electronicaura wrote on 2021-10-27, 11:26:
Thank you all very much, you have helped me a lot, I am almost ready.
I have another question to see if you can help me (I am learning to handle windows 98 and more) I installed a sound blaster to the computer (sound blaster SB0220) Working correctly. In msdos I get to reproduce sound effects worse not music. I am doing something wrong?
You'll need to be a bit more specific here on which games and which settings you're using.
The SoundBlaster Live 5.1 (SB0220) is called "SoundBlaster", but it's not hardware compatible with the old ISA SoundBlaster cards, so it needs driver software to emulate the old stuff. At best it more or less sounds like the original, at worst part of it or none of it works.
What is important to know is that DOS sound works completely differently than Windows (or pretty much any other OS).In Windows, there's a sound abstraction layer in the APIs that programs talk to, and most audio is sampled digital audio. A game doesn't need to know anything about the sound hardware in a Windows system (at a high level). In DOS, software talks directly to hardware, and there are multiple ways of making sound. Almost every card supports more than one, and it's possible (in fact very likely) that a game uses different ones for music and fx.
That means two things:
1) your card needs to be configured correctly for each of the standards it supports.
2) your game needs to be correctly configured to use the card for each of its features/methods.
And yes, that makes it a lot more complicated than "install the .exe driver, reboot and it just works". You need to be aware of your hardware and of the resources used to configure it (base address, IRQ, DMA etc. - in some cases multiples. This card probably uses three base addresses (Sound Blaster, AdLib and MIDI), two DMAs (low and high Sound Blaster) and two IRQs (Sound Blaster and MIDI))
So, first thing you need to do is figure out what you need. If you say fx work but music doesn't it tells us:
- digital audio (Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 or Sound Blaster 16 standard) is configured correctly in DOS and in the game.
- music synthesis, either OPL (AdLib) or MIDI (Roland) is not configured correctly in either DOS or the game.
Now, not all cards support all of those, but the SB Live 5.1 supports Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16, OPL and General MIDI, so you should be able to get sound in all those standards. Sound quality on its OPL emulation is not good, but it will give sound if correctly configured. So the problem isn't hardware, it's software or configuration.
Also, there's a big difference between running DOS natively, or running a DOS window under Windows.
So, to help troubleshoot we need to know:
- are you running native DOS or Windows DOS mode?
- what resources is the card configured for (adress, DMA, IRQs etc)?
- what game are you having sound problems on?
- which sound settings did you select in the game? And which resources?