Sure. Buy Creative Labs then open their source. 😀

THAT would be ironic, considering that Creative's modus operandi is to buy out companies who have developed technology that they're interested in marketing.

Damn, knew it would be hopeless! How were the other SB models emulated then? Didn't think any of the older cards would be open either.

I could try to hack the old sound support into the new executable, except I don't know a single thing about hacking in that sort of regard.

The older cards were reverse engineered and well documented because developers had to interface directly with them because there wasn't any fancy Windows driver type stuff sitting between the hardware and the developer. SB Live is a Windows-centric card - I've never actually heard of anything DOS-based that takes any kind of special advantage of it.

Well, perfectly working open source drivers for SBLive are alive and well in Linux. I had it working in Suse in 2004 at least.
With those it should definitely be possible to make a virtual device that behaves exactly like an SBLive without Creative's help.

Someone has to have a really good reason to do this however....

Interfacing to a device and emulating a device are more complimentary than analogous.

there is no change that we will emulate a sblive in future.

Besides, what sense would it make to emulate a PCI card in a DOS environment? I doubt there are any DOS games that take advantage of the Live!'s features (if there are any at all in comparison to a SB16, from a gaming point of view). I doubt Tyrian sounds any better with a Live! than it does with a standard SB16. And please don't give me any audiophile bs, both are consumer cards and probably not for the audiophile anyway (; .

It could be using some cool hardware DSP effects, but I doubt it.

One thing I've discovered is that (after installing the patch) under DOSBox the Setup program will fail to detect the sound card for sound effect

Wonder if the patch does the same thing in real DOS as well. Seems odd to create a patch to fix an issue with Live! cards but disable support for other cards....

Unless the programmers were lazy...

They probably assumed that those who installed the patch were most likely an SB Live! user and therefore didn't need to worry about any other cards. =P

I remember needing it to get sound back when I played Tyrian 2000 on my old Win95 (then 98) setup several years ago. What with me having a Live! card and all. Indeed I still use a Live! 24-bit in my current machine to this day, though I imagine at some point I'll need to upgrade to an X-Fi.

Is there any other way of swapping the sound functions between the unpatched and patched versions so that I don't even need to worry about all this "Live! support" malarky? Anyone here particularly good at hacking?

README.TXT from the Live! Patch

TYRIAN 2000 [TM] […]
Show full quote

TYRIAN 2000 [TM]

Version 1.3
Release Notes

October 30, 2000

Please note that this patch is only for computers with the Sound Blaster Live! audio card. This patch addresses Tyrian 2000's (tm) inability to properly configure sound effects on the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! audio card. If you do not have a Sound Blaster Live! audio card, DO NOT INSTALL THIS PATCH.

-----------------------
Installing the patch:
-----------------------

1. Unzip/decompress the patch to a temporary folder. Do not place it into the Tyrian 2000 (tm) directory or you'll overwrite important files.

2. The patch installs through InstallShield. Run the SETUP.EXE as you would normally and follow the prompts.

3. InstallShield will prompt you for the directory that Tyrian 2000 (tm) was installed into. Unless you changed this directory during the initial installation, you should not need to alter the default path given.

4. The patch also needs to be installed to the same place in your start menu as Tyrian 2000 (tm) originally was to update the links. As above, if you didn't change this selection yourself then accept the default.

5. After installation, running SETUP from the XSIV Games (tm)/Tyrian 2000 (tm) menu will generate a new CFG file (which means your settings will be reset) automatically. The configuration of the game was changed slightly since the initial release. Your save file should still be intact.

6. Select SoundBlaster Live from the sound effects menu. You will now be presented with an option to autodetect your audio card.

Could you post the pre- and the post- patched config file of the game?

Anyone remember what exactly that DOS driver for the Live! series did? Was it just for SFX?
I'm guessing the patch modifies the game to address a new port and IRQ.

Haven't checked it out with the debugger yet tho.

ugh....I hate installshield patches for DOS games. 😠

DosFreak wrote:

Anyone remember what exactly that DOS driver for the Live! series did? Was it just for SFX?
I'm guessing the patch modifies the game to address a new port and IRQ.

The TSR loaded the most awful FM emulation ever, and some rudimentary sound blaster 16 emulation. Tyrian could never work with that which is the whole point of the patch. It doesn't 'enhance' the game, it just brings hacked-in support to it.

Emulating the SBLive is like putting a sniper scope for a knife. We haven't even gotten to EMU8K emulation yet, and some dos games indeed do take advantage of that.