DOS Games Discussion

[dhruba.bandopadhyay]

If I bought a Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 PCI (eg. from ebay):

- will there be MS-DOS drivers available?
- will I be able to install MS-DOS drivers and get it working on a P4

3.0GHz mobo that uses Intel 8xx series chipset?

I really want to play/run DOS games/programs under native DOS. No

emulation whatsoever (I've tried the emulation and they're very buggy

and not 100% reliable).

If anyone has any Creative Labs Sound Blaster card, please can you let

me know what model it is and whether it works on a P4 mainboard under

Windows 98SE native MS-DOS.

[dhruba.bandopadhyay]

1. DOSBox is getting better and got some ok results from it. Though 3D via DOSBox is very very slow. And if the DOS app has fast refreshes or updates then DOSBox can't handle it.

2. VDMSound is okay but doesn't always work very. I ran Blood before and it was jerky. VDMSound is a discontinued project. It will not run under 64-bit Windows unfortunately.

3. VirtualPC has very bad support for DOS sound and joystick. Searching on the web & google groups I find people reporting this as a fact. They all say DOS games run chuggy.

4. I have yet to get DOS sound to work in VMWare. Just installed Windows 98SE. Getting DOS sound to work looks fiddly (from web & google group searching). And performance wise is again chuggy.

[dhruba.bandopadhyay]

Thanks for your replies:

I have learnt that the last Creative Labs Sound Blaster card that comes with DOS drivers was Audigy 1. I have also tried DOSBox & VirtualPC. VirtualPC has stated that it has very bad DOS support and won't improve. DOSBox is not good at 3D DOS games, has jerky sounds and can't do programs with extremely fast refresh updates.

I have yet to get MS-DOS/Windows98SE working in VMWare.

But am hoping to grab a few Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 PCI/ISA off eBay to stick in my near-future iBASE MB865 or some other Intel 865 chipset motherboard. Intel 865 chipset motherboards were the last to support Windows 98SE. I have a socket 775 P4 3GHz so I don't want that to go to waste.

Windows 98SE CD is indeed bootable with CD-ROM support. (but obviously not made for EMS loading games and sound).

Is it possible to take original 3 MS-DOS 6.2 floppy disks, and burn them onto CD? Has anyone done this before? Install/setup files or already-installed MS-DOS?

[dr_st]

Does your 865 chipset mobo have ISA slots? If so, just get an ISA card and be happy. SB PCI DOS drivers work in principle, but not always.