LSS10999 wrote:

BTW, actually, I wasn't talking about DOSBox here, but actually I think that program is just for DOS games of 80s (since DOSBox emulates a 386 CPU, and these very early games can be running too fast on modern computers).

Depending on how you look at it, every 32-bit Intel processor since the 386 have just been increasingly faster versions of the 386.

Most 90s DOS games are always compatible with modern systems and suffer no graphics/speed penalties. (some games may perform better if the game supports modern instructions, or VBE2/3.)

You're funny!

Unless you have a motherboard with ISA slots you will have a hard time getting good sound. Not to mention that many onbaord devices mess with the availlable address room (or whatever) which makes EMS not work properly in some cases. This board is FULL with such information.
If you want to play Dos games (no matter the time frame, you are really funny if you expect pre 1995 Dos games to run nicely) on modern hardware there is no way around a Virtual Machine or Emulator. And in the Dos games machine emulation there is no other than Dosbox (and bury that notion that Dosbox is for 80s games only).

Unless you have a motherboard with ISA slots you will have a hard time getting good sound. Not to mention that many onbaord devices mess with the availlable address room (or whatever) which makes EMS not work properly in some cases.

You are right that onboard devices are sure to mess up with the address room vital for SBPro support. However, the EMS itself should work fine on any systems (I was still using QEMM and everything works fine with RAM and ST:F option, just it cannot access the RAM outside 256MB, but it did little effect on running games and other apps. However, SBPCI/Live! SB16 emulation program doesn't like QEMM and it just reboots the computer. Some other EMS tools like JEMM386 works and can access all the RAM it can access for a 32-bit OS as long as the XMS driver supports it.)

If you want to play Dos games (no matter the time frame, you are really funny if you expect pre 1995 Dos games to run nicely) on modern hardware there is no way around a Virtual Machine or Emulator. And in the Dos games machine emulation there is no other than Dosbox (and bury that notion that Dosbox is for 80s games only).

IMO, DOSBox mainly solved the problem of some very early games running too fast (it's probably because these games don't have a speed limit or something so that it can run as fast as it can, or it has a very tolerant speed limit as the CPUs in these years are very slow). Later DOS games, especially later games with VGA/VESA/SVGA support, generally have their speed limited properly so that it can be run on modern systems without experiencing problems.

Games like Wolfenstein 3D, Tyrian, and some other Apogee games I've played, work perfectly on modern systems just without sound. I remember that games made by Wiering Software are even MPU-401 compatible so that the game can be run on both DOS and Windows flawlessly and with high quality sound under Windows via MPU-401 (MPU-401/General MIDI doesn't seem to work in DOS directly, and I've never seen such thing called external MIDI devices).

As for graphics, modern graphics card, including the PCI-E ones, don't need to care about legacy compatibilities at all as they're all VESA/VBE-complaint. I remembered of running things like UniVBE (which enables VBE 3.0 support for old video cards, but consumes about 25K base memory regardless of the remaining amount of UMB) during the early days when I was still using very old video cards like S3's... Such memory-consuming things are no longer needed for modern graphics cards as they are sure to support VBE3.0.

Whatever you think, as far as I'm concerned, everything but sound is still working fine in DOS.

You are right that onboard devices are sure to mess up with the address room vital for SBPro support. However, the EMS itself should work fine on any systems

It doesn't on all systems. Look it up in the forum... has been discovered a thousand years ago, I think...
If you think that running a game without sound is running perfectly, feel free to tinker around. I prefer to run games perfectly (and that includes sound for me) and most do so with Dosbox.

At least with music and basic adlib sounds will be okay... In fact, during the early days I didn't know about the BLASTER environment variable for a very long time, so I was only playing these games using only music and PC speaker (if possible). But what I can conclude is that audio is still possible in real mode, but only if all requirements are met (which can be hard on modern boards).

So far I can conclude about the requirements for SB-compatible PCI sound cards to work in DOS:
I/O base address for DMA (usually 8000h) - It should always work.
SB I/O base address (usually 0220h) - It should always work.
IRQ 5 - Not really possible since onboard devices, especially network cards and USB controllers. are likely to take it. Also, changing to another free IRQ (Like 3 and 9/2 which are less likely to be taken, but still supported by most games) is nearly impossible on all boards (even on those with DDMA support) using chipsets later than 440BX. (I don't know much about the INTA# assignment that produced the IRQ 5 option, and such assigned IRQ cannot be changed on boards later than 440BX. I have never seen anything real about PC-PCI/SB-Link, which can only be found on 440BX and some other early Slot 1 boards)
DMA (usually 1) - Fully supported by ESS' TDMA technology. Aureal and SBPCI/Live! cards are supported through emulation. It's unknown whether YAMAHA can support technologies other than DDMA or not, but it can still be loaded.
FM and Adlib (usually I/O 0388h) - Always supported if the card has an onboard FM chip, it's just a matter of whether the onboard FM chip is good or not. YAMAHA has genuine OPL3, while ESS' FM chip sounds is fine with few differences. Aureal's FM support is a bit bad.

As for the EMS... I haven't tried for a while It seems that modern boards uses some HMA spaces and can only provide up to 112K UMB without EMS and with B000-B7FF included using EMM386/JEMM386 (QEMM can provide up to 91K UMB with EMS and ST:F function, but that thing is more unstable than other memory managers, but one game, Corridor 7 CD version, relies on it and cannot work with other memory managers)... The EMS itself has incompatibilities, but so far I have never experienced serious problems with EMS under MS-DOS 7.10.

By the way, it seems that many SB-compatible PCI cards are compatible with Windows Sound System (I'm not sure whether it's real or not), but I've never seen any way to make Windows Sound System work in DOS... (And that is probably one of the ways to make DOS things work in Windows 98/ME)

Have you looked into UMBPCI already?

It's been a long time. I've checked the system for something these days...

Have you looked into UMBPCI already?

I'm sorry but I fear this is not gonna suit me, since I may load something incompatible with it, and on a modern board, B000-B7FF seems to be necessary since I need more space (and I have never suffered major problems from it), but it's not supported by UMBPCI.

These days I noticed a strange thing: The PCI Audio card somehow took the IRQ 7, and the network card moved itself from IRQ 5 to IRQ 10. Also, it seems that onboard network card is not actually controlling the IRQ since it's actually a PCI-E device, and the same goes to the display controller which seems to be taking the IRQ 5 along with the USB1.1 controller which's actually using it.

I checked my system using HWInfo/HWInfo32. The BIOS has ISA support through virtual address space, and has a LPC bridge for SMBus Controller and something else. Also, as YMF744 is set up using DMAMODE=3 in the INI, it probably indicates that my nForce motherboard HAS DDMA support but it cannot actually recognize what kind of DDMA it is as it's a driver dates back to 1999. (Actually the driver should fail to load, or completely non-functional if it cannot detect a possible DDMA, but everything except digitized sound works) It may conclude that DDMA ain't phased out, and most modern board keeps the support of it for some reasons, but unfortunately all pure DOS drivers for modern DDMA are no longer developed.

Actually PCI audio drivers for DOS are developed at the Pentium-II era and they seem to be specifically designed for boards with Intel chipsets like 440BX, and these drivers suffer a lot of compatibility issues on some non-Intel chipsets, and even some later ISA-available Pentium-III and AMD K7 boards. It seems to be a reason why the PCI cards may not work or don't work as good as a real ISA card on my previous EP-8KTA3PRO (VIA KT133A) which has 1 ISA slot on it. (As YMF744 don't seem to work on it, with the same problem I'm experiencing now) And actually, ESS audio cards will load themselves to the chipset-independent TDMA if the board doesn't have DDMA, or has a DDMA that it cannot recognize it. (Actually it does support VIA DDMA on my previous EP-8KTA3PRO)

So even though the sound card is capable of running in DOS, they don't really have a driver that can adapt itself with modern hardware. It's still unknown whether it's possible to create a driver (or even a universal PCI audio driver for SBPro/SB16-capable PCI cards) that's capable of handling the modern hardware to make things work once again, but there have been a workaround for YMF7x4 to work on some later SiS and VIA chipsets for Pentium 3/4 or AMD Athlon/Athlon XP processors a long time ago... Also, I'm wondering if they can be modded to add SB16 compatibility along with their SBPro compatibility.

By the way, many SBPro-capable PCI cards state themselves as Windows Sound System compatible. However, the drivers for Windows Sound System is nowhere to find, and it's unknown whether they'll work with WSS-capable PCI cards.

EDIT: I'm correct. YMF744 DOES use D-DMA on this board (It seems to be some universal way). There were words about that nForce chipsets don't have D-DMA support, and now it seems to be completely wrong. It seems that nForce chipsets appeared a bit later than Intel's and VIA's, and even later than the time the last version of the DOS audio drivers were created, so nVidia DDMA are not really supported (and VIA DDMA suffers more problems with drivers than Intel DDMA, and that seems to be why these drivers ship with compatibility information for other chipsets like VIA Apollo and Aladdin). And actually, what made PCI cards tougher to use on boards later than Intel 440BX was that its IRQ assigning method was based on Intel 430/440 boards, and it may or may not suit the need of newer boards especially VIA's, and also, it seems that nForce chipsets manage IRQs in a different way than Intel and VIA's (which made PCI drivers difficult to deal with the SBPro digitized sound), as I have another PC with an Intel G31 chipset board (for Core 2) installed, and the IRQ 5 on that board was free.

LSS10999 wrote:

I'm sorry but I fear this is not gonna suit me, since I may load something incompatible with it

Dude, everything you're doing sounds like it "may" be incompatible.

The newest hardware that I ever ran DOS on directly was a Pentium II. The AGP video was fully workable both with the Matrox G400 card that the system came to me with and the Geforce 4Ti that I put in when I upgraded my "main" PC's video. Sound was never a problem either, as the machine had a couple of ISA slots, one of which held a good old AWE32... The only thing that may have changed since then would be to fact that many video cards no longer have any dedicated to 2D functionality but instead use the 3D core to emulate the older 2D stuff: depending on how well (or poorly) this is done, it could hamper 2D performance (though this would likely be more noticeable in things like 2D CAD work or image editing than in VESA-powered games)

I'm not really sure about newer hardware, though, because once that system died, I started looking at DOSbox and never really looked back. Is there any reason you want to run these games directly? After all firing up a copy of DOSbox from Windows/Linux/OSX/other modern OS seems like it would be faster and easier than rebooting the whole system just to play a game or two.

Dude, everything you're doing sounds like it "may" be incompatible.

I tested UMBPCI, and now I'm certain I have no TSRs incompatible with it. At least, UMBPCI can seem helpful for me to run games that cannot run on v86 mode, notably Tetris Pro (by Michiel Ouwehand), an SVGA game that would refuse to run when EMM386 is present.

Unfortunately I have to stick on MS-DOS. FreeDOS is still experiencing EMS problems (as the area supposed to be used for EMS page frame are somehow consumed by the FreeDOS kernel or something so the EMS functions are limited, and only 36K UMB are really free in FreeDOS while in MS-DOS there should be 112K).

Actually the last motherboard I used to run DOS was EPOX EP-8KTA3PRO (VIA KT133A Chipset) with an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ and 1GB SDRAM. It has a single ISA slot and that's enough for me to plug a Sound Blaster 16. I tried some PCI Cards on it: YMF744 somehow didn't work with it (as digitized sound didn't seem to work with non-Intel boards, probably due to incompatible IRQ, while FM sound works on all boards) while my ESS Solo-1 recognized that board as using VIA DDMA. Even though I switched to a modern nForce board, the DDMA still seems to be present. I'm not certain whether modern AMD (like 790GX) chipsets keep DDMA or not. As DOS PCI audio drivers are designed to mostly support Intel chipsets, it seems very likely to run a PCI card (including SBLive!) properly on modern Intel motherboards (such as 915, 945, Q965, etc.), and that's probably how modern Intel-based motherboards (Socket 478, 775, etc.) with ISA slots are built. Since Intel didn't seem to made their chipsets to work with AMD boards (especially nVidia nForce boards which appered much later than the last versions of DOS drivers were built), it seems to be the reason being impossible to make these PCI cards work, or to make modern AMD-based boards with ISA slot since drivers aren't compatible with non-Intel chipsets. (I remembered using a Socket 754 board, GA-K8VT890, based on VIA K8T890 chipset, and the ESS Solo-1 worked fine, so it can conclude that VIA boards provide a working IRQ function for these PCI audio cards, along with Intel. I remembered SiS chipsets also seem to work with PCI audio cards. Unfortunately, both VIA and SiS somehow ceased developing motherboard chipsets...)

So far I have never experienced a single graphics problem on modern graphics cards... since AFAIK modern video cards are VBE3.0-compatible, I don't ever need to do anything on a modern video card while I may need tools such as Scitech Display Doctor for old cards from S3.

I only use DOSBox to run games that cannot run properly on modern systems, especially those 80s games (which can run too fast, like Apogee's Thor Trilogy, and so on)... Graphics on DOSBox aren't seem to be as real as run on a real-mode DOS (as it seems to be simply a VGA and requires a scaler, either Scale2x/3x or the scaler from MAME, when using fullscreen and may not cover the whole screen)...

If I ever want to use an emulation software I'd consider Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 first... It creates a fully virtual environment while it still accesses a portion of real hardware. I remembered VPC2007 uses the computer's CPU directly and it seems to allocate some memory as the system RAM from the actual RAM or page file, so they aren't and are not needed to be emulated. VPC 2007 emulates AMI BIOS, S3 Trio64 graphics card (Though you have to stick on its default resolution on fullscreen, it suffers no lags and distortions on full screen and works like a real card when on fullscreen) and Sound Blaster 16. The only trouble is that the system hard drives are not accessible and I have to create a image holding all what I needed to run it.

Hey, if you really want to play these games correctly, then you have to use an environement they were made for (either real or emulated).
This includes both the operating system and the hardware from that era .

I tested UMBPCI, and now I'm certain I have no TSRs incompatible with it. At least, UMBPCI can seem helpful for me to run games that cannot run on v86 mode, notably Tetris Pro (by Michiel Ouwehand), an SVGA game that would refuse to run when EMM386 is present.

It's really great.. It even breaks the ISA DMA on some mainboards. 😁

So far I have never experienced a single graphics problem on modern graphics cards... since AFAIK modern video cards are VBE3.0-compatible, I don't ever need to do anything on a modern video card while I may need tools such as Scitech Display Doctor for old cards from S3.

Well, today's graphics hardware has some basic support for VGABIOS or VBE, but it's rarely register compatible to VGA.

Actually the last motherboard I used to run DOS was EPOX EP-8KTA3PRO (VIA KT133A Chipset) with an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ and 1GB SDRAM

That's a bit overdone for DOS games. 😉

Graphics on DOSBox aren't seem to be as real as run on a real-mode DOS (as it seems to be simply a VGA and requires a scaler, either Scale2x/3x or the scaler from MAME, when using fullscreen and may not cover the whole screen)...

Well, back then there were a lot of different computers and graphics standards like CGA, Hercules, EGA, ...
VGA is well supported by DOSBox, in fact you can even select different chipsets that were common back then.
For more accurate VGA simply set 'machine=vgaonly' in the config file.
And the scalers are some bonus. For example, normal2x is also used to avoid blur effects caused by directdraw.
DOSBox also works without scalers and offers more than just graphical things. Did you ever look at its sourcecode ?
A lot of work had to be done to reach this high level of compatibility.

If I ever want to use an emulation software I'd consider Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 first... It creates a fully virtual environment while it still accesses a portion of real hardware. I remembered VPC2007 uses the computer's CPU directly and it seems to allocate some memory as the system RAM from the actual RAM or page file, so they aren't and are not needed to be emulated. VPC 2007 emulates AMI BIOS, S3 Trio64 graphics card (Though you have to stick on its default resolution on fullscreen, it suffers no lags and distortions on full screen and works like a real card when on fullscreen) and Sound Blaster 16. The only trouble is that the system hard drives are not accessible and I have to create a image holding all what I needed to run it.

Yes, VPC has some nice support for DOS and Win 9x, too.
However, it's designed for business and not playing games.
There's no speed control and its SB16 is hardcoded to IRQ 5. Old games rely on IRQ 7.
The FM support works fine only for OPL2, OPL3 ist distorted and then there's no midi interface present.

If I ever want to use an emulation software I'd consider Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 first... It creates a fully virtual environment while it still accesses a portion of real hardware. I remembered VPC2007 uses the computer's CPU directly and it seems to allocate some memory as the system RAM from the actual RAM or page file, so they aren't and are not needed to be emulated.

🤣!
If you want to run games and you consider VPC first, you have no clue.

After a long time testing, I have to conclude here...

As for memory management, I don't know why, but on DOS other than MS-DOS (these days my computer was unable to boot to MS-DOS due to a mysterious "Disk I/O Error"), the system seems to produce less UMB than it should, and in FreeDOS, even the UMB region used by EMS page frames are somehow reserved and unusable, causing problems with EMS. For that reason I dropped FreeDOS and turned to PTS-DOS 32 which is nearly compatible with everything except LFN.

There's indeed something no longer supported by modern boards, but the thing is not DDMA. Actually, DDMA seems to be something vital to functioning the onboard LPC bridge used by some other onboard devices so they can never be dropped, and for a long time the DDMA was kept in its original shape, what is different is just how those motherboard manufacturer made their own DDMA. That seems to be one of the reasons why it's still possible to make motherboards with ISA slots using modern Intel chipsets (and of course, for Intel Core 2 and newer CPUs), but not chipsets from other manufacturers, as PCI audio drivers are made to 100% support Intel motherboards.

Even on my old EP-8KTA3PRO (VIA KT133A Chipset with VT82C686B southbridge), a PCI audio card with DOS compatibility may not function as good as a real ISA Sound Blaster 16 or an ISA ESS Audiodrive, as from the very beginning, the PCI audio drivers are not 100% VIA-compatible.

At least for those games I've ever played, should work fine with either IRQ 5 or IRQ 7. Also, potential crashes can occur on non-Intel modern boards if you try to load TSRs for DOS audio support when these IRQs are already taken by an onboard device... the way how BIOS assigns IRQ is still unknown as after I messed up with the BIOS for several times, the motherboard seems to move away from IRQ5 (I didn't reserve it).

These days, I experienced a problem where mouse drivers would crash the system after loading the YMF744's DOS driver, but the problem has now gone as the IRQ5 is now free. But unfortunately for some reasons, CWSDPMI doesn't seem to like the YMF744 driver and would reboot the system (like when I was going to run FreePascal with the audio driver loaded), while most Adlib-only games work flawlessly with it as it produces genuine OPL3 FM music. And I also tested some other sound cards...

C-Media CMI8738: The driver cannot detect it, leaving a message of "PCI audio not found". It also applies to SoundPro HT8738AM...
Fortemedia FM801-AU: The driver can load, but will crash the system afterwards.
Creative ES1371: The driver would say "Cannot execute SBCONFIG.EXE" (or APCONFIG.EXE if using AudioPCI driver) when trying to load. It has to be loaded using LOADHIGH while it won't really load into UMB. When I use SBPCI drivers, the SBINIT can be loaded into memory, but it won't work, while JEMM386 would report exception when trying to load AudioPCI's APINIT. I'm afraid SBLive! would suffer the same problem as this one...

PCI audio cards with DOS support appear mostly during 1997-1999, AFAIK, at that time there were only boards from Intel, VIA, and probably SiS. AMD(ATi) and nVidia boards came out late (after 2000), and therefore PCI audio drivers are not aware of them since the latest drivers of them were created in 1999.

As for DOSBox,

After looking into DOSBox's configuration file... it seems DOSBox 0.73 has implemented SVGA support (and S3 support)... but I don't know whether there will be a feature to make the fullscreen resolution switch dynamically depending on the application it loaded (like switching to or from 320x200, and so on). Actually, as the screen resolution was fixed in DOSBox full screen and graphics are scaled by scalers to make it fit the screen, graphics distortions can be very obvious. As I can say, I experienced some graphics or sound lags in some games. Also, games like Corridor 7: Alien Invasion, runs very laggy, although sound is fine. By the way, it seems possible to run DOSBox as a real virtual PC (with its own HDD images and operating systems, for example), but I don't know how... but there have been no signs of updates for a new version... Maybe everything we could expect on a real legacy platform can be achieved when DOSBox 1.0 is out... but it seems to be a long, long time before that can happen...

EDIT: One last thing - If you want a modern system and you want to use some legacy PCI audio cards in DOS, stick with Intel CPUs and Intel chipsets (or find a modern Intel board with ISA slots). If you want to use AMD CPUs, either give up this idea, or write a compatible driver yourself just like the time when someone (on a MAME-related site as I can remember) wrote some DOS drivers and patches for VIA and SiS AMD/Intel boards to run them properly...

By the way, it seems possible to run DOSBox as a real virtual PC (with its own HDD images and operating systems, for example), but I don't know how...

You must have really looked into it... And for almost all cases you don't need this anyway.

but there have been no signs of updates for a new version...

Then I'd advise you to look more closely. One hint: SVN...

But you seem to have more fun with your real system anyway...

Yep, it is funny that besides Intel, all other chipset vendors that made chipsets before year 2000 stopped creating new chipsets for Intel/AMD CPUs after the 2006 generation. Desktop "platformization" is now a reality nowadays; nowadays with a specific vendor CPU, you pretty much use a chipset from the same vendor too. NVIDIA is pretty much the only independent vendor left standing, with Apple for example sticking with Core 2 CPUs to be able to use a NVIDIA chipset with better graphics, and without NVIDIA AMD CPU chipsets it would not be possible to use SLI with a AMD CPU.