Probably not the case, I've had it running fine on even faster machines. Like a quad-core i5 at 3.4GHz.

stamasd wrote on 2023-04-02, 13:59:

flynnsbit wrote on 2023-04-02, 13:22:

Not sure if this will help with the newer video chipsets but I did find this a while ago in relation to vbe issues with newer ca […]
Show full quote

Not sure if this will help with the newer video chipsets but I did find this a while ago in relation to vbe issues with newer cards:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020619230758/ht … /videoproblems/
"
Videoproblems
So, you are trying some of your old dos programs and find out that they will not work with your new video card. The programs tell you that your video card is not VESA compatible/ that no SVGA hardware is found or something similar. You think you need a VESA TSR but the manufacturer of your video card claims that that is not needed because your video card supports VBE 2.0/3.0.

That is what this page is about: getting those great old dos programs to work again!
It seems that a lot of programs suffer from only a few problems.
Although it is often said that new video cards are made for windows and 3d and thus have no or buggy vga/svga/VESA support this is in my opinion not true. The cards from 3dfx and NVIDIA even support VBE 3.0!
"

Unfortunately that does not work. The files in that zip are from an even older version of UNIVBE (version 5.x) and they're still not compatible with modern chipsets. There is a list of supported VGA chips, and it doesn't seem to support anything else hardware-wise.

Some day now, probably in the year 2525, some old guy will log on to vogons and create a thread about how they made a new utility called VesaEmu 😀)

crazii wrote on 2023-04-02, 02:15:

sega dude wrote on 2023-04-02, 01:30:

I tried this on several different computers before I had it work. I used the method in this video to create a flash drive with FreeDOS and SBEMU. I first tried it on my Dell Latitude E6500. SBEMU ran and recognized the sound card as Intel HDA. I got no sound in any game I tried. I tried plugging in headphones into the headphone jack but I didn't get any audio that way either. I then tried my Dell XPS M140 (a.k.a Inspiron 630m). SBEMU recognized the sound card as Intel HDA on this machine as well. Again I got no sound in any game I tried. I also tried the headphone jack on this machine and I again didn't get any audio out of it. I finally had it work on my Thinkpad R51 1830-BTU. On this machine SBEMU recognized the sound card as ICH AC97. I got sound in Doom, ROTT, the Warcraft 2 demo, and Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition.

Hi, Which version of SBEMU is used? The original beta2 or beta2c? Beta2c should have the power states fixed but there might be more problems that need fixing.

I used the release labeled "1.0beta2" on GitHub. Not sure if that's the same as the "original beta2" version you mentioned. I'll give beta2c a try and report back.

stamasd wrote on 2023-04-02, 13:52:

general note: the sound volume for all OPL and SB sound is very low in all instances where it works.

what volume option did you use? /vol9 will be the max, have you used that?

RayeR wrote on 2023-04-02, 13:58:

>crazii
Can you please test the Dynablaster? https://stahnu.cz/stare-hry/dyna-blaster#prehled
For me it runs without any sound with SBEMU but it works with YMF724 PCI with DSDMA TSR so it's definitely doable to trap and emulate sound for this game.

Yeah sure, I'll test it during noon break.

RayeR wrote on 2023-04-02, 13:58:

>crazii
Can you please test the Dynablaster? https://stahnu.cz/stare-hry/dyna-blaster#prehled
For me it runs without any sound with SBEMU but it works with YMF724 PCI with DSDMA TSR so it's definitely doable to trap and emulate sound for this game.

Just did a simple fast test, it used DSP command 0F2h (IRQ test) and then wait some duration for the IRQ. the 0F2h command is supported but the virtual IRQ happens during the periodical interrupt of sound card, which may happen after the game's waiting. so the game may missed the IRQ. - I got sound / or not, randomly on each launch of the game in VMWare Player. On real machines when system runs faster it is possible 0F2h never works because the waiting process is too short.

There're 2 solutions to this problem.
1. decrease the sound card interrupt interval so that the virtual IRQ may catch up with the waiting, but it is not controllable, not very promising.
2.raise the virtual IRQ immediate on 0F2h command (I tested it before but not working - freezes), this requires capture & restore the game's context (segment registers, GPRs) on port trapping, which needs support of the JEMMEX and HDPMI.
EDIT: for real mode the game context is preserved by QEMM/JEMM & captured by RMCB, I can use it in SBEMU. for protected mode I can capture it HDPMI, so it is possible to add the support.

EDIT2: I wrote simple code to capture & restore context and raise virtual IRQ in the IO port trap handler but it still freezes/crashes. I don't have time to debug it so I used another simple hack to delay the 0F2h command so that it delays the game code and wait for the sound card interrupt. tested working in VMWare Player but you need test it on real hardware.

EDIT3: I tested with my TP T540p and it works.

Baron von Riedesel wrote on 2023-04-02, 08:29:

Anyway, I added an optional numeric argument to hdpmi's -x option, working as "right shift" factor, so -x still restricts mem to 256mb, but -x1 changes that to 128mb, -x2 to 64mb and so on... System Shock is happy with -x2.

Had to notice, however, that there are games that won't be cheated so easily: Bleifuss ( English: Screamer ) isn't impressed by -x2, -x3 or whatever. I could make it run with hdpmi32's -v option, but have no idea why this works...

Thanks for the tip about Screamer. Could never get it to work with sound on HDA. Going to try the -v option of hdpmi32 now. Perplexed as to how this could magically get Screamer to work with sound, but am hopeful! Hopefully this will work for screamer 2 and Screamer Rally as well.

Incidently, your binaries of SBEMU are much smaller than crazii's. For one, crazii includes debug info, which can be stripped. Also, the reduction of unneeded code in your compilations reduced the SBEMU.EXE file by some ~30-40kb, even when compressed with UPX. Every bit of succinctness helps, but I think you are both right, paradoxically. Cleaner code is "better" but it makes updates perhaps less modular as crazii pointed out.

Do you have new test compile of HDMPI32.exe to try, with variable -x option?

stamasd wrote on 2023-04-02, 11:23:

The test program included (Display Doctor 6.53 for DOS) recognizes the name of the chipset and says that supposedly it's VBE 1.2 compatible. But when going to the actual tests, they either don't run or crash. All 4-bit modes tests for instance won't start, and several 8-bit modes tests crash part of the way.

SDD 6.53 and others are a dead-end road... Believe me, I've tried it, and similar ancient patches such as VESAFIX and the 3dfx VBE patch which was released in ~2002. Also Ken Silverman's NOLFB.exe. They're all hopeless. What we need is a new utility which will be a VESAFix for Intel High Definition Graphics on "modern" laptops with the IHD onboard graphics 530, 620 and other Intel vBioses which are broken with VBE2/3 after the i core 5th gen. A simple hook TSR should do it, but I've no idea where to begin, except with the dumped 63kb of BIOS code and comparing it to Intel High Definition 5500 to see what has changed which caused the black screen and system freeze that wasn't there before. The whole process of creating a VESA 2/3 fix or patch on these "modern" systems is above my pay grade...

I just now saw flynnsbit's helpful post. Most of the utilities on that page I've tried and failed miserably with, as they don't know the new Intel video chipsets. Rarely, vbe12.com has fixed a game which won't work in VBE 2 / 3 mode by downgrading the reported VESA version to 1.2. Silverman's NOLFB.com also does this, as VBE 1.2 extensions do not have any linear frame buffer.

zyzzle wrote on 2023-04-03, 09:07:

Thanks for the tip about Screamer. Could never get it to work with sound on HDA. Going to try the -v option of hdpmi32 now. Per […]
Show full quote

Baron von Riedesel wrote on 2023-04-02, 08:29:

Anyway, I added an optional numeric argument to hdpmi's -x option, working as "right shift" factor, so -x still restricts mem to 256mb, but -x1 changes that to 128mb, -x2 to 64mb and so on... System Shock is happy with -x2.

Had to notice, however, that there are games that won't be cheated so easily: Bleifuss ( English: Screamer ) isn't impressed by -x2, -x3 or whatever. I could make it run with hdpmi32's -v option, but have no idea why this works...

Thanks for the tip about Screamer. Could never get it to work with sound on HDA. Going to try the -v option of hdpmi32 now. Perplexed as to how this could magically get Screamer to work with sound, but am hopeful! Hopefully this will work for screamer 2 and Screamer Rally as well.

Incidently, your binaries of SBEMU are much smaller than crazii's. For one, crazii includes debug info, which can be stripped. Also, the reduction of unneeded code in your compilations reduced the SBEMU.EXE file by some ~30-40kb, even when compressed with UPX. Every bit of succinctness helps, but I think you are both right, paradoxically. Cleaner code is "better" but it makes updates perhaps less modular as crazii pointed out.

Do you have new test compile of HDMPI32.exe to try, with variable -x option?

Yes I didn't run strip with it. I did run it with early tested versions but not recently. tested again it would reduce the size from 472k to 341k.

mikedebian wrote on 2023-04-02, 18:42:

Some day now, probably in the year 2525, some old guy will log on to vogons and create a thread about how they made a new utility called VesaEmu 😀)

In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive,
They may find:

a wonderful VESAFIX DOS utility for borked vBIOS code, much as 2023 saw the magical release of SBEMU, that once-mythical Sound Blaster emulator fix for "modern" PCI sound cards, which had been tantalizingly discussed for 15 years previously...

crazii wrote on 2023-04-03, 03:36:

stamasd wrote on 2023-04-02, 13:52:

general note: the sound volume for all OPL and SB sound is very low in all instances where it works.

what volume option did you use? /vol9 will be the max, have you used that?

Oh I completely forgot about the volume options. 😀 I'll test tonight when I get back from work.
FWIW the EB 8470 uses a very special codec, IDT 92HD87 with very high performance in Windows/Linux especially for recording (up to 384kHz etc) which makes it useful for me for digitizing measurement data. I'm happy that SBEMU can use it too.

(edit) I actually managed to squeeze in 2 minutes of testing just before leaving home; /vol9 did make a difference, not as loud as I think it should be but much better anyway and within a reasonable range. I only tested OPL sound emulation, didn't have time to get into SB emulation volume testing.

tercio wrote on 2023-04-01, 13:23:

One Must Fall2097 now works great in my eeepc 701!!!

Care to detail how you got One Must Fall working? What is your HDA sound card and settings? I've tried many times with different settings and failed. This is what the latest SBEMU (beta2c) detects my Soundcard as:

1SBEMU: Sound Blaster emulation on AC97. Version: 1.0 beta2c
2Autodetecting/testing available outputs/soundcards, please wait...
31: Intel HDA: Intel SKL (Kabylake-LP) (80869D71) -> Realtek (10EC0256) (max 192kHz/24bit/8ch)
4Autodetecting finished... Exiting...

OMF works fine without sound, or with PC speaker sound. It freezes, with black screen upon running with SBEMU loaded. One Must Fall configures fine with its SETUP.EXE program for: Sound Blaster, SB Pro, SB16, Sound Blaster Clone, regardless of IRQ 5 or 7 chosen.

I've tried:
1. Running two different versions of OMF; ver. 1.1 and 2.1.
2. Restubbing the MASTER.DAT file which is really just a DOS4Gw / DOS 32a protected mode .EXE, and deleting OMF.EXE in version 1.1.
3. Restubbing the OMF.EXE file from version 2.1 which is a PMODE 1.0 protected mode .EXE with DOS4gw and / or DOS32/A.
4. Changing various SBEMU settings such as IRQ 5 / 7, T1, T5, T6, /rm0.
5. Tried Baron von Riedesel's compilations. The same behavior. Hard freeze, reboot required.
6. Also tried stamasd's hints by setting SET DPMIMEM=MAXMEM 16383 and SET HDPMI=2048 in my SBEMU .BAT file. No effect.
It's not a video issue, as the game runs in only 320x200 and runs very well without sound.

Who else, if anyone has gotten OMF2097 working on Intel HDA?

One more test that I did tonight. I went back to the Optiplex 3050m system and replaced the CPU: instead of the one I tried at first (i5-6600T) I installed a i5-7600T. That was the only change I made.

SBEMU does not work at all anymore. It gives me:
internal buffer overflow
system halted.
After that it requires a power cycle.

I tried it in various ways, enabling/disabling EMS, enabling/disabling UMBs in jemmex options. No matter what, even if I try to load it in conventional memory with no UMBs, it gives me the buffer overflow error.
Again, the only change I made was replacing the CPU with one from a newer generation (Kaby Lake instead of Skylake). This system can take either. The chipset is H110.
Other than that, the system works fine in Windows.
The testing was done with SBEMU beta2c and the other binaries from the beta2 package.

Baron von Riedesel wrote on 2023-04-02, 08:29:

Had to notice, however, that there are games that won't be cheated so easily: Bleifuss ( English: Screamer ) isn't impressed by -x2, -x3 or whatever. I could make it run with hdpmi32's -v option, but have no idea why this works...

Tried Screamer with HDMP32i.EXE from 3-4-23 and 3-30-23 with only the -v option, and Screamer still didn't work with sound. Hard freeze / HDPMI exception thrown. This resulth with running the DOS4GW / DOS32a SCREAMH.EXE, after having successfully configured with its setup program. Selecting anything from SB to SB16 results in same freeze / exception with SBEMU beta2c or your provided compilations above. This is my detected version of HDA card:
Intel HDA: Intel SKL (Kabylake-LP) (80869D71) -> Realtek (10EC0256) (max 192kHz/24bit/8ch)

stamasd wrote on 2023-04-04, 01:03:

One more test that I did tonight. I went back to the Optiplex 3050m system and replaced the CPU: instead of the one I tried at f […]
Show full quote

One more test that I did tonight. I went back to the Optiplex 3050m system and replaced the CPU: instead of the one I tried at first (i5-6600T) I installed a i5-7600T. That was the only change I made.

SBEMU does not work at all anymore. It gives me:
internal buffer overflow
system halted.
After that it requires a power cycle.

Very strange. I can confirm SBEMU works for me with my latest Dell Intel core Kabylake i5 laptop with I5-8250 CPU (Dell Inspiron 5570, 8GB RAM, 1TB NVMe drive) booted off a 32GB USB memory stick with DOS 7.1. Excellent compatibility rate of working games, and great sound quality with SBEMU.

Stubborn problems remain, such as SBEMU not working with One Must Fall or Screamer, though.

zyzzle wrote on 2023-04-04, 00:59:

Care to detail how you got One Must Fall working? What is your HDA sound card and settings? I've tried many times with different […]
Show full quote

tercio wrote on 2023-04-01, 13:23:

One Must Fall2097 now works great in my eeepc 701!!!

Care to detail how you got One Must Fall working? What is your HDA sound card and settings? I've tried many times with different settings and failed. This is what the latest SBEMU (beta2c) detects my Soundcard as:

Copy code to clipboard

1SBEMU: Sound Blaster emulation on AC97. Version: 1.0 beta2c
2Autodetecting/testing available outputs/soundcards, please wait...
31: Intel HDA: Intel SKL (Kabylake-LP) (80869D71) -> Realtek (10EC0256) (max 192kHz/24bit/8ch)
4Autodetecting finished... Exiting...

OMF works fine without sound, or with PC speaker sound. It freezes, with black screen upon running with SBEMU loaded. One Must Fall configures fine with its SETUP.EXE program for: Sound Blaster, SB Pro, SB16, Sound Blaster Clone, regardless of IRQ 5 or 7 chosen.

I've tried:
1. Running two different versions of OMF; ver. 1.1 and 2.1.
2. Restubbing the MASTER.DAT file which is really just a DOS4Gw / DOS 32a protected mode .EXE, and deleting OMF.EXE in version 1.1.
3. Restubbing the OMF.EXE file from version 2.1 which is a PMODE 1.0 protected mode .EXE with DOS4gw and / or DOS32/A.
4. Changing various SBEMU settings such as IRQ 5 / 7, T1, T5, T6, /rm0.
5. Tried Baron von Riedesel's compilations. The same behavior. Hard freeze, reboot required.
6. Also tried stamasd's hints by setting SET DPMIMEM=MAXMEM 16383 and SET HDPMI=2048 in my SBEMU .BAT file. No effect.
It's not a video issue, as the game runs in only 320x200 and runs very well without sound.

Who else, if anyone has gotten OMF2097 working on Intel HDA?

OMF2097 Version 2.1
Intel HDA (EeePC 701)

crazii wrote on 2023-04-03, 04:33:

EDIT2: I wrote simple code to capture & restore context and raise virtual IRQ in the IO port trap handler but it still freezes/crashes. I don't have time to debug it so I used another simple hack to delay the 0F2h command so that it delays the game code and wait for the sound card interrupt. tested working in VMWare Player but you need test it on real hardware.

EDIT3: I tested with my TP T540p and it works.
SBEMU_Dynablaster_Test.zip

Thanks for quick reply. I don't understand sound programming and why is needed polling DSP by commands to ask / wait for IRQ, I though that IRQ is simply HW generated and handled by ISR when it happen without any further magic....

I tested your quickfix and it works for me, sound in Dynablaster is fine and it seems it didn't disturb other games that worked with older beta.

I also tried Sandwarriors, sound in setup is OK, both sfx and music but the game crashes with HDPMI fatal exit James Bond 007 😜
But it's not related to SBEMU, I tried again without SBEMU loaded, just JEMM and HDPMI and SW crashed same way. It works with Yahama DSDMA.EXE and aureal vortex TSR.

mikedebian wrote on 2023-04-02, 18:42:

Some day now, probably in the year 2525, some old guy will log on to vogons and create a thread about how they made a new utility called VesaEmu 😀)

Not only VESAEMU, we would need complete legacy BIOS and VideoBIOS emulation layer over UEFI for modern UEFI-only (w/o CSM) systems. Someone is already challenging https://github.com/tkchia/biefircate but just now I got error from Github, wtf? Problem is that modern VGA cards dropped some VGA compatible IO ports so they shouldn't be called VGA anymore, just a framebuffer/accelerator. So some IO trapping method will be needed to emulate it (and pass to UEFI driver if it would be possible to let it run in background)...

RayeR wrote on 2023-04-04, 01:53:

I don't understand sound programming and why is needed polling DSP by commands to ask / wait for IRQ

It's mainly used for detection of the SB card (not all games uses that), when you send the command to the port, and wait for the IRQ as response, if it happens, then there's a huge possibility that the SB card exist, otherwise there's no SB card exist.
That's why Dynablaster had no sound, it cannot detect a SB card and so stopped doing sound functions at all.

zyzzle wrote on 2023-04-04, 01:11:

Stubborn problems remain, such as SBEMU not working with One Must Fall or Screamer, though.

I'll debug the two games to see what happens. 😁

zyzzle wrote on 2023-04-04, 00:59:

Care to detail how you got One Must Fall working? What is your HDA sound card and settings? I've tried many times with different […]
Show full quote

tercio wrote on 2023-04-01, 13:23:

One Must Fall2097 now works great in my eeepc 701!!!

Care to detail how you got One Must Fall working? What is your HDA sound card and settings? I've tried many times with different settings and failed. This is what the latest SBEMU (beta2c) detects my Soundcard as:

Copy code to clipboard

1SBEMU: Sound Blaster emulation on AC97. Version: 1.0 beta2c
2Autodetecting/testing available outputs/soundcards, please wait...
31: Intel HDA: Intel SKL (Kabylake-LP) (80869D71) -> Realtek (10EC0256) (max 192kHz/24bit/8ch)
4Autodetecting finished... Exiting...

OMF works fine without sound, or with PC speaker sound. It freezes, with black screen upon running with SBEMU loaded. One Must Fall configures fine with its SETUP.EXE program for: Sound Blaster, SB Pro, SB16, Sound Blaster Clone, regardless of IRQ 5 or 7 chosen.

I've tried:
1. Running two different versions of OMF; ver. 1.1 and 2.1.
2. Restubbing the MASTER.DAT file which is really just a DOS4Gw / DOS 32a protected mode .EXE, and deleting OMF.EXE in version 1.1.
3. Restubbing the OMF.EXE file from version 2.1 which is a PMODE 1.0 protected mode .EXE with DOS4gw and / or DOS32/A.
4. Changing various SBEMU settings such as IRQ 5 / 7, T1, T5, T6, /rm0.
5. Tried Baron von Riedesel's compilations. The same behavior. Hard freeze, reboot required.
6. Also tried stamasd's hints by setting SET DPMIMEM=MAXMEM 16383 and SET HDPMI=2048 in my SBEMU .BAT file. No effect.
It's not a video issue, as the game runs in only 320x200 and runs very well without sound.

Who else, if anyone has gotten OMF2097 working on Intel HDA?

tercio was using the temp release version that fixes Epic Pinball, did you use that too? I tested the game of ver 2.1, using /t5 and SB Pro in setup, and no problems found on my TP T540p, i7 4710MQ Haswell CPU. I'll do more test later.