Hi there,
this is a great project - I searched for something like this for a long time...
First of all - I`m not a gamer but a musician. Some very old software for musicians need a dedicated MPU401 with proper intelligent mode.
Most of these softwares now have modern replacements - a few not...
I am currently using an old thin client PC with a real MPU for this which is of course somewhat inconvienient. Best would be to have a virtual MPU in DOSbox which properly implements intelligent mode (which is not the case at the moment IMO) or -as you did- implement a virtual interface based on a virtual or real soundblaster (because you mentioned this would run with "Bochs").
Now what ist my point?
I cannot get it up and running in a virtual environment...(my goal)
-I tried Bochs, but only found an image with freedos, which doesn`t support EMM386
-I tried DOSbox, but DOSbox cannot write to the boot partition and so I cannot modify config.sys, load EMM386 or install QEMM there
-Bochs seems too difficult for me (mount writeable partitions, etc. - but this is my problem...)
-a proper intelligent softmpu under dosbox based on a virtual soundblaster would be very helpful for me, but then it has to support the different memory manager there (jemm?) to get it working for me
-unfortunately I think the software I`m using most seems to communicate a lot with a real MPU in intelligent mode (timers, interrupts, cpu ?)
i.e. the SW starts, seems to initialize the card (you can monitor the midi events with midiox for example) and then simply stops sending data when completely loaded, even if it seems to "play/work" afterwards visually.
-I tried a modified beta of DOSbox 0.6x? (with MIDIin support and modified intelligent mode some year ago) but this also didn`t work
Thanks a lot for your work so far - I think this is a real first.
JMe