DOS Audio Driver Question

[ChrisHale]

I'm thinking of picking up a T42 to run as a Windows 98 machine for some older games and I'm pretty confident in its ability to do so. Additionally I was thinking of cutting out a small partition to dual boot into MS-DOS 6.22 just for fun since I have many fond memories mucking around in my Dad's old desktop so many years ago.

What I wanted to know is if anyone has any ideas on how I might get the sound working in a native 6.22 environment? I noticed Lenovo has almost a complete set of drivers for DOS with the exception of an audio driver. I'm stumped.

Thanks!

[jdrou]

I think in most cases there is no audio driver for DOS; usually newer audio devices just emulate a SoundBlaster which is supported natively by most DOS games (older games may only support AdLib which is a subset of SB compatibility). If there's no SB emulation you're probably stuck.

[dr_st]

A few thoughts from someone who has an old Win98 rig still functional and being used occasionally.

In practice, I found that dual-booting DOS and Win98 is in most cases unnecessary, since Win98 runs on top of real mode DOS. I have yet to encounter an application that in principle runs under DOS 6.22 but not under "DOS 7" (the code name of Win98 DOS). Such applications do exist, I've heard, but they are far from mainstream.

I am not sure about using T42 as a Win98 rig. It is probably somewhat overkill, and compatibility will not be at its best with many drivers possibly missing.

The question is also - what Windows games can you run on Win98 but not on WinXP? I haven't encountered many of these, and when I did, I was not sure whether it's really a problem with OS compatibility or with video card compatibility (quite a few old games were geared towards 3dfx/Glide, and their DirectX modes were poorly supported).

Of course, if the goal is DOS games, it's a different story, because Win98 has a native DOS mode, while XP or anything NT-based for that matter does not. But then we are hitting the "hardware too new" problem again, with questionable sound/video card compatibility.

My experience with getting PCI sound solutions to work under DOS was unsuccessful. Apparently, like jdrou says, they are supposed to have a Sound Blaster emulation mode, but it does not always work. In my case, I was using a PCI SBLive Value card, and Creative's SB emulation utilities, but still couldn't get the DOS games to detect the card. I read somewhere that it was because my motherboard did not support non-maskable interrupts or something. Not sure what the status would be with the sound solution on a T42, and where one would even start looking to enable their SB emulation mode.

[jdrou]

What kind of DOS games were you looking to run? Most of them seem to run in a Windows "DOS box" with the Windows driver providing SB emulation (in 32-bit Windows at least). The ones that won't run under Windows are probably so old that they have timing problems with newer hardware so you would also need some kind of slowdown utility. Also look at DOSBox: http://www.dosbox.com/

[dr_st]

My experience with running my DOS games collection was that some run under native DOS on my W98 machine (AMD K6 500MHz CPU, Voodoo 3000, SB16) and not under DOSBox, but others run better under DOSBox (the emulator) than on the W98 machine. Between the two setups, most of the DOS games run more than satisfactory. Very few of them actually run well in a Win32 console.