I've been at it before - using (more or less) modern controllers with DOS games (and no Win9X), but this time I had an idea for a new twist.

So, Bret Johnson's driver TSR already offers good customization options for game controllers for relatively modern MoBo-s. It only works with EMM386 however. For old games to have sound with those relatively modern MoBo-s JEMM + HDPMI combination is likely required (in conjunction with e.g. VSBHDA). But, as written just above, joystick drivers are unable to take advantage of port virtualization that JEMM and HDPMI offer, since the latter is not compatible with EMM386.

So I decided to combine the two: have my fork of VSBHDA run as usual, but specifically for port 201 forward the calls to joystick service routine from pre-loaded TSR. This way both joystick driver and sound driver can coexist, and hopefully not much development effort is required. I guess, I was inspired with how Doom was interfacing stats server.

So far as a proof of concept I decided to start with keys2joy TSR and with the approach, I am able to have (Bret Johnson's) THRUST.COM joystick tester pick up "joystick movement" from port 201 with JEMM + HDPMI + sound driver loaded, which is promissing (the TSR maps keyboard presses to joystick "inputs", effectively creating a virtual joystick).

There's little point in testing game compatibility of this toy version, as games will likely intercept keyboard input anyway resulting in unpredictable behavior (Keen and Wolf3D don't really work), but next step - trying this with Mr Johnson's USB stack is a very interesting one, so wish me luck 😀