VOGONS


First post, by ArkJinx7

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Hello all, this looks like a really cool and interesting forum for
talk and info on Dos oriented discussion!

So I am pretty new to the Dos world of gaming and FreeDos,
but I have learned most of the basic commands on FreeDos
and I have figured out how to install FreeDos to my old 1 gig
Asus Eee shell laptop and load all of my Dos games on it.

I understand that you need an older soundblaster card running
on a older PCI that would be compatible with the Dos environment
to run sound while playing Dos games on FreeDos.

Is there any older soundcard that would work with my older modern
Asus laptop or a independent driver or software that would let me use
my laptop's built in soundcard?

Or would I be better off just using DosBox on WinXP or installing FreeDos
inside of a VM to emulate my sound for gaming? Thanks!

If more details about my laptop are needed, I'd be happy to provide them.

Reply 1 of 12, by weldum

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sadly no, as dos is a really old operating system, there were no point in make drivers for newer devices. also, while the processor is heavily underpowered for today standards, is far more fast than that dos games need, which is not good in almost half the cases.

your best bet is XP/any flavor of linux and using DosBox

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Others: Drean C64c/Czerweny Spectrum 48k/Talent MSX DPC200/M512K/MP475

Reply 2 of 12, by Jo22

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ArkJinx7 wrote:

Or would I be better off just using DosBox on WinXP or installing FreeDos
inside of a VM to emulate my sound for gaming? Thanks!

Yup.

The Eee PC series don't have any compatible sound chip inside, so there's no way to use them in DOS.
If your laptop had an parallel port, at least, you could use a Speech Thing clone (CVX4) or the Adlipt dongle.

Without that, you're pretty much limited to PC speaker sound (if it still supports that).
If the speaker sound works, you could try some of the Sound Blaster emulators (Virtual Sound Blaster, etc).

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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 3 of 12, by ArkJinx7

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Thank you for the info guys! But I'm afraid that I'm gonna have to ask what a
partial port is, a CVXV4 and a "Adlipt dongle" ??

I don't think the PC speaker is supported on my Eee laptop.
Sound Blaster Virtual sounds pretty awesome though!

It was a pain in the butt trying to get FreeDos installed on my Eee laptop!
But now I am able to run most games fine with little lag on high memory.

I just wish there was a way to emulate sound on the laptop. I am willing
to open the laptop up and do any upgrades necessary if you think it would help.

Reply 4 of 12, by darry

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ArkJinx7 wrote:

Thank you for the info guys! But I'm afraid that I'm gonna have to ask what a
partial port is, a CVXV4 and a "Adlipt dongle" ??

A parallel port has a 25-pin female connector and was mostly used to hook up printers before USB took on that role . I am pretty sure the EEE PC does not have any of those .
The Speech Thing clone (CVX4) and the Adlipt (OPL2lpt) dongle are sound producing devices that are meant to be connected to such a port .

ArkJinx7 wrote:

I just wish there was a way to emulate sound on the laptop. I am willing
to open the laptop up and do any upgrades necessary if you think it would help.

Nothing you can add internally will really help . Your best bet is probably running Dosbox under Windows .

Reply 5 of 12, by ArkJinx7

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Thank you very much for that information Darry! I really appreciate it!

I installed FreeDos on my Eee laptop just to get started learning how to use the OS
and run some games on it. I'll just keep that setup for now for just learning more
on how to use FreeDos. Nothing more.

I do have a older computer from 2001, HP 520c running on 1 gig of ram, upgraded from 512 m.
I have Sound Blaster Audicity and Windows XP installed on it, so I can use DosBox.

Although I'm not sure yet if I will be able to get sound emulated from the dos games.

(As you know, DosBox won't run "all" dos games, so FreeDos is a better solution.)

If I can't get sound on my WinXP computer on DosBox, there will probably be some hardware
I can install or extra software drivers to get the sound going for DosBox?

I've also left some space on the partition on my old HP PC for installing FreeDos
next to WinXP, as a dual boot later. But first I have to figure out how I'm going to be
able to install FreeDos on my HP, as the bios is so old that it doesn't support usb as
a bootable device, and the FreeDos on CD won't work without Bsod'd everytime.

PheonixBios is the name, I'm gonna check for a upgrade that might support usb.

My Eee laptop also didn't support installing FreeDos from CD, from probably a hardware
related issue within my CD drive (external) or the laptop itself. So I had to do usb.

In addition to using my HP PC for dos gaming with DosBox, I recently installed FreeDos
on a virtual hard disk on "Virtual machine" on my Windows 7 64 bit PC and got it to boot up.
But I haven't figured out yet how to mount and connect a VHD image to Virtual machine to
access through FreeDos to import my dos games.

Plus I run the risk of overloading my host computer's cpu through Virtual machine, even after
setting overcapping to 40 % from 100%. This happens sometimes when running certain dos
programs or dos games on FreeDos on a 64 bit OS. So I need to tread carefully on that.

In the end, I'm thinking that my old HP computer will be my best bet for installing FreeDos
and running all the games with sound.

Reply 8 of 12, by gdjacobs

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I think so. VIA chipsets are known to work well with ESS Solo-1 PCI sound chips.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

Reply 9 of 12, by ArkJinx7

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Well, I had some fun yesterday night finally getting a few dos games to run on
Virtual machine on my Windows 7 64 bit PC, one game even had sound!

That was Tomb Raider for dos, that game looked cool! The sound was heavily butchered
though, unfortunately. Very laggy and distorted. The other few games I unzipped, "Allien Rampage"
loaded once really fast, then wouldn't load at all afterwards, as well as "Screamer".

Charlie 2 and Skunny kart loaded so slow that they were unplayable.

I wonder if there are any settings that I can change to play some of these other games or not.

I'm currently emulating the Sound blaster 16 card and using 32 mb of memory.
7 mb of video memory and have overcapping set to 70%.

And that sounds good gdjacobs! Thank you! Do you know of a good compatible sound chip I
could get to use with my chipset? I currently have Soundblaster Audigy on my old WinXP computer.
That was a soundblaster card that I bought to use just for my old WinXP (HP 520c) PC.

But I don't know if that soundcard would be able to work with Dos or not. I'm guessing not.
Although it would probably work good with DosBox.

Oh, Audigy is can do 24 bit sound and came out in 2006, I think that answers my question.
That soundcard is way to advanced to work with Dos.

Reply 10 of 12, by Azarien

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ArkJinx7 wrote:

Oh, Audigy is can do 24 bit sound and came out in 2006, I think that answers my question.
That soundcard is way to advanced to work with Dos.

Being "too advanced" is not the reason. MPXPLAY player for DOS supports SB Live and Audigy.

The reason is that PCI audio cards are not (and cannot by themselves) be compatible with ISA sound cards due to differences between ISA and PCI slots. Some cards (e.g. SB Live, I don't know about Audigy) provided DOS "drivers", i.e. software emulators of ISA Sound Blasters, which sometimes even worked.

DOS games support soundcards that were commonly used in that era, that is, Sound Blaster family, Gravis UltraSound, and some others.
Modern cards and integrated sound chips are not supported simply because they did not exist back then (and compatibility is not possible or is too much of a trouble).

Reply 11 of 12, by ArkJinx7

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Mpxplay sounds really interesting! So if I had FreeDos installed on my old 2001 HP and used Mpxplay with my sb audigy card
I could get sound for my dos games?

I got several dos games to work under Dosbox in WinXP 32 bit, inside of Virtual machine, but every game had some
lag with the graphics and with the sound. I was wondering if there is anything I can tweak in the Virtual machine
or DosBox to get the games to run better.

I did fix my emulated cpu speed in Dosbox to a suitable speed for gaming, and I reserved 1 gig of memory inside my
WinXP 32 bit envirnment. Is there something else that I'm forgetting or doing wrong?

It's odd, but on my Eee laptop with FreeDos, every game runs very smooth and nice with no lag, even though
I can't get any sound. But on a 64 bit Windows computer with 8 gigs of ram, with 1 gig of memory reserved for
WinXP 32 bit in Virtual machine, I get a LOT of lag on all the games. Some games lag so much that it takes
2 minutes to leave the title screen to start a new game and the sound is all scribbled and messed up.

Reply 12 of 12, by gdjacobs

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MPXPlay is a program that can be used to play sound files, like MP3, WAV files, some tracker files, etc. It won't be of use for your games, unfortunately. Some PCI versions of Audigy card provide support for DOS, but I don't consider that line of technology to be great as far as backwards compatibility. I feel there are better options.

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