I just shared this as a news item on the website, but this comes up from time to time on the list and elsewhere, so I wanted to share here too:
If you run FreeDOS (or any DOS) on real hardware, you will have problems getting sound to work with DOS games. That's because DOS doesn't have a 'hardware abstraction layer' like modern operating systems; DOS programs talked to the hardware directly, which is why you had to tell each game about your sound card. But since about 1997, PC hardware moved to Intel audio, so games that used SoundBlaster for sound won't work. That's why you need SBEMU .. or Japheth's fork, VSBHDA .. to emulate SoundBlaster. Now there's a fork of VSBHDA that "adds support for using soundfonts for MPU-401 emulation using TinySoundFont, and properly fixes it to make it work with games like Duke Nukem 3D." But it requires a lot of memory; from the website: "Requirements remain the exact same as upstream VSBHDA, except it now requires potentially 128MB of XMS memory for soundfont functionality." * SBEMU https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU * VSBHDA https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA * VSBHDASF https://github.com/Cacodemon345/VSBHDASF
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