well your are describing vdmsound. so if that doesn't work....

Unfortunately, that's impossible unless you totally rewrite DOSBox. The worst speed hog, the CPU core, can be executed half-natively (through dynamic recompilation) if you chose the dynamic core. But other than that, DOSBox is constructed around the idea of emulating a whole PC (the same way e.g. a Commodore 64 emulator works), not of virtualizing certain hardware accesses of an otherwise natively running code. The subsystem emulation in DOSBox (such as sound or disk access emulation) is built around this concept and can't easily be divorced from it.

There was a thread about this same question not long ago in one of these Forums, but unfortunately I don't remember the title.

Pity. The sound emulation seems much improved over VDM-Sound.

At least you understood what I was getting at. DOSBox is great when you need the whole thing emulated. I'm using it for several apps. I suspect also that when Vista shows up, we may need it even more for all our DOS games and Vista will be even less likely to care about DOS apps. Heck, I'm even concerned that we might need an XP emulator given the way they're changing DirectX for Vista.

Anyway, I figured I'd at least ask and now I know. Thanks....

Sound is dependent upon other factors. VDMSound while better than XP/2003's sound emulation is ALOT better but it can only do so much. DosBox can do much more than XP/2003's sound emulation or VDMSound's but I think that in some ways it can never be better than the real thing.....and in some cases such as RealSound it can be better than the real thing.