Sound Blaster Emulator for DOS

The SBEMU project emulates a Sound Blaster and works with real DOS on a range of obsolete computers. Instead of getting only PC speaker sound, we now have FM music and Sound Blaster sound effects!

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[MarcoGPUtuber]

Finally! I can finally put my 5800X3D machine to use for real gaming! DOS gaming!

[TheCarlosMendonca]

Agree this is one of the most consequential retro gaming projects we've seen lately. Tried it on a Vaio P a while back and it was hit and miss, but excited to try the newest bits again soon.

[Waaaaaaaaaaaang]

The Wyse cx0 you covered in the past actually works quite well in sbemu, particularly since the speed throttling in cpuspd is well supported with its Via C7 CPU. A few things to note though:

a) freeDOS conventional memory management and shoving things into high/upper memory blocks on those old machines are...a challenge. In some cases you still need to make whatever you run play well with only 580k of conventional RAM. Even if it does, well, it might still run into issues with Origin's memory manager for certain titles like Wing commander privateer or Strike commander.

b) CPU throttling in DOS will always be an issue when it comes to the old titles like Test Drive 3 or Monkey island (the divide by zero bug in the old SCUMM games were due to the CPU being too fast). Via C3s and C7s tend to do well here...AMD's Jaguar APUs (like the old E350s)...less good. Unsure about the oldschool first gen Atoms.

c) even if sbemu works, those old machines often had another stumbling block in DOS applications: VESA BIOS support for SVGA titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator 5, Rowan's Airpower, and others. In most cases those old games cannot run due to VESA BIOS incompatibilities.

[marksmithcollins]

SBEMU is the GOAT. Myriads of On-board sound age PCs got new life!

[MarcoGPUtuber]

But half the fun is configuring sound cards in DOS for every game!

[ferrellsl]

I've used SBemu on several retro projects and it's a Godsend.

[RayArtichokeB]

It's an amazing project. Now the only thing missing is a VGA/VESA driver for newer hardware to use with freedos.

[retroftw]

Now all we need is a DOS display driver that makes widescreen LCD panels keep the aspect ratio! It would make a huge amount of free/cheap old laptops retro gaming beasts! 😀

Well....one can dream at least, hehe
Don't think it's possible 😕

[squid]

So much effort to do all these tests. Thank you

[Aaron.Newman]

Thanks for making a video about this! I was wondering when this would appear!!!

[richardcooper]

IVAN 'IRONMAN' STEWART'S SUPER OFF ROAD one of my all time favourites from the good old day of DOS
Loved those "Nitros" but it didn't always mean you won the race.

[imhafdhom]

This is miles better than my current method to get Soundblaster emulation working on pure Dos which involve using HX extender and a special build of Dosbox which support AC97 codec.

[seank]

Great Video Phil! Seems like a very interesting project.

[sebastian]

I used SBEMU with various computers, most of them with Realtek HD Audio and the program worked very well. The only issue I had was the memory manager, Jemmex, maybe because of the huge amount of RAM (2G+), there were no high memory available so all was loaded in the conventional memory, making so some games unable to run. An example is Betrayal at Krondor.

[ronny]

... Raptor ... totally forget about the game ... Thanks for showing it!

[Leeki]

This is a revolutionary project for PC gaming. It could make an impact in 1997-2000 when new PC hardware started loosing SB compatibility.

Today it's fun to play, but overall it's just better to use DOSBox, PCem or other emulator on modern hardware.
We all have a retro PC anyway with hardware Sound Blaster compatible sound device.

The most interesting part is that it should be possible to emulate different devices that way. I would love to see Gravis Ultrasound emu. Creative CMS, Tandy and maybe even software MT32 or General Midi.

This approach can work on older PCs too. Even using real Sound Blaster as an output device for emulated Wave Table, Tandy or MT32. With 400-1200 MHz CPUs there's a lot cycles to spare to emulate sound devices in software.

[DEVILTAZ]

Hey mate, greetings from Australia.

I still have my old 486 Dx266 running at 100 mhz. It has an Awe32 with a TNT 32mb card with a Voodoo 2. I played so many flight sims on it back in the day but my all time favourite was Bladerunner which I still have on CD Rom.

This new project is just amazing if it gives people the ability to hear some of these old sound effects and music from classic DOS games whilst playing.

I was lucky enough to never have to worry about pc speaker sound only apart from when I was at school and we used the Apple 2C and was playing wavy navy lol.

Good memories.

[paulcohen]

One of the most important YouTube videos here and in general.

[DDable]

Dune 1 sometimes autodetects the audio card incorrectly but you can change the settings by editing comm.bat, there is a config line and one entry is the sound card with irq/dma numbers.

[techdistractions]

Good to see you got Stunts going. I am yet to get it to run with SBEmu on any of my newer Via chipset itx boards.