Heaviest part of SBEMU is opl emulation. If the code came from RP2040 Doom/PicoGus then it should be using no more than 10% of CPU time max.

Afaik the code is from dosbox...
anyway i don't see usecase for sbemu on old machines that has isa slots. An old Thin clients without extra connectivity with only built-in AC'97 are different story...
BTW I have a thin client with SB-compatible sound (VSA) but it lacks USB KB/mouse support (no PS2 connectors) and dos usb drivers doesn't work there so it's a brick as dos machine, I managed to install linux there with dosemu...

i really don't get why people are like "i think it'd be really cool if we didn't have neat functionality"

let people use SBEMU on old machines dammit

megatog615 wrote on 2024-05-27, 01:18:

DarthSun wrote on 2024-05-26, 03:09:

megatog615 wrote on 2024-05-24, 21:02:

Okay I tested SBEMU a bit today on my MMX 233 machine with an SBLive PCI installed. /T set to 6 Games configured for SB16 sound […]
Show full quote

Okay I tested SBEMU a bit today on my MMX 233 machine with an SBLive PCI installed.
/T set to 6
Games configured for SB16 sound and music.
Audio output (both sound FX and music) seemed to be coming out only on the left side. Right channel is inaudible. For example, in Descent setup, the center and left test sounds come out of the left side but the right test sound is inaudible. Music seems to work fine, but stuck in the left side. Sound FX are way too fast at the default 22050 rate. Setting it to 11025 returned sound FX to its proper speed.
I was able to play Descent and Quake with little to no performance penalty on the latest release. I still want to try a pentium-mmx compiled version; Descent seemed to struggle a tiny bit in the intro.
Test sounds in the Duke3d setup program always ran at an incorrect speed, no doubt related to the sample rate problem.

EDIT: I just cold booted again and starting SBEMU with the same settings the channel problem has reversed to the right side, and the left side is outputting a crapton of noise, like constant white noise.

These are too slow configurations for SBEMU. Faster machines are recommended if older, then calendar driver. SBEMU is for modern, fast machines. Ryzen is really good, the retro effect is full.

SBEMU works very well now on a MMX 233. The only issues are the sound not playing correctly.

I wouldn't call "sound not playing correctly" as working very well. Since the whole point is to play sounds correctly...

kingcake wrote on 2024-05-27, 23:58:

megatog615 wrote on 2024-05-27, 01:18:

SBEMU works very well now on a MMX 233. The only issues are the sound not playing correctly.

I wouldn't call "sound not playing correctly" as working very well. Since the whole point is to play sounds correctly...

the question is does it play incorrectly because of CPU (game would be crawling during FM playback) or bug/incompatibility

Hello! Have been doing some testing on an IBM Thinkpad T30 (Intel 845MP, AD1881A AC97 codec), and while working well, it seems sound is only routed to the headphone jack.

Have tried setting /O to 1 and 0 with no change (although it crashes hard if I run SBEMU /O0 after it's already booted, seems to take the change OK on initial startup). Is this a known quirk with SBEMU, or should I do more debugging? So far just buggering around with the FreeDOS image from the SBEMU Github (1.0-beta4).

Cheers!

rasz_pl wrote on 2024-05-28, 09:08:

kingcake wrote on 2024-05-27, 23:58:

megatog615 wrote on 2024-05-27, 01:18:

SBEMU works very well now on a MMX 233. The only issues are the sound not playing correctly.

I wouldn't call "sound not playing correctly" as working very well. Since the whole point is to play sounds correctly...

the question is does it play incorrectly because of CPU (game would be crawling during FM playback) or bug/incompatibility

The games play at a decent framerate, like I would expect with a soundcard. I think there's just something broken with SBLIVE.

Or my soundcard is broken, I'll have to check in Windows.

You can check your soundcard from DOS via MPXplay, the SB EMU10kx drivers used in Mpxplay should be the same as in SBEMU. I use SB Audigy, that is very similar to SB Live and it plays correctly.

Hello. I am using SBEMU on a computer with a Biostar M6VCF motherboard. During startup, SBEMU displays that it uses the VIA VT82XX AC97 audio chip. The problem is that digital audio is always played twice as fast as it should be. Are there any SBEMU settings that will solve this problem?

Maryoo wrote on 2024-05-30, 17:28:

Hello. I am using SBEMU on a computer with a Biostar M6VCF motherboard. During startup, SBEMU displays that it uses the VIA VT82XX AC97 audio chip. The problem is that digital audio is always played twice as fast as it should be. Are there any SBEMU settings that will solve this problem?

well then, i guess i'm not the only one.

Maryoo wrote on 2024-05-30, 17:28:

Hello. I am using SBEMU on a computer with a Biostar M6VCF motherboard. During startup, SBEMU displays that it uses the VIA VT82XX AC97 audio chip. The problem is that digital audio is always played twice as fast as it should be. Are there any SBEMU settings that will solve this problem?

Have you tried setting it to SB-Pro and SB-16 in games to see if there's a difference? It could be similar to where I got mixed up with setting SBEMU to SB16 mode and games to SB-Pro mode or vice versa:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2023-03-14, 01:18:

... Yamaha's AC97 audio. ... though so far I've noticed that Descent's setup with sb-pro mode seems to give double speed audio? […]
Show full quote

... Yamaha's AC97 audio. ... though so far I've noticed that Descent's setup with sb-pro mode seems to give double speed audio? It works with SB-16 mode though on the standard IRQ 7 & DMA1.
Just noticed another oddity with Duke Nukem 2, after about a minute of play on here, the PCM audio stopped working and now there's only OPL3 emulation and adlib sounds.
The OPL3 emulation is great too 😀

edit: haha this is so odd, I have it set up to start with sbem in sb-pro mode now again, but with in sb-pro mode, the descent setup test sounds play at normal speed with sb-16 (i7 d1) selected. If I set it to sb-pro (i7 d1) with the sbemu in sb-pro mode then it goes right back to double speed.

edit 2: just observed latency for myself, it's particularly obvious in the menus of doom but far less apparent in actual gameplay

Yes, I tried SB-Pro and SB-16 with no difference.

Testing SBemu 10b4 and 11a1 (results are same)
using AXS synthesizer/sequencer v.2.03.
Reports the following:

AXS Realtime Software Synthesizer v2.03+ Free Version (C) 1998-2000 Resolution

ю Loading configuration file 'AXS.INI'... OK
ю Loading preset bank 'AXS.BNK'... OK
ю Initialising MIDI device: SB MPU... ERROR

-> SB DSP reset failed ! (No SB16 found at specified baseport)
ю Initialising WAVE device: SoundBlaster... ERROR

-> SB DSP reset failed ! (No SB16 found at specified baseport)

Testing SBemu 10b4 using FastDoom:
FastDoom version 0.9.9d
........................
Error initializing Music device: -1
If I am set music off then
SoundBlaster setup error
If I am FX off too then works well without sound

I know based on the below quote that Aladdin can work using SBEMU.

vico wrote on 2023-04-15, 17:02:

I found out why the music wasn't working, the Jemm386 I was using was a different version than JLoad.
I have updated my jeem386 and am now playing the games that use EMS properly.
Sorry for the false alarm and once again thanks for your great work.

When trying to run it myself (775i65G, 2 Gb RAM, YMF724), I'm running into a constant headache.

My config.sys:
DEVICEHIGH=C:\SBEMU\JEMMEX.EXE MAXEXT=32768

Autoexec.bat:
C:\SBEMU\JLOAD.EXE C:\SBEMU\QPIEMU.DLL
C:\SBEMU\HDPMI32i.EXE -r -x

I boot DOS and type:
C:\SBEMU\SBEMU.EXE /A220 /I5 /D1 /T4

and get:

Typing "mem" gives me:

In setsnd, I enter SBPro, A220, I5, D1. And then on running Aladdin, it hangs on the waiting screen, giving the following error after a few seconds:

Following the exact same procedure with a different release (version?) of DOS aladdin gives a similar error:

In the exact same environment (i.e. after booting to DOS and running SBEMU), skyroads works perfectly with sound. But if I try to run Prince, again it hangs just at the loading screen (tried Prince 1.0 and 1.4 with the same result). Can anyone please help? What do I have to do to get Aladdin running normally with music and sound and all?

xtreger wrote on 2024-06-10, 17:19:

My config.sys:
DEVICEHIGH=C:\SBEMU\JEMMEX.EXE MAXEXT=32768

Aladdin is picky abou XMS, it should be a bit less than 32 MB - try MAXEXT=31744

However, the problem is most likely due to a page frame that uses non-free address space. You can try to force Jemm to use E000 or D800 as page frame ( i.e. option FRAME=E000 ). Jemm has found writeable memory there, and therefore excluded it as page frame candidate, but you'll loose nothing to try it nevertheless.

Finally, worth a try is to disable USB in setup...

Baron von Riedesel wrote on 2024-06-12, 11:49:

Aladdin is picky abou XMS, it should be a bit less than 32 MB - try MAXEXT=31744 […]
Show full quote

xtreger wrote on 2024-06-10, 17:19:

My config.sys:
DEVICEHIGH=C:\SBEMU\JEMMEX.EXE MAXEXT=32768

Aladdin is picky abou XMS, it should be a bit less than 32 MB - try MAXEXT=31744

However, the problem is most likely due to a page frame that uses non-free address space. You can try to force Jemm to use E000 or D800 as page frame ( i.e. option FRAME=E000 ). Jemm has found writeable memory there, and therefore excluded it as page frame candidate, but you'll loose nothing to try it nevertheless.

Finally, worth a try is to disable USB in setup...

Oh! I didn't realize you'd responded here. I raised this as an issue in your VSBHDA github repo. Let me try out the different MAXEXT value, as well as the FRAME=E000 option. I will let you know about the status after both these steps

Baron von Riedesel wrote on 2024-06-12, 11:49:

Aladdin is picky abou XMS, it should be a bit less than 32 MB - try MAXEXT=31744 […]
Show full quote

xtreger wrote on 2024-06-10, 17:19:

My config.sys:
DEVICEHIGH=C:\SBEMU\JEMMEX.EXE MAXEXT=32768

Aladdin is picky abou XMS, it should be a bit less than 32 MB - try MAXEXT=31744

However, the problem is most likely due to a page frame that uses non-free address space. You can try to force Jemm to use E000 or D800 as page frame ( i.e. option FRAME=E000 ). Jemm has found writeable memory there, and therefore excluded it as page frame candidate, but you'll loose nothing to try it nevertheless.

Finally, worth a try is to disable USB in setup...

I got it to work! Even though SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 T6 (i.e. seems like IRQ is 5), for Aladdin sound settings, the IRQ HAS to be 7.

Reports list updated.
crazii can you please make SBEMU print verbose AC97 codec info enabled by default.

Is it known that SBEMU currently breaks win 3.1x compatibility?