It’s been raining pcmcia enablers recently. After the 5571 enabler fellow Zikolas has released many more drivers and also modified vsbhda to support many pcmcia cound cards for fx and midi.
Off the top of my head we now have:
- scp-55 point enabler + vsbpcm supporting sb emulation in dos
- All es1688 based cards enables + sb support
- Vew211/212 sb emulation + FM/midi
- TDK mc8k/dmc9k midi support in dos
- Exp game/midi midi support in dos
- Audigy zs notebook cardbus dos enabler + sb/fm/midi support
- There is more and more to come

For details please check http://68pins.com and https://github.com/zikolas

Bondi wrote on 2026-08-30, 18:58:

It’s been raining pcmcia enablers recently. After the 5571 enabler fellow Zikolas has released many more drivers and also modifi […]
Show full quote

It’s been raining pcmcia enablers recently. After the 5571 enabler fellow Zikolas has released many more drivers and also modified vsbhda to support many pcmcia cound cards for fx and midi.
Off the top of my head we now have:
- scp-55 point enabler + vsbpcm supporting sb emulation in dos
- All es1688 based cards enables + sb support
- Vew211/212 sb emulation + FM/midi
- TDK mc8k/dmc9k midi support in dos
- Exp game/midi midi support in dos
- Audigy zs notebook cardbus dos enabler + sb/fm/midi support
- There is more and more to come

For details please check http://68pins.com and https://github.com/zikolas

Wow, this has really come along. Regarding the IBM Stereo CD-ROM support, do you know if it can or does initialise midi? I wonder if using the driver and wiring midi out to the right pin on the gameport would enable midi output?

I really need to dig it out and try it on the LTE Elite or T2130CT

With all this that's been recently developed, is there any possibility that there could be something for WSS capable laptops to have working Soundblaster emulation in DOS? Not all of them have the FM chip so not fully SB compatible but right now it seems the only way I can get the WSS soundblaster emulation to work on say, a T4700CT, is to use Windows 95 which does so but with a fairly big performance hit.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2026-09-07, 03:21:

is there any possibility that there could be something for WSS capable laptops to have working Soundblaster emulation in DOS?

You can use wssxlat.exe for SB emulation.

MAZter wrote on 2026-09-07, 03:35:

Thermalwrong wrote on 2026-09-07, 03:21:

is there any possibility that there could be something for WSS capable laptops to have working Soundblaster emulation in DOS?

You can use wssxlat.exe for SB emulation.

How though, I can never get it to work 😒 Isn't it the case that doesn't work with games that use protected mode i.e. DOS4GW? Even with the EMM386 it comes with I could never get it to do anything.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2026-09-07, 03:21:

Wow, this has really come along. Regarding the IBM Stereo CD-ROM support, do you know if it can or does initialise midi? I wonde […]
Show full quote

Bondi wrote on 2026-08-30, 18:58:

It’s been raining pcmcia enablers recently. After the 5571 enabler fellow Zikolas has released many more drivers and also modifi […]
Show full quote

It’s been raining pcmcia enablers recently. After the 5571 enabler fellow Zikolas has released many more drivers and also modified vsbhda to support many pcmcia cound cards for fx and midi.
Off the top of my head we now have:
- scp-55 point enabler + vsbpcm supporting sb emulation in dos
- All es1688 based cards enables + sb support
- Vew211/212 sb emulation + FM/midi
- TDK mc8k/dmc9k midi support in dos
- Exp game/midi midi support in dos
- Audigy zs notebook cardbus dos enabler + sb/fm/midi support
- There is more and more to come

For details please check http://68pins.com and https://github.com/zikolas

Wow, this has really come along. Regarding the IBM Stereo CD-ROM support, do you know if it can or does initialise midi? I wonder if using the driver and wiring midi out to the right pin on the gameport would enable midi output?

The attachment ibm-1969-110.jpg is no longer available

I really need to dig it out and try it on the LTE Elite or T2130CT

With all this that's been recently developed, is there any possibility that there could be something for WSS capable laptops to have working Soundblaster emulation in DOS? Not all of them have the FM chip so not fully SB compatible but right now it seems the only way I can get the WSS soundblaster emulation to work on say, a T4700CT, is to use Windows 95 which does so but with a fairly big performance hit.

Joystic/MIDI is wired very unusually on IBM CD-ROM. It's currently not supported as per the chart on github. Not sure why exactly, though.

As for WSS codecs, currently only CS4248 is supported by vsbpcmcia. It's tested with the sound card on TP 755C. In theory support for other chips can be added. But the issue is that FM emulation is very heavy for a 486. So realistically only SB digital sound is usable with chips without hardware FM support. The workaround could be redirecting FM to OPL2LPT device. I hope it will be implemented at some point. Some other codecs are supported too, CS4231, for instance, but they have been tested only in conjunction with pcmcia enablers.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2026-09-07, 03:21:

Wow, this has really come along. Regarding the IBM Stereo CD-ROM support, do you know if it can or does initialise midi? I wonde […]
Show full quote

Wow, this has really come along. Regarding the IBM Stereo CD-ROM support, do you know if it can or does initialise midi? I wonder if using the driver and wiring midi out to the right pin on the gameport would enable midi output?

The attachment ibm-1969-110.jpg is no longer available

I really need to dig it out and try it on the LTE Elite or T2130CT

With all this that's been recently developed, is there any possibility that there could be something for WSS capable laptops to have working Soundblaster emulation in DOS? Not all of them have the FM chip so not fully SB compatible but right now it seems the only way I can get the WSS soundblaster emulation to work on say, a T4700CT, is to use Windows 95 which does so but with a fairly big performance hit.

Hi Thermalwrong, thanks for taking an interest in the work being done 😀. The T2130CT is one of my test machines, it’s a great use case for all this, as is the LTE Elite.

My understanding from probing the IBM CD-ROM is the card only decodes five address lines, so the ES1688 never sees the addresses its MPU-401 responds to. You can still enable the MPU and set its base, since that goes through the mixer registers and those are reachable but there's no port left to write the data to. 330h has A4 set, which on this card is the CD drive's task file. Same reason the gameport ended up at an odd address instead of 201h. I would love to get MPU working but it seems it’s not possible 🙁.

I’m quite sure if I had a T4700 on the bench I could get a VSBPCMCIA backend going for it. Like Bondi said the Thinkpad 755 crystal codec is working. The caveat with these WSS Crystal Codecs is they have a fixed sample rate table and a lot of DOS games use sample rates outside of this, so it crackles or speed isn’t quite right. On VSBHDA resampling fixes this but on a 486 our ceiling is very low, I’ve tried some approaches to help but it’s not fantastic. The ES1688 has no issues with this because it is a Sound Blaster compatible and can match sample rates that games use. Some games sound completely fine because they match 11.025kHz and 22.5kHz like Doom and Duke3d.

Another example where VSBPCMCIA isn’t limited to PCMCIA; the Omnibook 600CT has a built in ES1688, but the laptop doesn’t wire in the DMA so no Sound Blaster in DOS, which is crazy but I guess HP had some architectural constraint on that. VSBPCMCIA enables SB compatibility with no problem, it just needs the base port set correctly. You could probably do the same elsewhere with the CS4231.

OPL3 emulation is very heavy on the 486 CPU, it’s not a good experience. Building support for something like the OPL3LPT is a great idea, should be possible.

Thanks again Bondi for all the help so far and posting here about the projects.

For anyone interested; I've opened a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage card, it was easy to do and non-destructive. There's an adhesive copper tape holding the dongle connector to the cover on both sides which comes away easily.

The surprise is it has a Motorola 68000 class CPU inside it and the driver uploads 68k microcode to it on activation.

Yamaha PCC10XG working in pure MS-DOS
https://youtu.be/3q30Uz0cxgI

zikolas wrote on 2026-09-08, 14:34:

For anyone interested; I've opened a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage card, it was easy to do and non-destructive. There's an adhesive copper tape holding the dongle connector to the cover on both sides which comes away easily.

The surprise is it has a Motorola 68000 class CPU inside it and the driver uploads 68k microcode to it on activation.

It has a whole second CPU onboard and yet it still offloads the software midi synthesizer to the PC's poor CPU. I wonder if they had planned to do it onboard but changed their mind sometime during development. This thing chugged in my 486 playing midi.

zikolas wrote on 2026-09-07, 11:16:

Hi Thermalwrong, thanks for taking an interest in the work being done :). The T2130CT is one of my test machines, it’s a great u […]
Show full quote

Thermalwrong wrote on 2026-09-07, 03:21:

Wow, this has really come along. Regarding the IBM Stereo CD-ROM support, do you know if it can or does initialise midi? I wonde […]
Show full quote

Wow, this has really come along. Regarding the IBM Stereo CD-ROM support, do you know if it can or does initialise midi? I wonder if using the driver and wiring midi out to the right pin on the gameport would enable midi output?

The attachment ibm-1969-110.jpg is no longer available

I really need to dig it out and try it on the LTE Elite or T2130CT

With all this that's been recently developed, is there any possibility that there could be something for WSS capable laptops to have working Soundblaster emulation in DOS? Not all of them have the FM chip so not fully SB compatible but right now it seems the only way I can get the WSS soundblaster emulation to work on say, a T4700CT, is to use Windows 95 which does so but with a fairly big performance hit.

Hi Thermalwrong, thanks for taking an interest in the work being done 😀. The T2130CT is one of my test machines, it’s a great use case for all this, as is the LTE Elite.

My understanding from probing the IBM CD-ROM is the card only decodes five address lines, so the ES1688 never sees the addresses its MPU-401 responds to. You can still enable the MPU and set its base, since that goes through the mixer registers and those are reachable but there's no port left to write the data to. 330h has A4 set, which on this card is the CD drive's task file. Same reason the gameport ended up at an odd address instead of 201h. I would love to get MPU working but it seems it’s not possible 🙁.

I’m quite sure if I had a T4700 on the bench I could get a VSBPCMCIA backend going for it. Like Bondi said the Thinkpad 755 crystal codec is working. The caveat with these WSS Crystal Codecs is they have a fixed sample rate table and a lot of DOS games use sample rates outside of this, so it crackles or speed isn’t quite right. On VSBHDA resampling fixes this but on a 486 our ceiling is very low, I’ve tried some approaches to help but it’s not fantastic. The ES1688 has no issues with this because it is a Sound Blaster compatible and can match sample rates that games use. Some games sound completely fine because they match 11.025kHz and 22.5kHz like Doom and Duke3d.

Another example where VSBPCMCIA isn’t limited to PCMCIA; the Omnibook 600CT has a built in ES1688, but the laptop doesn’t wire in the DMA so no Sound Blaster in DOS, which is crazy but I guess HP had some architectural constraint on that. VSBPCMCIA enables SB compatibility with no problem, it just needs the base port set correctly. You could probably do the same elsewhere with the CS4231.

OPL3 emulation is very heavy on the 486 CPU, it’s not a good experience. Building support for something like the OPL3LPT is a great idea, should be possible.

Thanks again Bondi for all the help so far and posting here about the projects.

Awesome, thank you for the clarification! 😀 Good to know that it's not really possible, it's probably because of the limited pin count of the cable, but who knows? Having some real confirmation that MIDI can't work on it saves me attempting that route.

Regarding the Omnibook 600CT, that's a real shame - I have the 800CT and apart from the speaker being terrible the audio works fine in games

The T4700CT - I get that there would be some overhead and its DX2 would struggle badly, it's not particularly fast in the Windows 95 WSS emulation mode. The T4800CT might do better but I haven't got one of those yet.
The T4850CT and T4900CT would be better targets for some VSB for WSS since they're faster and their WSS card has the OPL3 included as well.
What I'd really like to do with these T4000 series laptops is hook up some ISA into the expansion port on the back since I know sound works when I dock the laptop with the DeskStation IV but that is just such a big setup.

Bondi wrote on 2026-07-21, 08:43:

Kahenraz wrote on 2026-07-21, 07:34:

MAZter wrote on 2026-07-21, 00:28:

There is another joystick gameport card mentioned in this thread

I have two of these that I collected off of eBay years ago. They work great.

Can you upload the drivers here? I don’t think I‘ve archived them

Here you go!

See attached for a disk image as well as an archive I found online years ago. It may have the same content as the disk or an different/updated version; I don't have anything installed to open the IMA file at the moment or check.

My cards, cables, and driver disk were purchased loose from eBay years ago.

Imo, this adapter works much better than the New Media Basics card. Which is a shame, because that one doesn't need a cable. I don't remember exactly what the problem was; I think it had some kind of problem in DOS. Or maybe it required CardServices and the JC card does not.

I'm new here so I'm not sure if this is helpful, but I obtained a New Media GAMEjammer PCMCIA for DOS/Win3/Win95, complete with manuals and the joystick + headphone + mic + other 3.5mm jack. I didn't know how rare it was, nor did I have a device to make use of it, so it found a new home.

However I preserved both of the floppies if they are not documented at https://archive.org/details/gamejammer

I regret not scanning the manuals and inserts, or documenting continuity between the dongle and the IO, and do apologize. Hopefully the new owner will document it better than me.