SB16 Audio with MSDOS 6.22

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notorab
Posts: 10
Joined: 6. Nov 2019, 07:48

SB16 Audio with MSDOS 6.22

Post by notorab »

I have the SoundBlaster drivers installed, set BLASTER line in autoexec.bat, yet am having trouble getting audio working with Doom 2. I figured this would be a fairly standard configuration. Does anyone else have audio working in such a config?
ghr
Volunteer
Posts: 376
Joined: 25. May 2007, 22:46
Primary OS: MS Windows 7
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: DOS, Win3x, Win95, WinXP, Ubuntu, OS/2

Re: SB16 Audio with MSDOS 6.22

Post by ghr »

Working audio is ambiguous, e.g. playing WAV files or MIDI ? Because it's a game I imagine that MIDI is the issue here. You could duplicate your setup in DosBox and see (hear...) what happens there. You could also try to play a small WAV file, that should work after a correct install. And about that one: use sbbasic.exe to install.... Which you might already have done.
javispedro
Posts: 58
Joined: 29. Jan 2022, 15:31
Primary OS: openSUSE
VBox Version: OSE other
Guest OSses: Old & New Windows, Linux

Re: SB16 Audio with MSDOS 6.22

Post by javispedro »

You don't need the SB drivers for DOOM to play music.

I just tried the DOOM 2 demo. The SFX seems not to work under Virtualbox, only randomly producing loud noises. The SFX seems to work out of the box.
For music/midi you will need a Linux host and VMusic (shameless self-advertisement) . With it adlib & awe32 work (adlib is significantly slowed down though).
Last edited by javispedro on 19. Jan 2024, 00:15, edited 2 times in total.
Kosh
Posts: 5
Joined: 26. Dec 2023, 01:42

Re: SB16 Audio with MSDOS 6.22

Post by Kosh »

I haven't yet had success getting sound to work right in games in a DOS machine.

Granted, I'm quite new at the moment, so there's a lot to learn, but as of now, I've done the settings, I got the game to work, but the sound is very quite, and horribly distorted. I don't know if there's a better quality sound emulator available, some yet-unknown driver to install in DOS, or something else yet to try. But for now, it's bad.

Given what you've put here, I am suspicious there's a problem with the VB DOS sound emulator?
javispedro
Posts: 58
Joined: 29. Jan 2022, 15:31
Primary OS: openSUSE
VBox Version: OSE other
Guest OSses: Old & New Windows, Linux

Re: SB16 Audio with MSDOS 6.22

Post by javispedro »

The SB16 emulation is not perfect. I don't know what game you are talking about, though. Many games work as-is without problem.
DOOM2 mentioned above now seems to work better (I'm not sure when it was fixed or if it was an issue with my setup).

Don't bother looking for "different drivers". There are no drivers.

Also VirtualBox and all other virtualizers are always going to have issues with timing on these timing-dependent games. It is unavoidable unless you want to trade-off a lot of throughput.
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