First post, by xjas
- Rank
- l33t
I was playing around with my Celeron 1GHz / Gigabyte GA-6VEML machine a bit after recapping it. This is a compact, highly-integrated Socket 370 board with onboard video & sound based on the VIA PLE133T chipset with the (unfairly??) hated 686B southbridge. This board has an ISA slot, but I suspected its onboard audio was the same system as the VIA thin client I had good luck with last year. Sure enough, it was.
I've found the onboard sound on these to be highly compatible with DOS stuff and very easy to set up. I have a sneaky suspicion it's doing PC/PCI (SB-Link) natively in the chipset, but I haven't tried to confirm this.
Here's how to get it going:
In the BIOS for one of these you generally see the following options, this is where the magic happens. Enable all these and set them up how you like.
You can also change the PCI/ISA PnP settings to reserve your IRQ and DMA (5/1 in this case) but I haven't found that to be necessary (it doesn't hurt either.)
You can download the driver package straight from VIA, the zip file you want is 68MU220b.zip; the only files you really need are VIAUDIO.COM (and DOS4GW) in the DOS directory. (I don't even think you need the INSTALL.EXE but you can use it if you want.) You also need VIAFMTSR.COM which isn't in the package for some reason but I've attached it here:
^^ everything needed to make it work.
The only thing you need to add in the AUTOEXEC.BAT is VIAUDIO.COM and VIAFMTSR.COM (in order), and then your SET BLASTER line:
...and you're golden!
Unfortunately these take a fair bit of conventional memory (39kB) but I haven't played around with loading them high or optimizing at all. On my machine I still have 577kB free which is enough for most things.
The sound chip is compatible with Sound Blaster Pro drivers in most games including SB Pro stereo support. It seems to come across as a Pro 2 with an OPL3. The FM emulation actually isn't bad, it's certainly listenable if you're not too picky about "authenticity" and is significantly better than e.g. a Gravis Ultrasound's.
Everything I've tried so far generally "just works": Dark Forces, Quake, Hexen 2, FreeDoom, etc. Descent 2 crashes if configured for FM music, but I plugged a Roland Sound Canvas into the gameport and set it to general MIDI which worked instantly with no drama. (It runs fine with VIAFMTSR loaded but the game itself could not be configured to use FM.) Digi sound in D2 is no problem, again in SB Pro stereo.
I do have to run some games with DOS32A rather than DOS4GW but I think this is an incompatibility with FreeDOS's memory managers; I get the same thing on other systems.
It even plays sound in stuff it has no business getting sound out of:
Fans of Surprise! Productions's Copper demo will appreciate how hard it is to see this screen on this notoriously picky prod. It doesn't even work on my 386DX with a REAL OPL3 sound card. It seems perfectly happy with the VIA FM emulation though.
Conclusion: if you have one of these boards or the numerous S370 appliances (thin clients, etc.) with a variant of this chipset, and you want sound in your DOS games, give the onboard sound a try. I suspect anything that has the Sound Blaster settings in the BIOS will work fine.
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