Now I have another problem. While SBEMU is active, I get the words "near_fnodes not 0" appear randomly at the position of my cursor as I type something (usually occurs in Norton Commander 5 and Volkov Commander, can be either at the command line or in the built-in text editor). What is "near_fnodes not 0" and why it is pestering me?

One more strange behavior. When I use mem.exe after quake for example, it shows 0K XMS free. Quake allocates all available XMS. Without SBEMU (but with jemmex, qpiemu.dll and hdpmi32i) every XMS memory becomes freed after quit of an application. But with SBEMU, memory seems to stay in use, so mem.exe shows 0K free.

Can anyone confirm? I can run quake multiple times, so there is no real problem here. But at least one application (have to check which one) complains about too less memory after run quake.

Edit: Have to clarify, it's not quake but every application that's using XMS. After quit, XMS seems to stay in use.

MBH wrote on 2023-06-08, 20:35:

When I use mem.exe after quake for example, it shows 0K XMS free. Quake allocates all available XMS. ... with SBEMU, memory seems to stay in use, so mem.exe shows 0K free.
Can anyone confirm?

True. It's due to how hdpmi uses "xms memory" to backup "dpmi memory". It releases those XMS memory blocks when no "dpmi client" is active anymore - however, since sbemu itself is a dpmi client, and there's no way to uninstall sbemu, the XMS blocks are never released.

It's hardly a problem on "new" machines with GBs of memory, especially if hdpmi32 is loaded with the -x cmdline param.

Hi,

Having issues with Audigy card. As soon as SBEMU loads I get a contant "white noise" sound from the Audigy. Tried with Audigy (SB0090) and Audigy 2 ZS (SB0350) and get same result.
Booting to DOS7.1 (Win98SE, command prompt only bootmenu option) using Jemmex etc
Board is Asrock P67 Pro3, so it's not native PCI, there's an onboard PCIe-PCI bridge chip (Asmedia 1083)
SBEMU works ok with onboard HDA sound (using "SC2" to get it to use that instead of Audigy)
Still happens if onboard HDA is disabled.
Audigy 2ZS working fine in Win98SE (Running on same system) so the card itself seems ok.
(Audigy1 bluescreens with an ACPI error on VXD driver load, but that's a whole different story!)
Would be great to get SBEMU working with this, as the board's chipset is way past the point where the Audigy DOS drivers work.
I could just use HDA for DOS, but if I can get SBEMU to work, then I can disable onboard HDA and use Audigy for everything (DOS-Win10)

Any suggestions?

Thanks 😀

Baron von Riedesel wrote on 2023-06-09, 09:07:

MBH wrote on 2023-06-08, 20:35:

When I use mem.exe after quake for example, it shows 0K XMS free. Quake allocates all available XMS. ... with SBEMU, memory seems to stay in use, so mem.exe shows 0K free.
Can anyone confirm?

True. It's due to how hdpmi uses "xms memory" to backup "dpmi memory". It releases those XMS memory blocks when no "dpmi client" is active anymore - however, since sbemu itself is a dpmi client, and there's no way to uninstall sbemu, the XMS blocks are never released.

It's hardly a problem on "new" machines with GBs of memory, especially if hdpmi32 is loaded with the -x cmdline param.

Okay, thanks for clarifying. So that's "by design". I just have to reboot after quake, because my "new" machine has only 256 MB RAM minus RAM for IGP and quake takes all of them. I can live with that. Just thought there was a problem.

f1etch wrote on 2023-06-09, 11:47:

As soon as SBEMU loads I get a contant "white noise" sound from the Audigy.

Isn’t it outputting to S/PDIF?

f1etch wrote on 2023-06-09, 11:47:

Hi, […]
Show full quote

Hi,

Having issues with Audigy card. As soon as SBEMU loads I get a contant "white noise" sound from the Audigy. Tried with Audigy (SB0090) and Audigy 2 ZS (SB0350) and get same result.
Booting to DOS7.1 (Win98SE, command prompt only bootmenu option) using Jemmex etc
Board is Asrock P67 Pro3, so it's not native PCI, there's an onboard PCIe-PCI bridge chip (Asmedia 1083)
SBEMU works ok with onboard HDA sound (using "SC2" to get it to use that instead of Audigy)
Still happens if onboard HDA is disabled.
Audigy 2ZS working fine in Win98SE (Running on same system) so the card itself seems ok.
(Audigy1 bluescreens with an ACPI error on VXD driver load, but that's a whole different story!)
Would be great to get SBEMU working with this, as the board's chipset is way past the point where the Audigy DOS drivers work.
I could just use HDA for DOS, but if I can get SBEMU to work, then I can disable onboard HDA and use Audigy for everything (DOS-Win10)

Any suggestions?

Thanks 😀

I had a similar effect with my onboard HDA, but solved it with /t3 (SB Pro 2.0) switch in sbemu, instead of the default SB 16.

Hi , i want to use MS-DOS , instead of FreeDOS , some rufus versions can create MS-DOS bootable sticks, but in ms-dos sbemu seems crashes, or maybe i use it in wrong way.
FreeDOS has bad compatibility to some games i desire to test. MS-DOS even can give us much faster performance, for example quake at highest possible resolution works very fast , like i have 60 or even more FPS

There is no problem if you want to use MS DOS. Maybe don't use Rufus, just install it from your floppies. I'm using 6.22 without any problems. You can use himem + emm386 or jemmex if you need real mode support.

f1etch wrote on 2023-06-09, 11:47:

Having issues with Audigy card. As soon as SBEMU loads I get a contant "white noise" sound from the Audigy. Tried with Audigy (SB0090) and Audigy 2 ZS (SB0350) and get same result.
...

Hi, I can tell you that SBEMU works for me with Audigy 1 soundcard under MS-DOS 6.22 fine on my Gigabyte P67 MB.
First, try MPXplay if you can get clean playback to isolate that problem is more generic or related only to SBEMU...

Baron von Riedesel wrote on 2023-06-09, 09:07:

True. It's due to how hdpmi uses "xms memory" to backup "dpmi memory". It releases those XMS memory blocks when no "dpmi client" is active anymore - however, since sbemu itself is a dpmi client, and there's no way to uninstall sbemu, the XMS blocks are never released.

It's hardly a problem on "new" machines with GBs of memory, especially if hdpmi32 is loaded with the -x cmdline param.

As hdpmi -x limits XMS to old crappy apps to some safe level... wouldn't be possible to allocate DPMI memory from the (invisible) rest of XMS (on systems that have plenty of memory over -x limit)?

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestions. Changing the soundcard type didn't make any difference.
I tried MPXPLAY (167D) with the Audigy 1 (SB0090) in DOS (win98, command prompt only at boot menu) and it works perfectly playing back an mp3.
I noticed on the github page for SBEMU, someone logged an issue with an Audigy which sounds the same as mine about 2 weeks ago.

Thanks,

F1etch

RaVeN-05 wrote on 2023-06-12, 14:34:

Hi , i want to use MS-DOS , instead of FreeDOS , some rufus versions can create MS-DOS bootable sticks, but in ms-dos sbemu seems crashes, or maybe i use it in wrong way.
FreeDOS has bad compatibility to some games i desire to test. MS-DOS even can give us much faster performance, for example quake at highest possible resolution works very fast , like i have 60 or even more FPS

I don't know if it will work. I tried SBEMU on my real retrohardware, an old Pentium 3 Socket 370, VIA Chip (ASUS CUV4X-E) with real Window 98 DOS and works only the Protected Mode, at least for me with a real Sound Blaster LIVE! 5.1 PCI. You have to manually fire up hdpmi32i.exe thing and run SBEMU.exe, and looks like works but it can't find QEMU.dll thing (don't remember all exactly names right now, sorry, but you get the point) as it can't for me load JeMMEX. So i think is more tricky to make it work from FDOS, but you can try it. I tried on fly Duke3D and it worked, even better than Sound Blaster real DOS drivers and EMM386, but others like Wolf3D and other don't work without real mode activated, and idk how to activate it.

AFAIK Jemmex will work in plain DOS mode only, it will not work to start Win with Jemmex loaded.

For the dll, you need to specify the path to jload AND to the dll. As an example

1c:\dos\jload c:\dos\qpiemu.dll

MBH wrote on 2023-06-14, 08:37:

AFAIK Jemmex will work in plain DOS mode only, it will not work to start Win with Jemmex loaded. […]
Show full quote

AFAIK Jemmex will work in plain DOS mode only, it will not work to start Win with Jemmex loaded.

For the dll, you need to specify the path to jload AND to the dll. As an example

Copy code to clipboard

1c:\dos\jload c:\dos\qpiemu.dll

Yes, its really annoying.
I always liked to start DOS 7.1 directly and then windows98 if needed, with the win command.
Now, I have to first create a boot menu with a separate win98 entry, do a hard reset, and only then start windows.
Ill try also to perform fast reboot with WIN /mq, to take me back to the windows 98 boot menu and select the windows option from there, but that doesn't help either.
Simply, after each session with jemmex included, a hard reset (ctrl+alt+del) must be performed, so that windows 98 can start normally again.
btw, if you have SBEMU in global PATH, you don't have to specify path for jload, only for dll.

1jload c:\sbemu\qpiemu.dll

I hope that someone will one day patch MS-Dos.sys for more than 9 menu entries..

I just gave sbemu a whirl on a T5710, and it seems to work very well, and resolves the two major issues I had with viasbcfg and viafmtsr.

I had two major sound quality issues that were a problem with VIASBCFG/VIAFMTSR --

- Poor FM sound quality in for example, monkey island 2. FM sound with SBEMU works brilliantly now.

- pops/clicks as samples played themselves. This was really evident in KQ5, at the first game screen, as different sounds played. It would be popfest. No longer.

Only thing I need to do now is search out a mixer to faff with the levels, and reduce the volume. At present FM and SFX are both clipping. Need to reduce this to a sane level. I found the /VOL parameter when running SBEMU doesn't seem to effect anything, though I could be using it incorrectly.

I think my next step is to install soundblaster drivers and mess with mixer settings.

https://www.bttr-software.de/products/sbmix/

And for SBEMU, try /VOL5 instead of/VOL 5

🤣 for how much good this emulator by far is, despite still in beta and with issues, nothing beats the real DOS. I mean, i've just tried another build with a Pentium 4 Prescott on 775, a GeForce 6200 and a ESS Allegro 1 and Windows 98 SE and boy with my enormous surprise almost EVERYTHING runs perfectly, where 85% of the same games (using same folder for both FreeDOS PC and this W98 PC) would fail.. fk jemmex 😜

MBH wrote on 2023-06-15, 06:44:

https://www.bttr-software.de/products/sbmix/

And for SBEMU, try /VOL5 instead of/VOL 5

I'll give this one a try! This seems like exactly what I'm looking for.

I've tried /VOL5 and validated in the readback that it sets that value in sbemu, but no change in anything between /VOL1 to /VOL9 on my hardware.

As a test to get a mixer working, I downloaded the SB16 drivers from Creative Labs, installed them, and ran MIXERSET, and it seems to work brilliantly as well. It seems though that sbmix would be considerably more lightweight and easier to configure for my application.

If there's any more testing anyone wants me to do on a T5710, I'm more than happy to do so!

Bug I've noticed:

Hardware: HP T5710 w/ VT8231

Issue: With sbemu loaded, PC speaker audio no longer is mixed into the internal speaker/line out. Driver must be unloaded in order for PC speaker audio to function correctly.

The T5710 is somewhat unusual in that it doesn't have an internal beeper, instead normally routing the PC speaker audio through the internal speaker used by the onboard audio, or out through the line out on the rear. Since it only has the one internal speaker, if the audio is not properly mixed in, there will be no pc speaker sound of any sort, system beeps, or audio from software that uses it.