Reply 20 of 45, by xjas
- Rank
- l33t
Well, FreeDOS works too. ...except not from a USB stick for some reason (it's supposed to.) So I plugged in a USB floppy drive and with these helpful instructions for sound, managed to cram FreeDOS, the sound drivers, a RAMdisk utility, and classic DMP 3.01 onto a boot disk. Unfortunately I only had room for one module to play after all that, but hey, it's a proof of concept. 😉
Booted it up, fired up DMP which detected an original SB straight away, and after an AGONIZINGLY long load time of my 170kB module off apparently world's slowest 1.4MB disk, begun filling the room with glorious 8-bit hi-fi:
Okay, so the quality's not great. It's emulating an original SB (it seems to work in Pro mode too, but only mono) at 44kHz, 8 bit. There seems to be some weird distortion at low volume (high noise floor) but it doesn't scale, so I can crank it up and turn it down externally on my mixer. But hey, it works! I now have a functional, satchel-size DOS machine with sound. 😎
So what does this offer me over my Thinkpad 365ED which has a built-in ESS chip? Er.... not much actually. Well it does have a faster CPU and more RAM. And USB. So there's that.
I might stick to Linux on this one, or at least dual boot.
Incidentally installing a HDD & keeping this thing portable is going to be a pain in the butt as there's absolutely no power for it from the tiny PSU. Even my IDE->CF adapter needs a floppy-type power cable which this doesn't have.
EDIT: Tried Skyroads too, just to see if the FM emulation worked. It does! It sounds a little distorted, but it worked completely drama-free and played nice with the digi effects. I need to find a mixer for this sound chip so I can roll off some of the volume levels, I think it's running a LITTLE too hot and overdriving its outputs.
And major kudos to VIA for keeping all their driver downloads up instead of expunging them for anything more than 2 years old like some other companies like to.
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!