First post, by Miraculix
Over the last weeks I was browsing your forum and wiki a lot. Reading there was very helpful over choosing a sound card for my 2600k—A sound card which is able to emulate a Sound Blaster on DOS.
Long story short, I'm a Linux user. Whose familiar knows that starting Linux requires a bootloader. Though, it's also possible to start it from DOS, too. That's what I do for a quite a while now. In the beginning I just had my pleasure over starting Linux by typing LIN on a DOS prompt. It was basically sort of a retro joke. Over time I spent more and more time on DOS. Installing drivers, programs and games. The only thing missing was sound.
That's where the specs begin. On this 2011 PC the only cards able to emulate a Sound Blaster are Yamaha YMF7x4 (not tested) and Aureal Vortex (what I bought in 2019). An Audio PCI 5200 (ES1373) did not work with the H67/IT8892 PCI-PCIe-Bridge configuration.
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H67A-UD3H-B3 (rev. 1.1)
CPU: Intel i7 2600k
RAM: 16 GB
HDD: Hitachi HDS72101 (1 TB)
SSD: Crucial RealSSD C300 (64 GB)
Optical Drive: LG BH10LS30
Serial & Parallel Card: MosChip PCI 9865 Multi-I/O Controller
Sound Card: Aureal Vortex 1
Keyboard: Cherry G83
Mouse: Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical
Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster SA450
Now what works and what doesn't. Keyboard is connencted via USB and works just as supposed to. Onboard Intel HD3000 Graphics works quite fine. There's even a VESA Mode for my monitors native resolution of 1920x1200 pixel. Hard drive and SSD are both visible to DOS in AHCI mode, though the SSD is formated for Linux. DOS, FreeDOS 1.2 to be specific, lives in the first two gigabyte on the HDD, that's my boot partition. The rest of the HDD is also for Linux. This was what worked without the need of driver installation.
With HIMEMX.EXE 4 GB of RAM are addressable and MEM reports 3 GB to be free. In order to get the optical drive working I had to load AHCI.SYS from HP. It's working to read CDs and DVDs and propably BDs too, but I couldn't test them yet. Burning is not possible, because I couldn't find an ASPI driver. The I/O controller came with a DOS driver, GEMDOSIN.EXE its name. After installation MS-DOS' MSD could see the serial ports but not the parallel port, HWINFO then saw them all. However, I did not actually test the ports function yet. Mouse is connected with an USB to PS/2 adapter in order to get it working. Connection via USB, like the keyboard, wasn't successful. Now, three out of five buttons and the wheel are working with CTMOUSE.EXE. For the onboard network card, a RTL8111B, I found the driver RTGND. Combined with DIS_PKT and MSCLIENT I'm on the internet with DOS. Finally the sound card, the real mode driver ASP4DOS.COM provides Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 emulation. It seems to work better with newer games than older ones. Like Day of the Tentacle works fine and Maniac Mansion doesn't make a piep. DOOM, Settlers 2 and Wolfenstein 3D were also found working.
As mentioned, it's not exactly a retro PC. Yet I like this more or less 100% IBM compatible machine with it's old fashioned BIOS telling me about the good old times between 1984 and 2011 on every boot. If someone, then it's you who can understand my pleasure about compatibility for 35 years now.
PS: Actually I wonder why in all those years really no one ever published an open source Sound Blaster emulation for AC97 or HDA. Linux and BSDs all have free drivers for all those cards which look to be very generic. There's even MPXPLAY which supports the newer audio standards on DOS. Did I miss something or is this a task waiting for me?
PPS: A sidenote on the Audio PCI 5200 is that they didn't make use of electrolytic capacitors on it. Without the most likely thing to break in consumer electronics it's IMHO a very good design, unlikely to break. I found it especially noteworthy to mention, since in contrast to the ES137x sound cards I've seen all others had electrolytic capacitors mounted.
