I'm not sure what you mean- are you refering to a mixer for an AC97 compliant codec, or the Sound Blaster emulation present on the AC97?
My understanding is that there are no mixers for DOS when it comes to AC97 compliant codecs unless it includes some sort of Sound Blaster emulation.

Thx, some programs do seem to work with AC97 under plain dos like OCP (MusicPlayer), BUT i can't hear anything, I can only see the Bars moving.
Because there is no way to stop the muting of the soundports from plain dos, I went back to ESS1938 (SOLO1).
I also managed to get the ESS working within Win98se without a "bluescreen". I simply have to use the later WinME WDM drivers.
Using the VXD-Driver for Win98se with "Dos-Emulation" does only lead to a "!", using the Win98se WDM Driver leads to the bluescreen.

But one thing is bad about the WDM-Drivers. They do NOT support the onboard-mpu interface of the ESS-Solo1.
Under play Dos it works perfect with general midi 330, under windows with wdm-drivers I can choose ESFM or GM Softsynth.
MPU401 is there but not as "ess-mpu 401", therefore I think an external device will work under win98se.

All the thing I wrote above is for the i865gv chipset. I845 is still OK with ess-vxd drivers and internal MPU (Dreamblaster S2).

Doc

dr.zeissler wrote:

Thx, some programs do seem to work with AC97 under plain dos like OCP (MusicPlayer), BUT i can't hear anything, I can only see the Bars moving.

You can't hear anything because AC'97 doesn't work in plain DOS. Those players most likely just send data to port 220/388/whatever without really checking the presence of a sound card.

Depending on the mainboard, you may have luck and the codec that provides AC'97 has DOS drivers for SB Pro compatibility, like the Creative ES1373. But most AC'97 solutions are built into the chipset and do AC'97 only.

That's pretty much the case only for VIA boards.

Not a big deal since I went back to the ESS-Solo1 😀 But Thx for the useful infos.
My i915 machine has win9x-drivers too, but there is no way of getting digital out without a freeze on that chipset with my pci-soundcards under plain dos.
On that type of machine, a covox or a opl2lpt are mostly the only way...?

I'm glad to have quite a few mainboards with on-board Solo-1 or SB PCI 64/128. 😀

I think there is no FSC-Mainboard with an ESS-Solo onboard?

Why FSC? Did they use a non-standard form factor?

I only collect them and I love that on-/of keyboard feature with the powered ac-monitor connector.

Well, just by pure coincidence I fixed a Biostar M6VBE mainboard today, which is Slot 1 and has on-board ESS Solo-1. And that board was used by FSC in one of their PCs (no idea which model, just know that they used it).

AC'97 compliancy doesn't guarantee DOS support. That's up to the company making the AC'97 compliant card to provide some "legacy TSR" for it, or some VXD driver that provides dos sound through Windows 9x.

I know VIA's AC'97 chips for several Compaq computers in 1999-2000 had a very buggy legacy TSR with godawful OPL2 FM emulation.

derSammler wrote:

Well, just by pure coincidence I fixed a Biostar M6VBE mainboard today, which is Slot 1 and has on-board ESS Solo-1. And that board was used by FSC in one of their PCs (no idea which model, just know that they used it).

I think I own that one too.

that was used in a fsc "consumer" machine https://www.flickr.com/photos/94839221@N05/26 … 57668800582232/
but I think I have that other one too... but mostly the "3rd-party" board have not integrated that cool feature. beside that the "professionell"
series support onboard-management within win98/2k/xp.

Doc

**************
found it: https://www.flickr.com/photos/94839221@N05/26 … 57668800582232/
I'll have to checkout if I currently have that one and what is about the "keyboard" feature.

I also own one of their Pentium Pro mainboards.

dr.zeissler wrote:

Have you ever heard of a "mixer" for dos, that supports "windows-ac97-codecs" like soundmax?

There is the JUDAS Apocalyptic Softwaremixing Soundsystem, which supports some AC'97 and even some Intel HD Audio chipsets. Is that the kind of software you're looking for?

Is this a "soundplayer" for the mentioned formats, oder does it de-mute the ac97 in plain dos so it can be used in games that support digital samples like pinball-fantasies?

It's just a sound system with a player included. It will not make any existing DOS games compatible with AC'97.

derSammler wrote:

It's just a sound system with a player included. It will not make any existing DOS games compatible with AC'97.

Ah, but that is the Holy Grail that I've also been looking for myself. I've been wanting to take the VSB (Virtual Sound Blaster) source code and update it to work with AC'97 and/or Intel HD audio. With the original author's permission, I safeguarded the sources to VSB and TEMU on GitHub with the intent to first port them from TASM to an open source assembler, but that's been proving to be quite hard. I've asked people at the Flat Assembler forum for help and advice on this, and some of the people there suggested porting the code to a more TASM-compatible assembler than FASM. I've made some attempts to port to NASM and JWASM as well as FASM, but so far, I haven't had much success.

My idea was to first "liberate" the TEMU and VSB sources so they could be compiled/assembled using an open source toolchain, after which the code could hopefully be polished and extended to support more recent AC'97 and/or Intel HD Audio chipsets. I safeguarded the source code of JUDAS on GitHub as well, in the hope that I could use the AC'97 and Intel HD Audio code from that project as a reference to extend TEMU and VSB.

Having a universal open source Sound Blaster emulator for more modern audio chipsets would be very useful, especially when distributed with FreeDOS. I'd love to work on this further, but I admit I'm going to need some help for this to actually go anywhere. The fact that there are many mutually incompatible AC'97 and Intel HD Audio implementations in existence would make this even more challenging. My idea was to concentrate on the AC'97 and Intel HD Audio implementations emulated by VirtualBox first, since that would aid in development, and subsequently extending support to other common implementations, both real-world and virtualized.

What do you think? Shall I open a topic here on Vogons to enlist help from people here?

My purpose of de-muting the AC97 has another goal, it's using the line-in for a covox.
In windows the covox does not work, but ac97 line-in works and some dosgames or
scene-demos that can use the sb-emulation.

Could you just use a different device alltogether (perhaps an external one) to mix your audio, before you send it out?