Hi everyone! 🙂

So today I released the first build of a32ichdg.dll, an AIL/32 for the ICHx AC'97 sound devices that were common on x86 motherboards in the early to mid 2000s.

The driver basically combines the assembly source code of the AIL/32 drivers by John Miles and the ICH player by Leff Leyda.

I'm simplifying this, since a lot of work was involved to combine this into a working driver.

After years of toying with this idea and being blocked by my limited knowledge and experience of x86 assembly language programming, I recently enlisted the help of Claude Code to get something working.

I actually got it working in SimCity 2000 with sound, albeit with occasional crashes. I'm not sure whether those can be attributed to the driver or QEMU, which I tested the driver on.

I have not tested this driver on actual hardware, since I don't believe I currently own any mothboards of laptops with an ICHx AC'97 sound device.

So if any of you are interested in helping me test this, it would be much appreciated! 🙂

And of course, pull requests with fixes and improvements are absolutely welcome too.

Ideally, I'd like to have this tested on actual hardware as much as possible, and with as many games as possible. Of course, only a limited number of games use AIL/32 drivers, but the more of those we can have it tested on, the better.

Ultimately, I know that an HDA driver is much more generally useful than an AC'97 driver, but this was a hobby project that I spent quite some effort on (even with an LLM), and it would be nice to have this become a polished and stable driver. For research and fun. 😅

Thanks, and have a Happy Easter! 🐣