PCGamingTimeMachine wrote on 2026-05-09, 19:31:

Thanks a lot Aaron, that's extremely helpful and I'll have a look at some of these. For the ones that crash after an FMV (e.g. Worms or Destruction Derby 2 or Alien Trilogy), have you tried them with regular VSBHDA and regular SHSUCDX? If there's a crash even with vanilla VSBHDA and SHSUCDX, then there might be something specific to these games. For example, Rayman was a particularly problematic game that needs a few tricks to play even with vanilla VSBHDA/SHSUCDX.

Which tricks you using to run Rayman ?

On my side the game only blackscreen or crash at running.

As far i know it's because this one require XMS (EMS need be disabled).
It's a similar issue as Atlantis The Lost Tales (DOS Version) and Wing Commander: Privateer.

With original Ensoniq/Sound Blaster driver it was impossible to run thoses games because of the need of EMS.
However now with VSBHDA it should be possible but not found how to make them run yet.

I didn't want to derail the Audigy Guide thread so I'll continue here. I mightve misremembered with Rayman and had tested it under Windows 98 rather than DOS/VSBHDA so apologies, I haven't managed to get that to work neither just now, I also tried HimemX and JEMM386 instead of JEMMEX and still black screen after the launcher. Also I wasn't able to install the game with VSBHDA running, I had to install it prior to running that. The only other game I've tested in DOS that needed its memory limiting was Aladdin (JEMMEX MAXEXT=32768) and that worked, but I can't use that with SHSU because it needs several hundred MB to mount the disc and I don't have a CD drive, so I guess SHSU won't work with anything that needs its ram limiting. I'm using the UK 1.21 copy of Rayman and the latest JEMM package (v5.87pre1).

Also I tested Full Throttle and Powerslave a few weeks ago, Powerslave seems to work fine but Full Throttle is a painful experience, unfortunately its also a problem with the regular SHSU where cutscenes will take like 30 seconds to load, I did beat it though.

Also there's a new version of VSBHDA available (1.9) if VSBHDARB is to get a new update, unless its fine to just overwrite the VSBHDARB.EXE with the new one from 1.9?

TgamesFR wrote on 2026-07-14, 11:49:

Which tricks you using to run Rayman ? […]
Show full quote

PCGamingTimeMachine wrote on 2026-05-09, 19:31:

Thanks a lot Aaron, that's extremely helpful and I'll have a look at some of these. For the ones that crash after an FMV (e.g. Worms or Destruction Derby 2 or Alien Trilogy), have you tried them with regular VSBHDA and regular SHSUCDX? If there's a crash even with vanilla VSBHDA and SHSUCDX, then there might be something specific to these games. For example, Rayman was a particularly problematic game that needs a few tricks to play even with vanilla VSBHDA/SHSUCDX.

Which tricks you using to run Rayman ?

On my side the game only blackscreen or crash at running.

As far i know it's because this one require XMS (EMS need be disabled).
It's a similar issue as Atlantis The Lost Tales (DOS Version) and Wing Commander: Privateer.

With original Ensoniq/Sound Blaster driver it was impossible to run thoses games because of the need of EMS.
However now with VSBHDA it should be possible but not found how to make them run yet.

Hello! Sorry for the delay, it's really hectic for me these days. I will definitely get back to you on this in August (since I won't get a chance to tinker with my PC till then)? Hope that's cool...

AaronS wrote on 2026-07-15, 18:29:

I didn't want to derail the Audigy Guide thread so I'll continue here. I mightve misremembered with Rayman and had tested it under Windows 98 rather than DOS/VSBHDA so apologies, I haven't managed to get that to work neither just now, I also tried HimemX and JEMM386 instead of JEMMEX and still black screen after the launcher. Also I wasn't able to install the game with VSBHDA running, I had to install it prior to running that. The only other game I've tested in DOS that needed its memory limiting was Aladdin (JEMMEX MAXEXT=32768) and that worked, but I can't use that with SHSU because it needs several hundred MB to mount the disc and I don't have a CD drive, so I guess SHSU won't work with anything that needs its ram limiting. I'm using the UK 1.21 copy of Rayman and the latest JEMM package (v5.87pre1).

Also I tested Full Throttle and Powerslave a few weeks ago, Powerslave seems to work fine but Full Throttle is a painful experience, unfortunately its also a problem with the regular SHSU where cutscenes will take like 30 seconds to load, I did beat it though.

Also there's a new version of VSBHDA available (1.9) if VSBHDARB is to get a new update, unless its fine to just overwrite the VSBHDARB.EXE with the new one from 1.9?

There seems to be a backlog piling up of games that have some issues, but still I'm happy that many popular games work. I'll get chance to resume work on this in early August so I'll maybe test/debug then. Regarding 1.9, I don't think there are any conflicting changes so I'll just merge his changes into my VSBHDARB repo. I need to iron out with Japheth whether I should maintain VSBHDARB separately or merge VSBHDARB upstream into VSBHDA, will see...

PCGamingTimeMachine wrote on 2026-07-19, 19:39:

Hello! Sorry for the delay, it's really hectic for me these days. I will definitely get back to you on this in August (since I won't get a chance to tinker with my PC till then)? Hope that's cool...

Yes no problem, thanks =)

No worries, this has already achieved more than what we've had for the past 30+ years which is the ability to mount CD images and hear the redbook audio, massive thanks!

AaronS wrote on 2026-07-21, 14:48:

No worries, this has already achieved more than what we've had for the past 30+ years which is the ability to mount CD images and hear the redbook audio, massive thanks!

You're welcome! I made some changes to SHSURBHD and VSBHDARB. Attaching a prerelease package with latest changes here. The package is now able to run Destruction Derby 2 and Alien Trilogy as well! With full sound effects and CD music. When you get time, I'd be grateful if you could check it out and let me know if you have any luck with those games

Yep those games are working great here now too. Only Worms crashes at this point but it could be a problem with VSBHDA in general like Super Frog.

I have a physical CD-ROM drive and want to try the Rayman game. Is an audio CD-ROM cable necessary?

vico wrote on 2026-09-13, 05:16:

I have a physical CD-ROM drive and want to try the Rayman game. Is an audio CD-ROM cable necessary?

With a physical drive, no.

The entire point of these modified tools is to perform digital audio extraction and playback through a private buffering api.

Shsucdx reads raw mode2 sectors, (which contain raw stereo 44100khz pcm samples at 16bit precision, per redbook standard), loads them into a small bit of XMS memory, then tells VSBHDA to play from that buffer.

The whole point of this modification is to enable playback on hardware that lacks an analog audio cable.

When using disc images, the *entire* disc image gets loaded into XMS, then shsucdhd copies the requested raw sectors into the playback buffer. There's not even a physical disc drive in that circumstance.

From what I have experienced, assuming the cdrom drive (and its atapi driver) supports raw mode2 reads, the physical drive approach uses less memory, handles disc swaps more cleanly, and works fairly reliably.

It's been awhile since I have updated my copies, but in the past, when using disc images I had to completely unload then reload the entire shsucdhd + vsbhda stack when changing discs.

vico wrote on 2026-09-13, 05:16:

I have a physical CD-ROM drive and want to try the Rayman game. Is an audio CD-ROM cable necessary?

Hi vico, Rayman is a really tricky game to run. I have tested it using the image approach, but I've yet to test it via physical CD. Also at least for my setup, the USA version of Rayman always crashes when I start the game.

What version of Rayman physical disc do you have? Also, how much RAM does your system have? Based on this info I could suggest a couple of ways you can likely get the game running

I have a Rayman US v1.21 CD and my PC have a 128MB RAM

vico wrote on 2026-09-15, 04:41:

I have a Rayman US v1.21 CD and my PC have a 128MB RAM

I've attached an archive containing the tools you can use to try and run it. Keep in mind that with this version (US 1.21) I've had issues on my end - the game hangs if I select options in the main menu, and crashes the system when I press escape during gameplay to bring up the pause menu. I have had no problems at all with the UK 1.21 version. It may be different for you so let me know how it goes.

Steps:
1. Extract contents of RBTOOLS.zip archive into C:\RBTOOLS
2. Add to config.sys:

1DEVICEHIGH=C:\RBTOOLS\JEMMB586\JEMMEX.EXE
2DEVICEHIGH=C:\RBTOOLS\UIDEJR.SYS /D:MSCD001 /N1 /UX

3. Then navigate to RBTOOLS directory run `runthis.bat`

I hope this works for you. But if you face the same issues as I did with the USA 1.21 version, you may want to burn the UK 1.21 version to a CD using Nero and try with that instead

TgamesFR wrote on 2026-07-14, 11:49:

Which tricks you using to run Rayman ? […]
Show full quote

PCGamingTimeMachine wrote on 2026-05-09, 19:31:

Thanks a lot Aaron, that's extremely helpful and I'll have a look at some of these. For the ones that crash after an FMV (e.g. Worms or Destruction Derby 2 or Alien Trilogy), have you tried them with regular VSBHDA and regular SHSUCDX? If there's a crash even with vanilla VSBHDA and SHSUCDX, then there might be something specific to these games. For example, Rayman was a particularly problematic game that needs a few tricks to play even with vanilla VSBHDA/SHSUCDX.

Which tricks you using to run Rayman ?

On my side the game only blackscreen or crash at running.

As far i know it's because this one require XMS (EMS need be disabled).
It's a similar issue as Atlantis The Lost Tales (DOS Version) and Wing Commander: Privateer.

With original Ensoniq/Sound Blaster driver it was impossible to run thoses games because of the need of EMS.
However now with VSBHDA it should be possible but not found how to make them run yet.

Hi, I know it's been a long time but I've described in my post above on how you can try to run Rayman if you have a physical CD. But if you have a machine with more than 800 MB or so of RAM, then let me know and I'll describe the method to run Rayman via CD image

Nice project, that can be useful in a number of scenarios.

That said if you have a working setup with analogue input, using the digital audio just because "is cool", makes no sense.

On normal usage what's the point of doing more traffic on the IDE bus, more CPU work ,on a low powered machine, when that work is already done, pretty well, by the CD player itself?

The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-15, 12:04:

Nice project, that can be useful in a number of scenarios.

That said if you have a working setup with analogue input, using the digital audio just because "is cool", makes no sense.

On normal usage what's the point of doing more traffic on the IDE bus, more CPU work ,on a low powered machine, when that work is already done, pretty well, by the CD player itself?

There's no real purpose to do this on period hardware, it's specifically to solve an issue getting redbook audio on newer computers that have no CD audio connection and an abundance of spare resources

NeoG_ wrote on 2026-09-15, 13:10:

There's no real purpose to do this on period hardware, it's specifically to solve an issue getting redbook audio on newer computers that have no CD audio connection and an abundance of spare resources

You wrote, more or less what I wrote, with different wording.

Perhaps, as a side note, if I remember correctly digital audio was already possible since Win98 or Win98SE, but was not enabled by default you needed a registry setting, and some dose of luck to find the right combination of CD/DVD player IDE controller and related firmwares.

This project is aimed more for anachronistic retrostations, and less for vintage ones.

Win7 era systems with intel HDA, sata controllers, 2+gb RAM, optical drive that does not have analog output, etc.

Vintage systems probably would struggle rendering the audio stream.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-15, 12:04:

Nice project, that can be useful in a number of scenarios.

That said if you have a working setup with analogue input, using the digital audio just because "is cool", makes no sense.

On normal usage what's the point of doing more traffic on the IDE bus, more CPU work ,on a low powered machine, when that work is already done, pretty well, by the CD player itself?

I agree with you. To be fair, Neo_G didn't entirely restate - he specified the target machine for this project. More specifically, a more "modern" machine (say from 2000's onwards) that won't have shortage of RAM, will have a fast enough processor to render both digital sound and digital CD audio streams, and doesn't support sound cards with native DOS drivers that can also relay analog CD audio from the CD drive to the user. wierd_w also summed it up nicely.

Thanks for checking out the project and I hope the tools come in use for you too!

Is it maybe possible to integrate this into the main branch? Not sure how github works but I saw there's been a couple of new releases for the main VSBHDA and I assume this is more or less finished?