There is something interesting you could try, Neville. It was not originally my idea. I read it as a suggestion by bristlehog in this topic. But here it goes:
Apparently, a VESA standard was developed for audio devices, just like there was a VESA standard for high resolution (post-VGA) graphics). It was called the VBE/AI standard. Although there weren't any games that supported this standard directly as far as I know, both a DIGPAK bridge driver and a Miles/AIL/ADV bridge driver existed which would wrap around VBE/AI drivers. This is particularly interesting, since there is a VBE/AI driver for the Disney Sound Source, but also a lot of games used DIGPAK or Miles/ADV drivers! It's a very extensive list of games, most of which (as far as I know) don't support the Disney Sound Source directly.
Anyway, you can download the VBE/AI drivers from here:
* http://cd.textfiles.com/freedom/CODE/SOUND/VAISDK.ZIP (the SDK, which includes a driver for the Disney Sound Source)
* http://cd.textfiles.com/freedom/CODE/SOUND/VAISDK.TXT (documentation)
The Disney Sound Source wave driver that you need to run is SSWAVE.COM. (By the way, I already tried to run this driver using DOSBox, but the driver would not detect a Disney Sound Source, even though I had DSS emulation configured in DOSBox. Since you have the real thing to test this with, that should be no problem for you.)
Anyway, once you've loaded the VBE/AI driver in memory, you will have to load DIGVESA.COM from the DIGPAK drivers for DIGPAK games. This should allow games that use DIGPAK drivers to output digital audio to your Disney Sound Source. For games that use Miles drivers, you'll have to use the VESADIG.ADV driver. the DIGVESA.COM and VESADIG.ADV files might come with the games, but sometimes they do not. In that case, you'll have to copy those VESA bridge drivers from other games. Alternatively, you can Google for them, since both the Miles drivers and the DIGPAK/MIDPAK drivers can be found on-line.
Even though it would take a bit more work to get these games going, I really hope you try this out, since I'm really curious if this works! 😀 If it does, suddenly the compatibility/support of the Disney Sound Source will expand greatly beyond just the games that supported the DSS out-of-the-box. What I'm particularly curious about is if the VBE/AI driver for the Disney Sound Source will also handle the playback of 11kHz samples, since the Disney Sound Source only supports 7 kHz playback in hardware. I cannot imagine the driver being sophisticated enough to perform downsampling, so I wonder how and if that will work in games that output digital samples at frequencies other than 7 kHz. Will the driver simply play back 11 kHz audio at a higher pitch, or will it simply not output any audio in such cases? Only one way to find out... 😉
For lists of games supported by MIDPAK/DIGPAK and Miles (ADV), see this post, also by bristlehog: Re: Innovation SSI-2001 MIDI driver (NOTE: some of the lists pertain to other driver models, which may or may not have VBE/AI wrappers as well.)
See also these threads for more info:
* A list of sound engines found in DOS games
* Is there a example of what a "VESA MIDI" device is?
Good luck! 😀