DoutorHouse wrote on 2026-02-01, 16:33:

k-Tracker wrote on 2026-01-30, 01:50:

I got my VIA config running with VSBHDA, we had a whole thread on Github, finally it works fine.

Would you mind sharing your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS with the settings that worked? Thanks!

Sure, long conversation thread is here.
https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA/issues/60
It started with FT2 not working properly, but there things that have to be finished in basic code for it to start playing reliably. You may want to grab the latest binaries from there.

k-Tracker wrote on 2026-02-02, 17:10:

Sure, long conversation thread is here. https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA/issues/60 It started with FT2 not working […]
Show full quote

DoutorHouse wrote on 2026-02-01, 16:33:

k-Tracker wrote on 2026-01-30, 01:50:

I got my VIA config running with VSBHDA, we had a whole thread on Github, finally it works fine.

Would you mind sharing your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS with the settings that worked? Thanks!

Sure, long conversation thread is here.
https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA/issues/60
It started with FT2 not working properly, but there things that have to be finished in basic code for it to start playing reliably. You may want to grab the latest binaries from there.

Thank you so much! I'll give it a try! For the time being, VSBHDA17 seems to work fine with my SIS7012 chipset, while VSBHDA18 doesn't produce any sound at all. VSBHDASF also works fine with SIS7012 and I had no need to change any IRQs inside the BIOS. I'm hoping to get better results with the next version of VSBHDA on this particular board. 😀

Just tested on 1 recovered-trashed Dell Wyse 5010 (Dx0D) thin client with VSBHDA and sound works - Doom SFX/FM synth.
Audio device was detected as ATI SB600.

Hi, tested with an ONKYO DX DX1007A5 and working great. I tried Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Cisco heat and all three working with no issues.

It detected it as Intel HDA (it seems it has a Realtek ALC262).

SB-Emu and VSBHDA is the gift that keeps on giving. This program is the most ground-breaking one of the last 25 years as far as I'm concerned. Let us keep it alive and never forget our gratefulness to crazii for coding it. Already, the three year-anniversary is at hand.

nach wrote on 2026-03-04, 06:37:

Hi, tested with an ONKYO DX DX1007A5 and working great. I tried Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Cisco heat and all three working with no issues.

It detected it as Intel HDA (it seems it has a Realtek ALC262).

This article says it's a dual-screen netbook, a variant of the Kohjinsha DZ with dual 10.1" 1366x768 screens, neat. Has a "1.6GHZ AMD Athlon Neo MV040 processor, plus an ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics card" so it's a M780G with likely the SB700.

Report: HP T610 (AMD A55E) fully works with SBEMU
config.sys

1device=himemx.exe /MAX=65536
2device=jemm386.exe
3DOS=HIGH,UMB

start.bat (in SBEMU directory)

1c:\jload -q c:\qpiemu.dll
2lh hdpmi32i
3set blaster=A220 I5 D1 H5 T6 P330
4sbemu.exe/vol9

Game tested:
Prince of Persia 1.3/1.4
Doom
The Incredible Machine
Dune 2
Silpheed
The Legend of Sword and Fairy

VSBHDA not fully working, digital voice/MIDI soundfont ok, but:
FM emulation not work until I uninst and reload VSBHDA
Issue opened: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA/issues/70

My start.bat in VSBHDA

1jload -q qpiemu.dll
2jload -q jhdpmi.dll
3lh hdpmi32i -x2
4set blaster=A220 I5 D1 H5 T6 P330
5vsbhda.exe /O2 /VOL9 /sf:gm.sf2

If this thread is handling VSBHDA things as well, I'd like to report something I noticed with the latest stable version of VSBHDA. (its a good thing, ironically.)


If you load the 32bit dos extender, and 32bit version of VSBHDA, then *IMMEDIATELY* unload them, load the 16 bit versions, then unload them again, then finally load the 32bit versions one last time, then games that "only work" with the 16 bit version suddenly work with the 32bit version.

I'll make a youtube video demonstrating this here in a bit, with Wolf3d.

After looking into this more, I find that I still need the 16 bit version for persnicketty games like Tyrian. (which also needs a slowdown utility on startup for the first few seconds. Slowdos works fine for this)

I dont know why I thought Wolf3d was having problems with the 32bit version, since it seems to work fine out of the gate for me now, where I could have SWORN it only worked with the 16bit one loaded previously. Maybe I am just more senile than I thought.

I will monitor this more closely.

pengan wrote on 2026-03-12, 20:19:

VSBHDA not fully working, digital voice/MIDI soundfont ok, but:
FM emulation not work in Prince of Persia / Dune2/The Legend of Sword and Fairy,
System halt in The Incredible Machine/Silpheed

If you want VSBHDA to get better, the best location to give feedback for VSBHDA is likely the GitHub issue tracker. Baron von Riedesel seems to be quite responsive over there: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA/issues .

Hi all...

Many thanks for SBEMU, I think it's a very interesting and useful project.

I'm trying to get my Compaq Armada E500 laptop to work with SBEMU.

The laptop has an ESS Maestro (snd_maestro - ESS Technology - ES1978 Maestro-2E Audiodrive).

When I boot it with the DRDOS image provided with SBEMU, I can see:

But games run with no sound (although WOLF3D autoselects Soundblaster for both music and gfx, but I get no sound).

When I boot with a USB flashdrive with MSDOS 6.22 I get this instead:

It's the same SBEMU version (the last stable release 1.0.0-beta5). The config is:

1DEVICE=C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE
2DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
3DOS=HIGH,UMB
4FILES=30
5BUFFERS=30
6
7DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\SBEMU\JEMMEX.EXE

1SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330
2
3LH C:\DRIVERS\MOUSE\BIN\CTMOUSE.EXE
4LH C:\DRIVERS\SBEMU\JLOAD C:\DRIVERS\SBEMU\QPIEMU.DLL
5LH C:\DRIVERS\SBEMU\HDPMI32I -r -x
6LH C:\DRIVERS\SBEMU\SBEMU.EXE

(I've tested some combinations of DEVICEHIGH, without DOS=HIGH,UMB, etc etc)
So, 2 questions...

1.- Why SBEMU's DRDOS disk detects the sound card ok, but sound is not working?

2.- Why MSDOS 6.22 with the same sbemu software is not detecting any card?

Thanks.

From my own experience most of the time it's good to check different sound output or connect headphones.

I just noticed that the files copied in the msdos usb stick were beta3... (facepalm)

I updated them to beta5 and tested both usb sticks (freedos and msdos 6.22) in an old Desktop computer with Intel HDA and got sound in Wolf3d, Duke nukem, Lotus 3, Dynablaster, Prince of Persia 1.3...

In the Compaq Armada E500, I get the ESS Maestro detected (as in the screenshot), and Wolf3d starts detecting the Soundblaster (appears pre-selected in the Options) but I get no sound in both the Speakers and the Headphones exit (both work in Windows 98).

Also, some games crash in the Armada when launching them with sound while they work in the Intel HDA computer.

Ok, I conducted a better test with both MSDOS 6.22 and FreeDOS with the same exact results.

Both work perfectly in an Intel HDA audio computer.

When I test both in my Compaq Armada E500 with ESS Maestro I get the following information on boot:

Wolfenstein 3D detects the sound card exactly like in my Intel HDA desktop computer, but I get no sound (neither speakers nor headphones).

Duke Nukem's setup.exe detects the card in the same parameters than the ones that appear during boot (and reported by sbemu.exe if I run it):

The sound test gives no error, but again I cannot hear anything.

The SFX test says:

Any idea?

Thanks!

I found I'm not the only one with issues in this laptop...

https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU/issues/165

Good luck reporting issues with sbemu, the developer has been gone for years and no one is maintaining the code. Your best bet is to try VSBHDA but I doubt it will be compatible with your card.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2026-03-22, 12:05:

Good luck reporting issues with sbemu, the developer has been gone for years and no one is maintaining the code. Your best bet is to try VSBHDA but I doubt it will be compatible with your card.

Thanks for your response.

So... SBEMU has been abandoned? 🙁

I just tested VSBHDA for a couple of "modern" computers not working with SBEMU and found something interesting.

With one of them, with an Intel HDA, VSBHDA 1.8 worked perfectly (where SBEMU didn't). All games I tested have sound and music.

For the other one, a Fujitsu Futro s720 (small, fanless and would be perfect for DOS), with a Realtek ALC671, VSBHDA 1.8 makes SFX work but Music doesn't work (tested in DUKE NUKEM's sound test).

It's strange because I don't get any kind of error but no music can he heard in Wolf3D, Duke Nukem 3D, etc. But the SFX work.

I will try asking VSBHDA's developer, thanks.

compiler wrote on 2026-03-22, 13:06:

So... SBEMU has been abandoned? 🙁

Well last release is almost 3 years old now, the github is full of unaddressed issues...

Your best bet is with VSBHDA, the developer is far more active.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2026-03-22, 14:34:

compiler wrote on 2026-03-22, 13:06:

So... SBEMU has been abandoned? 🙁

Well last release is almost 3 years old now, the github is full of unaddressed issues...

Your best bet is with VSBHDA, the developer is far more active.

Thanks for the advice.

The developer is so active that he replied me in a few hours and now I have sound in 2 computers where SBEMU didn't work (not in the Armada 500 but in other 2 systems). 😀

Hi. Sorry for not posting in this thread for a while.

I'm one of the "official" maintainers of SBEMU on GitHub, although crazii is the creator and was the primary maintainer. But indeed he seems to have taken a leave of absence from the project. He's done so before, only to return after awhile, but this time he's been gone from the project for a lot longer.

I've been wanting to look into picking up further development of SBEMU. But I haven't gotten around to making time for that.

I've been mostly involved with CI/CD automation and some testing of SBEMU, and not as much with the code base of the project itself.

One challenge w.r.t. further maintaining SBEMU is the fact that it relies on an (apparently unmaintained) forked version of HDPMI, as opposed to the upstream version of HDPMI created (and continuously maintained) by Baron-von-Riedesel, the same guy who created and maintains VSBHDA.

If I understand the interactions between crazii and Baron-von-Riedesel correctly, this HDPMI fork happened due to a certain technical disagreement between the two. VSBHDA may have been created in part due to that same difference in philosophies and technical approaches. (Someone here please correct me if I'm wrong about that, though!)

Although SBEMU precedes VSBHDA (it started about a month and a half earlier, if the Git commits are anything to go by), the former indeed appears unmaintained, whereas VSBHDA is seeing continued maintenance and development on both the tool itself and on its dependencies (unforked HDPMI, Jemm and QPIEMU.DLL).

SBEMU remains, at least to my knowledge, the first DOS Sound Blaster emulator that solved the protected mode compatibility problem, and for that, we owe crazii an enormous debt of gratitude. (Again, if someone here can point out an older such project that worked with both real mode and protected mode games, feel free to correct me. But I had been looking long and hard for one before cazii shared SBEMU with the world.)

One advantage that SBEMU has is that supports a wider range of target sound devices, whereas VSBHDA sticks to the most popular ones. But it recently also got MIDI emulation (thanks to Cacodemon345 here on VOGONS who initally forked VSBHDA to VSBHDASF and had it merged back upstream).

But I think we can indeed more and more conclude that SBEMU, as much of a pioneer it was, has become unmaintained and VSBHDA seems to be the way forward. In my experience, Baron-von-Riedesel is quite responsive here and on GitHub and is very active w.r.t. working on the various cool projects he maintains.

I'm not ready to mark the SBEMU project as abandoned yet though, since crazii might pop up again to resume work on it. As I said, this is not the first time he's been absent for a longer period of time, only to come back on the radar a while later. I wish him the best, regardless! (I'm assuming he's a "he", based on his GitHub avatar.)

AFAIK crazii took major part of sound drivers (and maybe some aux code) from mpxplay (that was ported from linux) as is while Japheth wanted to clean it up.
The firts approach would make it more easy to upgrade sound drivers from mpxplay so also sbemu probably still supports wider sound HW. But vsbhda still improved many RM/PM compatability issures, added midi emu so it's more mature project.

I didn't look what exact difference was between crazii and japhet's version of HDPMI and why it was not possible to use one common version. If someone knows, please explain. Japhet, as maintainer of HDPMI still improves it and fixes bugs so I reccomend to use his current version.