First post, by SpectreVR
I nabbed an old Gateway from 1999 from a dump and was surprised to see it's perfect. It runs everything very well, but I'm having a very hard time getting that adlib-style music to play (for example, the music from Ultima 6 intro).
I KNOW it works, because I have the shareware version of DOOM playing gun/menu sfx as well as the guitar track during play. This was using MIDI port 330 and SoundBlaster address 220/interrupt 5 settings (as specified in autoexec via the SET BLASTER command).
It has a Creative AudioPCI 1371 as specified in this thread: Ensoniq / Creative AudioPCI
From there I learned:
There is one huge drawback however. This card doesn't have a Yamaha OPL chip. It doesn't have a clone chip either. FM synth is emulated through wavetable / soundfont
and sounds horrible.
So, what are my options? How can I get Yamaha "OPL" sound on this machine? Would booting into real DOS mode fix anything or am I SOL for DOS music?
Additionally, if I did have a working OPL chip, would it work automatically? I'm worried because I'm not even hearing wavetable or soundfont as specified in this thread - it's just SILENT. If it did exist and work, would I need to manually configure stuff? I'm worried because many DOS games don't have an installer that lets you select the sound device. For games without installers, am I SOL for running on Windows 98 or ME? Or is there better hardware detection and emulation in the "boot into DOS" mode that these OSes have?