First post, by digger
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi everyone,
This is my "maiden post" in the Vogons forum, by the way. Glad to meet you all. 😁
Anyway, here's my crazy idea:
As you know, many DOS games started to use standard sound APIs to support the growing list if not-quite-soundblaster-compatible sound cards (PAS, GUS, WSS, etc). As a result, many games would rely on the same interchangeable drivers to support most common sound cards of the day.
The most common of those driver frameworks are Sierra's DRV model, MIDPAK/DIGPAK, and Miles (AIL2 and later AIL3).
Considering how hard it is to run these games on contemporary hardware due to the gradual disappearance of ISA slots, and the limited compatibility that PCI sound cards could provide in emulation mode or using workarounds such as DDMA, I figured that perhaps it would be easier if someone with both the knowledge and access to the aforementioned frameworks and the programming expertise would simply write DIGPAK/AIL2/AIL3 drivers for newer (PCI or on-board) audio hardware.
I know there are countless of cards and chipsets, but starting out with the more common and popular cards, such as the Sound Blaster Live, and perhaps a unified AC97 driver that would work with the most common integrated audio solutions out there, would definitely be a start.
Now I know that the Miles AIL2 SDK has been freed and open-sourced, which would in theory allow for the development of such driver. However, AIL3 (which I believe is used in most later DOS4GW games) is still closed and proprietary, and money is still being charged even for DOS development (someone please correct me if I'm wrong).
And as for DIGPAK, I wouldn't know at this point (but again, anyone who knows more about that is encouraged to come forward).
Of course, if the license fees for the official frameworks would prove to be to pricey, perhaps compatible drivers could still be developed after reverse-engineering the APIs and ABIs.
As far as I know, no AIL3 or DIGPAK drivers currently exist for any non-ISA hardware.
As a matter of fact, no such driver even exists for non-DMA-using audio solutions such as the Covox Speech Thing or Disney Sound Source on the LPT port (which would also be a solution for modern hardware lacking ISA slots). I can understand DMA being pretty much a requirement performance-wise back in the day, but I don't think that would still be an issue these days.
I got this idea after remembering the days long past when I owned a GUS, and was initially forced to use crappy SB emulation with most games, until Gravis and Forte released AIL2, AIL3, and MIDPAK/DIGPAK drivers, after which many of those games suddenly worked much better and started taking full advantage of my card. Why can't we do the same for newer PCI or on-board audio devices?
So what do you guys think? If we concentrate on the later DOS games (the ones using DOS extenders and often also higher VBE resolutions and are therefore a bit slow to run on DOSBOX for the time being), this could be doable, right? Once stable drivers would be completed, suddenly a large number of games would instantly become natively playable again on newer systems. This seems like a fun project.
Anyone more knowledgeable than me care to weigh in on this? 😀