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Hi!

I am currently having some trouble getting the Sound Blaster Emulation to work. I have downloaded the boot disk and put it on the floppy. Then I restart my computer and the floppy boots up and does everything but at the end it says "error: PCI device detect failed; Device not found. Creative SB16 Emulation Drive NOT loading"
and then leaves me to play my games in silence... The main reason I downloaded the Boot Disk is to play Cybermage: Darklight Awakening smoothly because DOSBox runs it slow under SVGA graphics (but playable under VGA). I would also like to play Doom, Toxic Bunny and Theme Hospital because they all run slow (or not at all) under DOSBox with sound.

I also have a question for the Boot Disk. The Boot Disk doesn't mess around with my WinXP does it? Like overwrite settings when it installs stuff? I don't like messing around with my system because I have no idea what boot disks are. LOL :blink:

I have Windows XP and my sound card is Realtek AC97 Audio.

[Scatty]

No, the boot disc doesn't change anything on the hard drive, all it does is reading data from the floppy. About the card, maybe it's simply incompatible to the old Dos Soundblaster standard, if it's the case you can buy a Creative Soundblaster Live! which offers this compatibility and also has it's own SB Pro / 16 drivers for Dos which work 100% and install automatically but only when you install the Windows drivers for SB Live! in Windows 98. In Windows XP only the regular Windows drivers will be installed.

Oh ok... but isn't it supposed to emulate the drivers and make it work even if I don't have SoundBlaster? It works with DOSBox

I have the driver things in C:\DOSDRV because that's what autoexec.txt says.

So there is no way to get sound with the Boot Disk...?

I'm confused... When it says "This driver emulates sound in DOS mode for newer generation Creative Labs Sound Blasters." does that mean I need newer generation Creative Labs Sound Blasters for the drivers to work? Is there anyway to make it work like DOSBox and get sound?

When it says "All you have to do is copy them to a directory that is specified in autoexec.bat on the floppy!" it seems I don't have autoexec.bat but autoexec.txt. I assume it's the same thing?

[win98]

If it's a text then it wont be a true autoexec file which is used to automatically load programs and some parts of drivers at startup. Looks to me like there is something weird going on with that since it should be autoexec.bat.

[Scatty]

That's probably only a renamed autoexec.bat. Just rename the ending and edit the file to see what's actually standing inside.
About the sound drivers, yes I guess you need a Soundblaster card for the sound emulation, since only Soundblaster cards (like Creative Soundblaster Live!), and not even all of them I think, offer the old Soundblaster standard for Dos.

[Moonypond]

Hello, I decided to register instead of being a guest...

OK I've being searching through the Realtek site and I found this FAQ

# Q3: Would the ALCXXX support DOS mode drivers ?

A3: There are two major components for AC'97 sound cards: AC'97 CODEC and audio controller. Realtek is an AC'97 CODEC manufacturer. The most important part of an AC'97 sound card is the audio controller in the chipsets, provided by the chipset vendor. The integrated sound chip doesn't usually have SB compatible hardware to support DOS games directly. We implement an SB emulation in the DOS prompt of Windows OSes instead. If you want to run a DOS game, please run it in the DOS Box of Windows. It can support almost 90% of popular DOS games (?!?!?). Please type 'set' in DOS box to check what resources you should set for your DOS programs. The resources will be shown as 'BLASTER=Axxx Dx Ix Pxxx'. The compatibility between a DOS driver and a SB emulation in DOS Box of Windows is almost the same because of lack of hardware support. Sorry for the inconvenience caused.[/b]

For some reason this " built in SB Emulation" doesn't work. Would there being any way of having this emulation in DOS by that autoexec (or whatever)? Their site isn't really helpful as it hardly explains anything.

When I try to rename autoexec.txt to autoexec.bat it says a file with the same name exists and tells me to use a different file name... :blink:

[horrorist]

QUOTE(Moonypond @ Jan 13 2007, 06:35 AM) [snapback]274686[/snapback]

For some reason this " built in SB Emulation" doesn't work. Would there being any way of having this emulation in DOS by that autoexec (or whatever)?

When I try to rename autoexec.txt to autoexec.bat it says a file with the same name exists and tells me to use a different file name... :blink:
[/b]

I have a SB- Life! 5 and I did not find any SB 16 emulation either. I remember the SB 128, I had before, worked fine. It was easy to define IRQ, DMA and E/A- Range for DOS or Win. The automatic SB 16 emulation, Scatty mentioned, well I did not found it, yet. Maybe they removed it though it is Life! 5 not Life! 1.
Using Win 9X, you allready have (at least) one autoexec.bat in the root directory of your start partition, because this is used, when you boot your system. Win9X still uses a DOS- kernel (WinNT/ 2000/ XP does not). Usually the autoexec.bat and the config.sys are "hidden". I would guess it's also set to "hidden" on the floppy. WinXP has the slight tendency to hide everythyng which could be helpfull for the user to gain any knowledge about his system. If you like to view or change a .bat- (batch-) file you can also right click it and choose "view", the third thingy from above, if available, or open a notepad window and drag and drop the batch- file into it. It is strongly recommended to keep a copy of the original autoexec.bat in order to restore the default values. Just rename the original autoexec.bat to autoexec.bak (backup).

[Japo]

I don't think you need to rename anything, you've got your autoexec.bat and it doesn't matter if there's a autoexec.txt in the same floppy. The error you got at first is an evidence that the drivers were trying to load, it seems that you followed the procedure right.

Newest sound cards don't support SB16 emulation. I don't know which card was the last to support it, but just like Strachwitz I had a SBPCI128 and it worked swell in DOS once I managed to configure it. Maybe your card doesn's support SB16 emulation, although that's not what I imply from your quote from the Realtek FAQ. Maybe you have the wrong drivers (is your card a PCI one?). I don't know.

DOSBox is different, it emulates all hardware from the very start and that's why it can work always, but that's why it's so slow.

To play DOOM there's a special program, ZDaemon, which will be faster I think.