SBEMU Just Killed Your DOS Gaming PC

SBEMU is a new DOS program that emulates a Sound Blaster card. It uses its own sound handling code to playback DOS game audio natively on modern hardware – magic!

If you have an Intel ICH chipset or Intel High Definition audio, it should just work.

Amazing work by crazii. You can grab SBEMU here:

[greanhare]

Keeping and restoring vintage hardware should never go away, but hopefully this alternative will make the former more affordable.

[Devi_Salias]

DOSBox is out there since 2002. So... You could always play DOS Games on modern PC's. You can even route the MIDI Music to Windows and using COOLSOFT Midi Mapper and MIDI Synth to load SFZ Banks to improve Music quality.

[term-]

This also potentially opens up windows 95 games as well since the sound portion is now covered with this project. If we could do the same for true color graphics and glide interpretation on either the CPU side or a basic driver layer for graphics card then that is almost every base covered for vintage PC gaming.

[tankermottind]

This absolutely does not make old hardware obsolete, for many reasons:
1. EFI systems may not be fully IBM compatible, which means bad news under DOS, Windows NT (2000, XP, 7, 10, 11, etc.) uses a virtual machine where the DOS program has no direct hardware access, EFI systems also do not support the floppy drive interface, and DOS is severely limited without a floppy drive or hardware floppy emulator. If you want a BIOS system, you're looking at a motherboard that is 10 years old or more.
2. For many people, historically accurate experiences are an end in themselves, including the experience of building and using the computer. Sure, I could use a floppy emulator in my Athlon, but I have real floppy drives in both 3.5" and 5.25". I could use a generic $10 SATA optical drive with an adapter, but I scored a very early DVD-ROM drive made for a beige Mac with an old-school ATAPI interface and a '90s aesthetic. I could use any random 4:3 LCD monitor with a VGA output, but I use a 21" Trinitron that weighs over 80 pounds. I could just have the Athlon and be done with it, but I'm also building a 200 MHz Pentium Pro machine.
3. Some games have specific hardware requirements other than a Sound Blaster, like a processor that runs in a certain range of acceptable speed (like Wing Commander and Descent), weird video modes, etc. SBEMU won't help you with these, you need a computer built to a specific set of specs (or DOSBox).
4. Driver software like Sound Blaster emulation cut into conventional memory in DOS, which is extremely precious--you get 640 kB, and some of that will be used by the system itself even with all the tricks for loading as much as possible "high". One of the rules for my Athlon build was that it had to have an ISA slot for its sound card for this reason. Some DOS games (especially around 1991-93 when budgets and scope started ballooning but DOS extenders were not yet popular) requited 600kB of conventional memory or even more! Sound Blaster emulation is a *notorious* memory hog and will make some games unplayable.
5. The primary users of this will likely be running old hardware anyway, it will just open up full DOS support to a larger range of old hardware--there were millions and millions of late '90s/early '00s consumer-grade PCs with nothing but motherboard AC97 for audio, and they can be turned into (limited) DOS rigs with SBEMU. It will let your great aunt's old eMachines run Doom (though it won't let it run Wing Commander, TIE Fighter, or Ultima VII). It isn't really worth much of anything on a modern EFI machine.
6. DOSBox already exists and runs old DOS titles *far* better than they could possibly run natively on modern hardware. You can create custom virtual machines to simulate very specific hardware configs required to optimally run finicky titles like Ultima VII and TIE Fighter. It runs under Linux and Mac, it corrects for aspect ratio on widescreen monitors and pixel-scales to an arbitrarily large resolution, it is much easier to configure than a real DOS machine.

Yeah, it's cool, but it's not a revolution, and it's not a replacement for my Athlon, let alone a 386 or 486.

[Lawnie]

Keep up the great work, James! This could fix the shortage of both FPGAs and retro parts in the near future, and prevent people from having to drop a load of money on new equipment.

[missditto]

Came for the DOSBox vs native arguing in the comments. Wasn't disappointed. Or was.

[paulisthebestuk]

Oh wow just tried this on a core i7 laptop. Same method, freedos and now I have a bootable usb pen drive loaded with dos games and almost all of them have full dos sound.😮 Thanks for the video that's pretty incredible. I had no idea this existed

[casualretrocollector]

Finally a solution! I posted a video 2 years ago showing another way of getting sound in dos. But this way is so much easier and works flawlessly! Thanks for the video!

[GeoStreber]

Honestly I don't see the appeal. In a world in which DOSBox exists and offers support for SB, SB32, AWE64, GUS, ...., bothering to run it natively is just redundant.

[MegaManNeo]

This makes me want to try to set up a small USB flash drive with FreeDOS and SBEMU.
The games I played barely depended on SoundBlaster capabilities but I can see this being more excitement than having a DOSbox fork running in a window which I can close all the time.

[actuallynotsteve]

I wasn't aware that we had problems emulating SoundBlaster 16 audio in 2023, but finding out we did and that it's no longer an issue is awesome. Some of my fondest memories are rooted in SB16 and Pentium 1/2 era gaming...back when games were released in a completed state, and you didn't have to worry about patches and updates.

[boot-nrjn]

All hardware will eventually die. How can with keep it alive? Via emulation, software and/or hardware. From the perspective of a hardware collector and preservationist, this is an awesome project that I hope everyone will take into consideration when getting into the hobby. Vintage PC parts are really expensive to get a hold of nowadays so innovations like this will keep the community alive decades from now, especially with SBEMU and many other software and hardware projects being open source!

[PascalBrax]

I love when a new open source project starts being used and promoted. But I'm having a hard time figuring out why this should be better than usin QEMU or DOSbox.

[EsotericArctos]

This is a great advancement, but it won't kill the old DOS Gaming PC's. A lot of people like playing on original hardware, and not emulators.
That said, there is only so much of the old hardware around, and it is increasingly becoming unreliable, and as you mentioned, very expensive.
Thanks for the great video.

[lesr]

Nice, this is fantastic news. Hopefully it'll work well with some of the older thin client boxes that are cheap to pick up.

[damonblade]

It sounds just like my childhood !!! Thankyou !!

[RMCRetro]

Nice! This gives me some ideas for using a few PCs I have kicking around to natively run DOS games nicely, maybe for a LAN party 🤔

[kanetombs]

I grew up in the 90's and had a few consoles but my first love was the potential of pc gaming to the point of obsession. Problem was for many of these old games i didn't have the patience of an adult to take my time, now that i do i find myself really enjoying many old titles in both a sense of nostalgia and a new sense of adventure and purpose to complete these dusty indie titles (most of all when it's 1 am and everyone is asleep and its just me, the game and some crickets outside).

[rkurbatov]

That's a nice addition and good and useful work, but not a breakthrough. I have several retro systems and I love every aspect of them - rare and interesting hardware, real CRT, noise of harddrives and even floppies (even 5.25 inches), old case, old plastic speakers, everything cleaned and properly restored - that gives me that nostalgia feeling and experience I either had or had not. That's the point. Another option is proper emulation with different supported devices that cannot be obtained like GUS, Tandy and so on. SB/Adlib are pretty basic and standard. Third option is playing the remasters of late games. And this driver is just something in-between when you can use real DOS on real but modern PC instead of emulated DOS, having some advantages but with lots of limitations (DOSBox is more powerful) and much less real experience. Because the old game is not only sound but overall feeling.

[gblargg]

Apparently you actually boot the PC into a DOS and run the old games directly on the metal. It wasn't clear whether it was all running in a virtual machine (which of course it can as well). That's impressive.