First post, by OMORES
The more you read about PCI sound cards the more you find that there is no point in trying without DMA/DDMA/PC-PCI/SB Link support...
This was my feeling when I was testing several Creative ES137x cards in DOS . Then I loaded Windows 3.11. Didn't knew that the ES137X driver by watlers_world is still installed... The same card (CT5805) a few moments ago was lost in DOS... did initialize and played Windows 3.11 startup sound. I listened to some MP3s, played Sim City 2000 - all good.
From what I can tell the driver is targeting some ES137x registers but also AC'97 codec registers (CT5805 is paired with an AC97 codec from Crystal). This AC'97 thing is a little bit concerning DOS wise. But initializing the card and make it decode a bit stream is still a step forward...
Maybe some of you guys will take a peek into source code. (attached) It's written in Pascal, there is little Win16 API involved, and some parts are in assembler.
Ideally, Watlers would be the guy to do this, but Windows 3.1 is his thing, not DOS. (although he is not so active anymore he did released a improved Windows 3.1 driver this year)
My latest video: NT 4.0 running from M.2 PCI-E AHCI SSD.