VDMSound only cares about NTVDM. It has no relation with DOSBox. DOSBox has no relation to NTVDM. Nothing will conflict.

Whoever told you otherwise has a severe case of misinformity.

leileilol wrote:

VDMSound only cares about NTVDM. It has no relation with DOSBox. DOSBox has no relation to NTVDM. Nothing will conflict.

Whoever told you otherwise has a severe case of misinformity.

Thank you for your reply. My information came from when I originally researched VDMSound. I cam across the following information via Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vdmsound):

VDMSound started as a private project in 1998, in Montreal, its motivating purpose being that of capturing in-game MIDI music through software while taking advantage of Windows NT's 16-bit subsystem virtualization. It became open-source and moved to SourceForge after a full rewrite in the early spring of 2001. It was discontinued in early 2004 (last checkin occurred on 2004-02-14), when additional improvements in emulation were no longer possible due to limitations in the Windows 16-bit subsystem. The sound emulation code from VDMSound has since been integrated into DOSBox.

I would not be surprised if that were wrong, but I figured better to be safe...

That's not wrong, but how do you derive that you can't use VDMSound and DOSBox at the same time?

What could be problematic is to install a game under VDMSound and attempt to run it under DOSBox or vice versa.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

That's not wrong, but how do you derive that you can't use VDMSound and DOSBox at the same time?

That part comes from researching other responses around the net: Some have reported that using both DosBox and VDMSound simultaneously can result in crashes, unless the sound settings are the same. I will be the first to admit that I don't know much about this, so if my concern seems foolish, please forgive me. Based on the above quote, I was thinking of DosBox as a (much) evolved version of VDMSound. Some older programs require uninstallation prior to installing a newer version, so I was concerned this might have the same restriction. Thank you for your responses, as that is exactly what I wanted to hear!....😀

When you run DOSBox, it emulates everything, so as far as Windows is concerned (or Linux, but that's not related to VDMSound much) it's just a "game", as it's using SDL->OpenGL/DirectDraw/D3D/etc.. When you run a DOS game without DOSBox, Windows runs the code on the CPU in 16-bit mode (as opposed to 32-bit, which most things run in) and emulates a few devices (as opposed to the whole machine, like DOSBox). This is why under "NTVDM" (the name for Windows's DOS capability) you need slowdown programs and such. DOSBox was designed for games (primarily anywho) while NTVDM was designed for business prorgams, so NTVDM does not emulate a sound card, as business programs don't need it. VDMSound emulates a sound card of the era, so when you combine VDMSound and NTVDM you get a DOS environment to run games in, but they still run on your processor, unlike in DOSBox, which emulates it. The only real reasons to use (or rather, to prefer, since they both do the same job in the end) NTVDM:

- Your machine is older, and can't run a DOS game in DOSBox at full speed. VDMSound + NTVDM may be faster.
- You need direct hardware access to a floppy drive, or other piece(s) of hardware. Microsoft made NTVDM, so it has the ability to delve into the internals of Windows for access to these things. DOSBox could be improved to do this, but can not yet (except for a select few things, like CD-ROM, and in some patched versions MT-32, and a few other things).

There are far more reasons to prefer DOSBox when running games, because like with the sound, NTVDM doesn't concern itself with other things that allow some games to run correctly (display emulation and CPU speed, primarily). Also you only get Sound Blaster 16 sound from VDMSound, and some games use other outputs which are available in DOSBox but not VDMSound/NTVDM combined.

I hope this clears things up for you, and if you have any questions I'd be glad to answer and explain further.

Thank you all. That clears a lot of things up.😀