This is a very interesting project! I've been doing some testing and I found the following results.

I did the tests on both 86Box (several machine configurations) and a MVP3 Socket 7 with an AMD K6-2 at 400MHz, 128MB and a SB16 Vibra16 CT4180. For the software I used MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 9x DOS mode, with MSCDEX and SHSUCDX, HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE. I got basically the same results in all cases.

Real mode games seem to work pretty well. I tested the CD versions of Loom and Monkey Island 1 and they seem to be perfectly playable. Only for this, this is a great project.

For 32 bits protected mode games the history is totally different. I was only able to get Quake working (which uses CWSDPMI.EXE), and although the demo mode works pretty good, navigating trough the menus makes the computer reboot randomly. But the main problem is with DOS/4GW games, I tested Tomb Raider and Carmagedon, and after running the installer or the main executable, the DOS/4GW banner is displayed, the computer hangs for several minutes and finally shows an error about being unable to access the CD-ROM or loading the executable.

How did you manage to get Tomb Raider and Screamer working? Maybe I'm miss configuring something, but I tested everything that came to my mind. I also tried with JEMMEX, JEMM386 and 386MAX, but I always get the message "The memory manager rejected the port-trap request" when trying to load the driver.

Thanks for your work!

Thank you for giving it a try!

I had gone away from the driver for a couple of days and there were way more failures left than I expected!

When it comes to JEMMEX, it only works (worked) with 5.86; 5.87pre1 changes the callback interface, so it wasn't compatible. I've added support for that version too.

I tested with Tomb Raider again, and it didn't work for me either. I think I may have broken it when I was trying to get the driver's memory footprint smaller, should have re-checked.
I've fixed the issue (A20 corruption and stack failure caused by interrupt re-entry) and Tomb Raider worked again. Then I went through another bunch of games looking for different DPMI hosts and found a whole lot of problems.

- Carmageddon (DOS4GW) had Redbook audio but not sfx because it uses a 3840 byte audio ring and uCDD required a power of two size. I removed the requirement and that fixed it, but then DOS4GW complained about an invalid opcode in the sound driver.
- Archimedean Dynasty (Causeway 3.25) loaded but then crashed in the menu, then I got the music working but again no SFX. Here the problem was a byte read from the DSP reset port that the driver had no handler for. Now it behaves correctly.
- Quarantine (w/DOS32A), Rayman (PMODE/W) and Street Fighter II Turbo (Borland 32RTM) exposed other issues that I still need to fix.

The 0.9.1 beta release is available here: https://github.com/vorvek/uCDD/releases/tag/v0.9.1 Other games I have not tested that weren't working may now work, too.

I found another problem while testing Archimedean Dynasty under Microsoft EMM386. Its port-trapping API cannot trap ports below 100h, which includes the DMA controller registers. When the game and uCDD share the physical 16-bit DMA channel, the game can overwrite uCDD’s DMA settings. In my test, this caused clicks and then a crash. SBEMU faces a very similar issue, and I don't really think there's a good way of solving it in the driver itself. So, the two workarounds:
* The same shared-DMA setup works under JEMMEX.
* With EMM386, using physical DMA 7 for uCDD and virtual DMA 5 for the game avoided the menu audio failure. uCDD’s settings in UCDDSET must match the physical card’s actual configuration. The game should instead match the virtual settings in BLASTER, which must be set before installing uCDD. Both audio streams still play through the same card.

In any case, I've corrected the interrupt timer after STI which had a problem in the previous versions, and made a couple of changes to the entry stack allocation. Latest version is here: https://github.com/vorvek/uCDD/releases/tag/v0.9.1a

Great work! Now Quake doesn't reboot, and Tomb Raider and Carmageddon seems to be working quite well. I found issues with the following games:

• Screamer, Screamer 2 and Screamer Rally: the three games ask for the CD just before reaching the main menu. Screamer 1 has an attract mode that seems to work fine, but after that it asks for the CD.
• Pro Pinball The Web and Timeshock: both games show the message "error initialising cdrom routines" just after launch.

Thanks for testing!

The Screamer games stopped working because I was sending a valid-in-practice 26-byte READ LONG packet through MSCDEX function 1510h; uCDD insisted on 27 bytes and returned 810Ch (“bad request length”). It was a small fix, but exposed a different issue that made loads take a long time (even though the game itself run fine). When loading for the first time, these games malloc/free bigger and bigger memory chunks to see how much RAM they have available. The DPMI host uCDD used run on 4KB pages that it asked the EMM handler each time, so it was painfully slow, and the more memory, the worse it got. I tested in my Athlon 600 with 512 megs of RAM and it took nearly three minutes to move from the DOS4GW prompt to the attract demo. It's now fixed too, with a reusable pool of VCPI pages. This also works with JEMM/JEMMEX.

Pro Pinball failed because uCDD's DPMI host was missing a particular behavior. The games use INT 31h, AX=0300h with two protected-mode stack words, and the uCDD rejected any nonzero stack copy.

So, those 5 games now also work under uCDD!
Updated version is here: https://github.com/vorvek/uCDD/releases/tag/v0.9.1b

HI , this project is super interesting, thanks!
I know it's in early stages , do you have a guess of system requirements for a smooth operation? you think a 486 or 386 could handle the load?

At the moment I only have my Athlon 600 for testing, so I can't be sure, but I imagine a Pentium or thereabouts probably make a good baseline, since simply streaming audio takes around 800KB/s.

Awesome progress one more time!

I found another problematic game, this time is a real mode one, the enhanced CD-ROM version of Battle Chess. Running the game in Sound Blaster mode (/SB switch) gives an error about DMA channel, in Sound Blaster Pro mode (/SBP switch) the game runs, but there is no sound at all, neither SFX effects nor CD-DA music. Also there is something weird with this CD image, UCDD refuses to mount it although the CUE doesn't have any PREGAP or any other unsupported flags. I had to regenerate the image by opening and saving it with UltraISO, maybe there is something wrong with the CUE parser or any other checks UCDD performs on the image file.

If you are interested in having more feedback, I have a lot of games I can test when I have some free time. Won't be an intensive test, just checking the game installs, runs, gets in game and sounds fine.

Thanks again for your work, this is becoming a great project with very big potential.

Did you save the original cue by any chance to see what could have caused the parser to fail?

I imagine you tried with EMM386, can you check with JEMMEX to see if the DMA error goes away? EMM386 can't trap ports under 100h, so it gets a bit tricky. With uCDD you basically get a "virtual" card the games talk to, and uCDD connects the IRQ/DMA with the real card with the settings you give it in UCDDSET. In JEMMEX I can trap the DMA ports, but in EMM386 they need to be different for the virtual and physical card. The problem is some games allow setting a low DMA and not a high DMA (eg, Screamer) so if you use UNISOUND like me, you may end up having to set up two different BLASTER vars before and after initializing the physical card. I'm looking to make the set up a bit cleaner and more easy to understand, maybe extending UCDDSET.

I'm currently using JEMMEX with shared DMA config, but different IRQs (cause Tomb Raider crash if I use IRQ5 for both real and virtual card, but maybe this is already fixed). These are my current CONFIG and AUTOEXEC files:

1DOS=HIGH,UMB
2DEVICE=C:\JEMMEX\JEMMEX.EXE I=B000-B7FF
3FILES=30

1@ECHO OFF
2PROMPT $p$g
3PATH C:\DOS
4SET TEMP=C:\DOS
5LH KEYB SP,,C:\DOS\KEYBOARD.SYS
6
7SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 T6
8C:\DOS\UNISOUND.COM
9
10SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 T6
11LH C:\DOS\UCDD.EXE -install -ems
12C:\DOS\SHSUCDX.COM /D:UCDD0001

With this configuration Battle Chess exposes the behaviour I commented on the previous post. The CUE file I have is the following (it is from eXoDOS v6):

1FILE "CHESS.bin" BINARY
2  TRACK 01 MODE1/2352
3    INDEX 01 00:00:00
4  TRACK 02 AUDIO
5    INDEX 01 09:58:12
6  TRACK 03 AUDIO
7    INDEX 01 25:22:00
8  TRACK 04 AUDIO
9    INDEX 01 27:27:45
10  TRACK 05 AUDIO
11    INDEX 01 30:09:02
12  TRACK 06 AUDIO
13    INDEX 01 32:55:52
14  TRACK 07 AUDIO
15    INDEX 01 35:40:52
16  TRACK 08 AUDIO
17    INDEX 01 38:29:02
18  TRACK 09 AUDIO
19    INDEX 01 41:17:60
20  TRACK 10 AUDIO
21    INDEX 01 41:42:40
22  TRACK 11 AUDIO
23    INDEX 01 42:05:20
24  TRACK 12 AUDIO
25    INDEX 01 42:29:65
26  TRACK 13 AUDIO
27    INDEX 01 42:53:52
28  TRACK 14 AUDIO
29    INDEX 01 43:17:07
30  TRACK 15 AUDIO
31    INDEX 01 43:41:07
32  TRACK 16 AUDIO
33    INDEX 01 44:04:45
34  TRACK 17 AUDIO
35    INDEX 01 44:27:10
36  TRACK 18 AUDIO
37    INDEX 01 44:52:70
38  TRACK 19 AUDIO
39    INDEX 01 45:15:47
40  TRACK 20 AUDIO
41    INDEX 01 45:40:42
42  TRACK 21 AUDIO
43    INDEX 01 46:18:10
44  TRACK 22 AUDIO
45    INDEX 01 47:43:35

Funnily, if I change track 2 from "INDEX 01 09:58:12" to "INDEX 01 11:00:00", it can be mounted. Mounting the BIN without the CUE works also. Does UCDD perform some checking on the track boundaries?

Thanks for the CUE and configuration. Beta 0.9.1c addresses these issues:

For Battle Chess:
- The original CUE: was valid. uCDD rejected it because the disc’s filesystem reports a size extending into the audio tracks. That check is now fixed; the original image and track timings should now work.
- Sound Blaster mode: Fixed the DMA detection that caused the /SB error.
- Sound Blaster Pro mode: Fixed the missing effects, and as a bonus added support for the filtering bit. CD music playback is fixed too.
For Tomb Raider:
- I've fixed the startup problem when the physical and virtual cards both use IRQ5 under JEMMEX. Tomb Raider was writing directly into the real-mode interrupt vector. uCDD intercepted vector changes made through DOS and DPMI calls, but real-mode writes displaced uCDD's audio handler and reached the game's handler instead of the virtual mixer. The physical interrupt remained in service, but the mixer stopped progressing, and that caused the hang. With two different IRQs there was no collision, so everything seemed to work.

JEMMEX is now the default memory manager for the project, I'm downgrading EMM386 to best effort because it's proving to be a pain in the ass!

More reports like this would be very useful!

I'm still having issues with Battle Chess. Now /SB freezes with a blinking cursor, and /SBP gives "Sound hardware not found" error. Maybe there is something wrong with my configuration or hardware, but I'm getting the same results both on real hardware and 86Box. The image is perfectly mountable now, that's a good point, cause is very likely to exist more games with the filesystem size issue (maybe some kind of mastering error?).

I tested Battle Chess in 86Box with JEMMEX 5.87, physical A220 I5 D1 H5, and virtual A220 I7 D1 H5. Both /SB and /SBP reached the chess board. If you are still using the AUTOEXEC from above, I don't know what may be wrong, because I can't get it to fail.

I did reproduce “Sound hardware not found” on /SBP by changing only the port saved in Battle Chess’s SBPDIG.ADV from 220h to 240h, while leaving AUTOEXEC correct. Installing uCDD’s virtual card at 240h instead reproduced both that error and the /SB cursor stall. Changing the game file alone did not stall /SB.

Can you give me the verbatim output from UCDD -install, SHSUCDX, and UCDD -mount, plus your UCDDSET physical settings? A wrong physical setting prints “The selected sound card did not start” before the game runs.

Did you make sure the setup was pointing to the virtual card?

As an aside, last night I noticed that while Pro Pinball Timeshock was working okay, The Web had issues. I thought both games would run in the same engine, but The Web's sounds were causing stalls. I ended up doing a bunch of optimizations that saved 7.5KB of conventional memory with the driver loaded high. It wasn't enough to get the game running 'fine' in a 486 DX-100 in 86box, but it may help other games run in more limited hardware.

The new release is here: https://github.com/vorvek/uCDD/releases/tag/v0.9.1e

Yes, it works if I use IRQs 5 and 7, I changed that after posting the above autoexec and I was using IRQs 5 and 5. Indeed, I'm finding a lot of games that fails if using the same IRQ (Miles Sound System setup tool fails to detect the card, for example), so I went back to 5 and 7.

I think the ideal combination is a Sound Card with the WSS codec for output, that makes it simpler from a configuration perspective. Sharing IRQ or DMA between the virtual and physical card is a bit iffy at the moment, because there are a few ways of reaching the ports and I probably haven't covered all of them.

I've been getting Descent II to work too. It came with a bunch of performance improvements, as using the mouse in game exposed an issue in how I was dealing with ports 60/64 (for the disc changing support). Flicking the mouse fast was enough to make the videos stutter, and it could even lead to missing inputs during gameplay (getting keys stuck and stuff like that). Everything works now. Also, loading times in games should improve a bit from previous versions, I've added multi-sector reads from raw BIN images (an idea taken from SHSUCDH). This may make some games playable in 386/486 CPUs too, but I can't promise anything.

Release here: https://github.com/vorvek/uCDD/releases/tag/v0.9.2

I was looking forward to playing Alone in the Dark this October and I found out it wasn't working. Similar to Tomb Raider, it overrode uCDD's IRQ handler. I've also added PREGAP support for the CUE files (because eXoDOS' Loom image required it, otherwise stuff would get trimmed).

Along the way I improved the WSS support, both for the virtual card and physical ones.

Latest release here: https://github.com/vorvek/uCDD/releases/tag/v0.9.2b

Impressive work. Looking forward to trying this out when I get some time.

I found a little inconvenience in how the driver is loaded in memory, nothing serious but maybe it can be addressed. It seems that when loading the driver high, the part resident it conventional memory leaves the memory fragmented, so not all conventional memory is contiguous in a single chunk, which limits the maximum loadable program. The following images shows the issue, before loading the driver there are 622KB free conventional memory and the maximum loadable program is also 622KB. After loading uCDD the free conventional memory is 621KB, but there seems to be a memory gap that limits the maximum loadable program to 612KB.

I also started testing all the games I have in my hard drive, alphabetically. I found the following results so far.

Working

• Alien Trilogy
• Battle Arena Toshinden
• BC Racers
• Blam! Machinehead
• Big Red Racing

Non working

• Absolute Pinball -> Freezes with blinking cursor al launch
• Amazing Learning Games with Rayman -> Game works and SFX sounds fine, but CD-DA constantly restarts or is missing
• Alpha Storm -> Game works and SFX sounds fine, but there is no CD-DA
• An Elder Scrolls Legend - Battlespire -> Freezes on the main menu at name entry prompt
• Batman Forever - The Arcade Game -> CD-DA audio constantly restarts
• Batman Forever -> game and sound is constantly stuttering
• Battle Race -> CD-DA works, but there is no SFX
• Blood -> Exception crash dump at launch
• Bust-A-Move 2 - Arcade Edition -> Freezes at loading screen
• Cyber Police -> CD-DA plays fine, but no SFX
• Cyberball -> No sound at all
• Chasm - The Rift -> Error "cannot initialize" at launch

Thank you for the encouraging words and for taking the time to test!

I've been working on some Coktel Vision games, as I imagined getting Gobliiins working may also add the sequels to the list of supported titles. Not quite, but almost. All three titles now work with uCDD. Lost in Time, also from Coktel Vision, worked without any extra changes. Fascination was a bit more picky and complained about RAM being full ("RAM toute pleine"), but it was actually that the game asks for a normal cooked sector read with an interleave size of 1 and a skip of 0. uCDD rejected it, even though no sectors needed to be skipped. That's now fixed too, alongside an issue that was later exposed. Fascination reads game data from sectors beyond the volume size declared in the ISO header, but still inside the CD’s data track.

Other improvements since the previous post:
- The Secret of Monkey Island was not working (I thought it was, but SFX didn't play). It exposed a bug that didn't prevent the game from running, a write of zero to the DSP read-data port (22Ah) was incorrectly flagged by uCDD as unsupported. 86box's CD emulation simply ignores it, which seems to be a bit more proper. The game also uses the E2h DSP command during card detection which was also not supported and now passes correctly. The SFX problems actually came from timing. The game waits for a one-byte sample interrupt using a very short loop during detection, and the mixer couldn't keep up.
- Future Wars required a fix. uCDD reduced an IOCTL buffer count from 18 bytes to 7. Future Wars then used that returned value as the next request’s header length, which uCDD rejected. Not anymore! There were some shenanigans with "device busy" checks in this game.
- The German versions of Blade of Destiny and Star Trail, plus Shadows over Riva now work. Personally, I prefer the MIDI soundtracks in the first two, but hey, you can now do those Frankenstein installs with the English versions and Red book audio.
- The Manhole works. It was the oldest title still untested. Redbook audio was fine, but the SFX were a bit rough. Turns out the game uses direct-DAC samples. In 86Box those are filtered, but I'm not sure that's correct in real hardware, so I haven't added the 3.2 kHz filter to that path for now. So far it's the only game I've seen do this, so there may not be many games where this matters.
- Descent II: Vertigo Series also works (Descent II was already working, some may say I'm padding the list here 🤣). There's a Redbook OST for the original Descent, but I haven't found any DOS version with it. Is Redbook audio available only in the Mac version? In any case, I used the game to re-test the MDM format and disc switching, and it was still working, which made me glad.
- I've also looked into the memory fragmentation issue. It was the order in which I allocated some buffers; temporary buffers were allocated first and then a 512-byte DMA buffer which has to stay in conventional memory. Allocating it first removed the empty gap.

The latest version is Beta 0.9.2c, right here: https://github.com/vorvek/uCDD/releases/tag/v0.9.2c

I've started going through this list from the oldest titles, since I imagine those are the ones that are going to be causing more issues: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_gam … d_Book_CD_audio
Took me a while to find that Mario Teaches Typing's entry refers to some version of the game in CD-ROM that came with a hidden rap, and not part of the game. Also, I think the list is missing a few games (Igor: Objective Uikokahonia and The Big Red Adventure, I think both have Redbook audio tracks, that's just two examples).