOS game that supports the original ISA 8-bit Sound Blaster will normally work with cards that are hardware compatible with this card (including newer
compatible ISA Sound Blaster cards or third party clones).
The problem with the Sound Blaster Live! (and most PCI sound cards) is that it is not Sound Blaster compatible (not with any of of the 8-bit ISA variants, nor with the ISA bus Sound Blaster 16) on the hardware level in the sense that DOS software would need it to be. That is why the SBEINIT emulation layer is needed as a middleman to allow DOS games to use the card as if it was an ISA Sound Blaster 16 (or mostly so). So, a game would talk to an emulated Sound Blaster 16, withe SBEINIT doing the emulation and actually talking to the Live! hardware.
Windows operating systems need an OS specific driver to talk to a sound card. That driver is designed to talk directly to the hardware. In this case, there exists no such driver for the Live! cards and Windows 3.1 . The only hope would be to use a Sound Blaster driver for an older Sound Blaster card (like the Sound Blaster 16), for which there is a Windows 3.1 driver and try to get that driver to talk SBEINIT . That is unfortunately unlikely to work based on prior experiences of others. SBEINIT was not meant to be used in such a way, but might still work. Same for SBEMU and VSBHDA.
I hope that clarifies things a bit.