AaronS wrote on 2026-09-24, 16:30:

Is it maybe possible to integrate this into the main branch? Not sure how github works but I saw there's been a couple of new releases for the main VSBHDA and I assume this is more or less finished?

Yep I considered that and talked to Japheth, though before even reaching out to him I noticed he's been active on VSBHDA dev work, so now may not be the best time to merge it upstream. Since then he'd have to juggle two things at once - review what I've done as part of VSBHDARB and also work on what he has in mind.

And yeah he confirmed the same - best for me to wait for a while and when Japheth feels comfortable regarding the state of VSBHDA, then I'll again suggest the merge. In the meanwhile I'm pulling and merging his changes into my local copy of VSBHDARB from time to time. I'll maybe make another release of VSBHDARB when I get some time

Thanks, that makes perfect sense. I saw something about SB X-Fi compatibility on the latest commits, which is exciting if it means being able to use PCIe X-Fi soundcards under DOS.

It works with my Sound Blaster Live 5.1 SB0100, but I experience significant performance drops at times—specifically at the start of the game, during level selection, and whenever the audio track restarts.

As far as I understand, VSBHDA plays CD audio via the 4-pin cable (even if it isn't audible on some incompatible PCs like mine); perhaps VSBHDARB inherits this behavior and is handling the load for both modes—analog and digital—simultaneously, contributing to the performance drop.
I also tried using the /F22050 option to see if it would improve performance, but that just makes the CD music sound like it's in slow motion.

My specs:
MS-DOS mode in Windows 98
Pentium IV 2.66 GHz
1.5 GB RAM
Sound Blaster Live 5.1! SB0100

This is a great project; I hope it can be improved further so it doesn't consume so many hardware resources.

Thanks for your hard work.

vico wrote on 2026-10-07, 04:45:

It works with my Sound Blaster Live 5.1 SB0100, but I experience significant performance drops at times—specifically at the star […]
Show full quote

It works with my Sound Blaster Live 5.1 SB0100, but I experience significant performance drops at times—specifically at the start of the game, during level selection, and whenever the audio track restarts.

As far as I understand, VSBHDA plays CD audio via the 4-pin cable (even if it isn't audible on some incompatible PCs like mine); perhaps VSBHDARB inherits this behavior and is handling the load for both modes—analog and digital—simultaneously, contributing to the performance drop.
I also tried using the /F22050 option to see if it would improve performance, but that just makes the CD music sound like it's in slow motion.

My specs:
MS-DOS mode in Windows 98
Pentium IV 2.66 GHz
1.5 GB RAM
Sound Blaster Live 5.1! SB0100

This is a great project; I hope it can be improved further so it doesn't consume so many hardware resources.

Thanks for your hard work.

Hi vico, thanks for testing this out. Are you playing this with the Rayman CD that you mentioned earlier? Since you have 1.5 GB RAM, I'd highly recommend making an image of your CD and using the redbook tools in image mode. The gameplay will be much, much smoother when you work with an image rather than physical CD.

Your intuition is correct on VSBHDARB handling both CD audio and digital audio, but that by itself doesn't lead to a significant performance drop if the processor is fast enough (I think Pentium IV 2.66 GHz is quite fast). The actual bottleneck is that the physical CD also adds a bit of latency in responding to CD audio read commands - there's a communication overhead.

I understand making an image and then converting it and using it is a time investment, so if you get time to do this, let me know and I'll be happy to share step by step instructions for it too

I tried using an image, but the music still stutters at the start of the game, while levels are loading, or when Rayman loses a life.
It is true that the constant performance drops caused by audio tracks restarting don't happen, but loading the image at the beginning takes too long; I was expecting something like what DAEMON Tools 3.43 does.

BTW: Is there any way to use only the analog output with vsbhdarb?

vico wrote on 2026-10-07, 16:39:

I tried using an image, but the music still stutters at the start of the game, while levels are loading, or when Rayman loses a life.
It is true that the constant performance drops caused by audio tracks restarting don't happen, but loading the image at the beginning takes too long; I was expecting something like what DAEMON Tools 3.43 does.

BTW: Is there any way to use only the analog output with vsbhdarb?

If it's only momentary stuttering for like a second or two, then that's expected. That happens even with a regular CD drive though - e.g. if I use a physical Rayman CD in my CD drive and directly plug speakers to the front 3.5mm jack in the CD drive itself - even in that case I notice the stuttering behavior. So my guess is maybe it could be something to do with regular VSBHDA? (since any vanilla VSBHDA behavior will carry over to VSBHDARB).

If you want an absolutely seamless experience with no audio stutters, you could try with either a sound card with supported DOS drivers or maybe SBEMU (I haven't tested SBEMU with Rayman) + your Rayman CD in the regular CD drive. If your CD drive has a 3.5mm jack, you could maybe get a 3.5 mm 2-male to 1-female wire, plug one end into your CD drive, the other end into your sound card, and then plug your speaker's aux into the female end of the wire. Or skip all that and play the Win95 version

As for the image loading, I don't think the time it takes to get the image into memory can be brought down to what DAEMON Tools can do, since pure DOS is quite different from Windows. Your expectations may be a tad too high from the tool :p

I realize it must be very difficult—if not impossible—to implement something like DAEMON Tools in DOS, but it would at least be good to fix those performance drops; although they only last a few brief seconds, they are far more annoying than the ones that occur when using analog CD output with VSBHDA on a PC with compatible hardware.

I still believe this is a great project; I just hope you can improve the performance.

Once again, thank you for your work.

Did you try with original SHSU (non VSBHDA version) mounting? There wont be redbook audio obviously. Full Throttle has really bad issues whenever it tries to load a cutscene (especially the mine road section where you have to fight different bikers and its a constant background FMV streaming) but sadly this is a problem even with original SHSU, with or without VSBHDA, not sure if it can be fixed/improved.

Unrelated to VSBHDA but has anyone managed to run a game with multiple CDs mounted with SHSU? I guess it depends on the game but I was playing Toonstruck and made a save right before the disc swap happens because I knew it was probably not going to work. Google AI claims the following commands should work which they kind of do but the game still doesn't swap.

1C:\SHSUCDRB\SHSUCDHD /F:C:\CD\TOON1.ISO /F:C:\CD\TOON2.ISO

1C:\SHSUCDRB\SHSUCDX /D:SHSU-CDH

After doing the above the two CDs are mounted on D and E but the game doesn't check E: for Disc 2, only D. In TOONSTRK.CFG there is this:

1[TOONSTRUCK]
2CD = D:\

Which I tried adding a second line such as CD = E:\ and also editing CD =D:\, E:\ etc. but still asks for Disc 2. I guess this isn't possible to finish under DOS without an actual drive or ODE. I attached my save file which is immediately before the disc swap takes place if anyone wants to play about.

In the case where the game only supports a single drive letter, unfortunately SHSUCDHD doesn't have a solution. There's no facility to change the contents of a drive letter while an application is running. You may be able to cheese it by copying the contents of both CDs to a hard drive folder and using that folder as the CD directive in the CFG file.

Fortunately for this game I have a physical copy but yeah, reminds me of the early PSP modding days where trying to play multi disc PS1 games, if the game didnt have a save on the "disc swap screen", you were outta luck.