It's not possible unless your soundcard has dos driver included and yes, dosbox emulates the soundcard itself 😀

No sound drivers for DOS. There are some drivers for Win 9x that enables some kind of compatibility, but I don't know if some of the stuff will work in plain DOS (as it worked with AudioPCI cards).

Since Creative moved to PCI cards, there hasn't been a single faithful sound card that works in DOS like it was meant to. The Legacy drivers for all PCI cards sucked up loads of memory and get a lot of instruments totally wrong. My AWE64 (ISA) was the best card to have for DOS sound - before I got the SB Live which already was PCI.

I feel your pain. Creative has always suck.

I have an audigy ls and although is okay for most things, it isn't good.

I figured... Oh well. Guess I'll just have to play in DOSBox for now. ^.^

Would have liked to have my laptop running 'real' DOS but this is just about as good. I won't be able to run it on my laptop though, because it gets too hot and is a little slow(Which is why I wanted just DOS instead of an emulator). Doesn't help that one of the fans are dead. x.x

Thanks for the replies and have fun. ^.^

Real Dos hasn't been an option for quite some years now unless you got an older PC/laptop anyway. Juggling with memory, drivers, getting all hardware to work correctly, the lack of a joystick port, etc. And that's not even touching the many speed issues.

el_pusher, if creative/soundblaster always sucked, then how did the orignial standard get set?

also, most creative vibra and older cards support dos sound emulation for win9x and it worked under winME to some extent too.

red_avatar is right. Even with DOS installed, chances are many games will work too fast. Plus you may not be able to enable EMS memory, I'm told that's not possible with newer PCs.

Nobu wrote:

Hi, I have DOS (6.0 I believe) installed on my laptop and it doesn't seem like my sound card is compatible with any of the old games that I have(Command & Conquer, F22, etc.).

My questions are: Is there any way of emulating the sound card on my laptop since it only has DOS(No win9x/NT) and is it possible to get sound working by copying the files from DOSBox to my DOS installation?

My laptop is an insprion 8100 with an integrated Maestro3 sound card.

Does your laptop have AC97-based sound card? If that's the case, then you may want to experiment with this.

More DOS drivers for VIA-based soundcards.

Well, I wasn't really worried about speed issues. When I installed C&C it ran fairly smoothly and almost slow, but not overly. I got the mouse working with the CuteMouse driver. I don't really need a joystick, but I have a USB adapter that I haven't tried in DOS yet that might work. Memory doesn't seem to be a big problem so far, I haven't had any errors concerning it when running C&C or OpenGEM.

I'm not sure what my sound card is based on. It is a Maestro3, as I've said in my first post, and at their site and pretty much any site that has drivers, they had them only for(I think) win95 and up. No support for DOS afaik.

Thanks for the links though, I'll check them out and see what I can find. 😀

Neville wrote:

red_avatar is right. Even with DOS installed, chances are many games will work too fast. Plus you may not be able to enable EMS memory, I'm told that's not possible with newer PCs.

Really? Didn't know about that. I just remember having a lot of problems getting older games to run. When I discovered abandonware online, I started to make a folder of all games that I managed to get running and a *lot* of them had problems:

Sierra games were a nightmare. Either they required enormous amounts of memory with outrageous demands (LSL6, I'm looking at you - 600kb with cdrom, mouse and sound drivers??) or they had speed issues (Space Quest 4 at the very least and also 6) or they didn't even want to run (Ecoquest, etc.)

Then there were all the Bullfrog games. Theme Park, Populous, Syndicate Wars, Magic Carpet etc. All didn't have any speed control and no way to slow them down. The so called Moslow was something that I tried to avoid because it makes games jerky and unresponsive.

Well basically about a third of all Dos games wouldn't even work well on my PIII450 with Windows 98. And that was still on a system that was supposed to fully support it. I dread to think on a modern system how few games would still work without Dosbox or VMDS.

I dread to think on a modern system how few games would still work without Dosbox or VMDS.

On a modern system, when they work, they fly through the wall. x.x

On my laptop in DOS, not DOSBox, they go about normal speed, only without sound. 🤣
I think I've said it already, but I think it's about 886MHz and has 512MB of ram. My desktop has a 2GHz dual core processor and 1.5GB of ram and a modern video card. When I run stuff, even in an emulator, it flies(But on DOSBox, it seems to run at fairly normal speeds for some reason. 😒 ). And I was thinking, after looking at the links that were given earlier by Kreshna, would my desktop support a driver that's compatible with the Intel ICH audio chipset? I thought about it while changing some of my audio settings when I noticed that the ALSA driver showed 'Intel ICH'. OSS says 'Realtek ALC655 rev 0'. I'll do a search for drivers and see what I come up with, even though it's not necessary on this computer, I would like to try. ^.^