Hi!
I'm playing Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition, and it works perfectly... But I previously had some problems with Spear of Destiny, and also with Wolfenstein 3D on Windows 98SE. Neither of those games (Spear and Wolfenstein 3D) have sound, and they only work with the motherboard speakers.

Sound Blaster should work for the sound effects only, I will have to test and find out why it isn't, could be a resampling problem if it asks for 8khz or lower sample rate though I thought the Kernel Mixer would resample that up to 48 khz.

Adlib music is unfortunately not supported by the WDM Sound Blaster emulator at all, only General Midi.

I might have to write another Windows driver to trap the Adlib ports and pass it directly to Nuked OPL3. There is that one alpha version of VDMSOUND but it hasn't been maintained or updated for 24 years so maybe it's time for someone else to have a go.

You can also try the game in DOSBox which does its own Adlib and Sound Blaster emulation and should work better, but I know that kind of ruins the nostalgia factor. You can also try in pure DOS with VSBHDA but that requires setting up a boot menu since it needs a different memory manager that won't work with Windows. Finally, you could also try a source port or this version that supports General MIDI for the music.

onethirdxcubed wrote on 2026-03-07, 01:18:

Sound Blaster should work for the sound effects only, I will have to test and find out why it isn't, could be a resampling probl […]
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Sound Blaster should work for the sound effects only, I will have to test and find out why it isn't, could be a resampling problem if it asks for 8khz or lower sample rate though I thought the Kernel Mixer would resample that up to 48 khz.

Adlib music is unfortunately not supported by the WDM Sound Blaster emulator at all, only General Midi.

I might have to write another Windows driver to trap the Adlib ports and pass it directly to Nuked OPL3. There is that one alpha version of VDMSOUND but it hasn't been maintained or updated for 24 years so maybe it's time for someone else to have a go.

You can also try the game in DOSBox which does its own Adlib and Sound Blaster emulation and should work better, but I know that kind of ruins the nostalgia factor. You can also try in pure DOS with VSBHDA but that requires setting up a boot menu since it needs a different memory manager that won't work with Windows. Finally, you could also try a source port or this version that supports General MIDI for the music.

Hi everyone!
I've been searching the darkest corners of the web and found a version of Wolfenstein 3D and Spear of Destiny that changes its configuration to add MIDI support, replacing AdLib, and it works pretty well, hehe.
The game is renamed WolfMidi.

Fixed the crash on Intel mobile chipsets. it was failing on the Intel Display Audio codec and then double-freeing a pointer.

https://github.com/andrew-hoffman/WDMHDA/rele … tag/Alpha-018-1

Any chance to see some soundmax/c-media support in future? Such laptops as asus Lamborghini vx1 would be greatfull))

@onethirdxcubed Your driver made it to the front page of Hacker News today. Congrats! 🙂

That increased exposure should result in some newly raised GitHub issues, and hopefully some more Pull Requests as well.

Of course they only want to talk about AI. I don't know what I expected.

onethirdxcubed wrote on 2026-03-31, 01:07:

Of course they only want to talk about AI. I don't know what I expected.

Yuck, this is doing the whole project dirty 🤢

onethirdxcubed wrote on 2026-02-22, 17:24:

Still doesn't seem to work any better on AMD chipsets. I think I need to do the WBINVD every interrupt, which will hurt performance but it can't be helped.

The Asrock AM1B-ITX now works. This is incredible 😁

Looking for some advice pls...

I have a dual boot XP/98 SE ( with or without SP3) Dell D620 (VEN_8086&DEV_27D8). Sound all working for XP.

Installed the latest WDMHDA for Win 98SE. It all looks good, driver loaded in DevMgr, Multimedia applet, DXDIAG, etc. But no sound output.
Tried the .12 version, same result.

Should it work in this system?

You didn't say what audio codec it has but Dell often used Sigmatel and IDT codecs, and those don't work with this driver yet. Needs more development work & time that I don't have right now.

@onethirdxcubed, thanks for replying to me so quickly.

From DXDIAG on XP, the audio codec is VEN_8384&DEV_7690; a Sigmatel 9200 HD Audio Codec. I mistakenly thought the ICH7 chipset included an audio codec, but can see it only provides a controller to interface with an external codec device.

I commend you on your driver development work!

Not that I really understand it, but I believe the hda is loosely 2 parts.
One is a mostly serial bus and "layer2" protocol not too dissimilar to pcie, usb, or Ethernet.
The other is some kind of "addin card" much like any isa/agp/pci card.

It's specific for audio and it's not exactly clear why, perhaps it was an early test iteration for pcie,or a more natural evolution of ac97 that no one has seen the need to replace yet.

I think it technically could be used for other things if you really really tried.

The HD Audio architecture is meant to be used with a separate controller and codec driver, with the controller driver creating a bus that multiple codecs can attach to. The bus can also support software modems and GPIO. This also solves the problem with AC97 where the system can't read the hardware IDs from the codec with no driver loaded so many different manufacturer drivers will install to the same controller ID but won't work.

My current driver is monolithic and handles the controller & codec all in one driver; it's possible that the Windows 2000 bus driver could be backported but even R. Loew tried and couldn't make it work. Also it's very complicated to write a bus driver in WDM and if it didn't support the manufacturer codec driver interface there would be no point. Someone (else) could try to backport the open source HDA bus driver which just got added to ReactOS: https://github.com/coolstar/sklhdaudbus

Right now I'm trying to get my driver to function on Windows 2000 or XP so I can use Driver Verifier, but it's crashing immediately upon loading, I think because I'm trying to use an API that's not available at StartDevice time and I need to delay reading config info from the Registry until later or do it differently.

What is the start type of the driver in xp?

Iirc in regedit
0 =boot (pre gui kernel)
1= gui
2=auto
3=manual /on demand
4=disabled

Id try manual, and literally start it manually

Cmd: Sc start servicename

PD11BI-J1900-12V with ALC662 works perfectly. For some reason it doesn't like Dos applications, so I can not test them.

I assume you're using one of the VESA video drivers (either JHRobotics' VmDisp9x/SoftGPU or BearWindows VBE9x) and running DOS programs may be only supported in a window, only supported in fullscreen, or not supported at all depending on the driver and video hardware.