TgamesFR wrote on 2026-03-18, 09:14:

- 1:1 authentic Yamaha OPL3 (very very very close to it) (it's so close that most won't notice any difference, huge step from th […]
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- 1:1 authentic Yamaha OPL3 (very very very close to it) (it's so close that most won't notice any difference, huge step from the one from Ensoniq).
- General Midi / Sound canvas support for all .SF2 (no longuer need .ECW bad soundfonts), we can now load any .SF2 file including big ones (require at minimum a Pentium III 1Ghz - Pentium IV for that).
- No longuer need any Creative/Ensoniq drivers or program
- Support volume levels adjustement for the Audigy 1/2/ZS cards !
- SPDIF Digital output support under DOS ! Yes now we hear sound from the SPDIF =)
- Reverse Stereo fixed for Sound Blaster Pro (was a flaws in the Creative driver)
- No longuer need EMS to be loaded ! (huge step too)

I've compared to a real Sound Blaster 16 we are really close now. Minus the ISA support ofc but it sounds great !

So since VDMSound for Windows 98 full support of MPU401 and VSBHDA for pure MS-DOS the Audigy 2 ZS show fully shows his capabilities for DOS.
It's strange nobody ever did a tutorial or a video about that, because it's really a huge step forward for DOS support on this card.

Is this some modified driver that you are working on? The EMS thing is very interesting and might allow it to work on my AM3+ board with 4GB+ ram, I wasn't able to get it to initialize the driver but I have no idea how to set up memory managers so it's probably something I'm doing wrong. Works flawlessly under 98SE otherwise.

EDIT: Nevermind, I missed the part where you mention VSBHDA and yeah, its working great for me now, not sure why but even with Jemmex the Creative DOS driver never worked, but this does and like you said, soundfonts and volume levels all work.

Six years later, this thread still delivers.... A++++

Hi Joseph, first of all thanks a lot for the great guide! Is there an option of downmixing a 5.1 audio stream to stereo (e.g. for a movie I'm playing) with Audigy 2 ZS in Windows 98? I've noticed that with such a movie, the volume will kind of increase / decrease and show significant variation. I'm not very knowledgeable in multimedia, but I guess this may be due to 5.1 audio being played out of regular stereo speakers? The significant volume variation could be an artifact of that. If so, I'd love to know a method so that the movie audio can be downmixed in realtime during playback. I'm not able to find such an option in the creative settings (in fact I'm not sure if this downmixing is supposed to be enabled in creative settings or ffdshow audio decoder settings).

Would appreciate any help!

PCGamingTimeMachine wrote on 2026-05-23, 20:42:

Hi Joseph, first of all thanks a lot for the great guide! Is there an option of downmixing a 5.1 audio stream to stereo (e.g. for a movie I'm playing) with Audigy 2 ZS in Windows 98? I've noticed that with such a movie, the volume will kind of increase / decrease and show significant variation. I'm not very knowledgeable in multimedia, but I guess this may be due to 5.1 audio being played out of regular stereo speakers? The significant volume variation could be an artifact of that. If so, I'd love to know a method so that the movie audio can be downmixed in realtime during playback. I'm not able to find such an option in the creative settings (in fact I'm not sure if this downmixing is supposed to be enabled in creative settings or ffdshow audio decoder settings).

Would appreciate any help!

Try the following: make sure that your speaker configuration both in Windows Control Panel and in the Creative Speaker Settings is set to Stereo (or 2.1). After that, go to the EAX Console, enable CMSS-3D and then select CMSS2, which is intended for DVD playback. Not sure if/how much that will help, but it's the only thing that comes to mind. I don't use my retro rigs for multimedia purposes, so I have no personal experience with that.

PCGamingTimeMachine wrote on 2026-05-23, 20:42:

Hi Joseph, first of all thanks a lot for the great guide! Is there an option of downmixing a 5.1 audio stream to stereo (e.g. for a movie I'm playing) with Audigy 2 ZS in Windows 98? I've noticed that with such a movie, the volume will kind of increase / decrease and show significant variation. I'm not very knowledgeable in multimedia, but I guess this may be due to 5.1 audio being played out of regular stereo speakers? The significant volume variation could be an artifact of that. If so, I'd love to know a method so that the movie audio can be downmixed in realtime during playback. I'm not able to find such an option in the creative settings (in fact I'm not sure if this downmixing is supposed to be enabled in creative settings or ffdshow audio decoder settings).

Would appreciate any help!

PowerDVD or WinDVD should be able to down-mix the audio stream.

AaronS wrote on 2026-04-08, 16:02:

Is this some modified driver that you are working on? The EMS thing is very interesting and might allow it to work on my AM3+ board with 4GB+ ram, I wasn't able to get it to initialize the driver but I have no idea how to set up memory managers so it's probably something I'm doing wrong. Works flawlessly under 98SE otherwise.

EDIT: Nevermind, I missed the part where you mention VSBHDA and yeah, its working great for me now, not sure why but even with Jemmex the Creative DOS driver never worked, but this does and like you said, soundfonts and volume levels all work.

No, it's just a recent open source project and yes it completely replace official Creative DOS driver making them now pretty much useless.

There is still there and there some games who have some issues but for the most part it's night and day. And having soundfonts (.SF2), Coax S/PDIF and volume levels under DOS is a huge step up.
Let's hope one day someone will find a way to also enable gameport.

TgamesFR wrote on Today, 10:52:

No, it's just a recent open source project and yes it completely replace official Creative DOS driver making them now pretty much useless.

There is still there and there some games who have some issues but for the most part it's night and day. And having soundfonts (.SF2), Coax S/PDIF and volume levels under DOS is a huge step up.
Let's hope one day someone will find a way to also enable gameport.

Yeah I've been using it since making that post 🤣 I hadn't heard of it (I heard of SBEMU but didn't know of VSBHDA), it works well and I've played a number of games under DOS with it. There's also a fork that lets you use redbook audio, also working with a lot of games, only a small handful have issues.

The only problem I have had with VSBHDA (probably same with SBEMU, I haven't tested it since) is that I bought one of those S/PDIF brackets from ebay to use for optical audio into my retrotink upscaler, and occasionally there will be hissing in either the left or right channel and its totally random, most of the time its fine, and its always fine under Windows so definitely a VSBHDA issue. I made a post on the github about it.