Hi Gino! > I've been using FreeDOS for a while and it works great.
Nice :-) > I'd like to write an Intel HDA driver for SCI games (Sierra quests). > Ok, they work great under Dosbox, but I still prefer using plain DOS. You could at least use dosemu :-p Much faster :-) > I consider myself a good programmer, but I've never made any low-level > programming or debug DOS programs. Which programming languages do you write? At least part of your driver can be written in C, but you might need Assembly language as well, in particular if you want to take the tough route of creating universal virtual hardware instead of a Sierra driver. For debugging, I recommend using DOSEMU or, for even more lowlevel stuff, BOCHS, but you can also try 386SWAT in pure DOS, maybe :-) > Is there any book or information on the net I can start with? Creating virtual hardware can be very hard, but if I understand you correctly, Sierra games already have some sort of interface for loading custom sound drivers? Then you can split your task in two parts: Write something which makes any sound on HDA and can be run from the command line. And write something which does anything with the sound sent by a Sierra game and which can be loaded as a Sierra driver. For example the latter can blink some pixels on your screen or can use the PC speaker (port 61h) - any noticeable activity will be enough to show you that your Sierra driver does properly receive sound data from your game... The command line thing could for example be based on MPXPLAY sources and can play any simple noise you want - a sine, maybe with some frequency sweep over time, will do perfectly :-). Eric PS: You can have a look at the sources of the ancient VSB virtual sound blaster to see how complicated it is to create some virtual hardware for SB1/SB2. Or look at the sources of DOSEMU to see how a proper virtual SB16 can be implemented in C. Of course DOSEMU uses Linux to send sound to your hardware and to trap I/O access of DOS, so it only shows the "middle" part of what a virtual soundblaster for DOS will need... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
