On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 8:28 PM Eric Auer <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Also, you do not want to write a DOS driver for AC97
> or HDA sound, because sound drivers are not part of
> DOS: They are part of the games and very few games
> let you replace their sound drivers with your own.
>

Actually, there are actually quite a few DOS games that used sound drivers
that you could replace, notably Miles (AIL), DIGIPAK/MIDPAK, etc.

There is also the VBE/AI standard, which is an extension to he VESA VBE
(int 10h) API to offer a hardware-indepenent audio interface.
Unfortunately, this standard never gained any traction, since it arrived on
the market too late (in 1994), but there are shims/wrappers available to
allow VBE/AI drivers to be used by games that use AIL2 or DIGPAK/MIDPAK
drivers.

My goal has been to use Jeff Leyda's Intel ICHx AC'97 audio player code as
a basis for developing an open source VESA VBE/AI sound driver that could
be shipped with FreeDOS, as a way to kickstart the adoption of VBE/AI as
"the" audio driver standard for FreeDOS, going forward. An audio driver
standard has been on the FreeDOS wishlist for quite some time now:
http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/(Free)DOS_development_wishlist

Anyway, if anybody would like to help me out with my driver, I would
appreciate that. I'm still working on the first "phase", namely adding
compatibility with more on-board AC'97 devices, before building a VBE/AI
driver around it. Link to the project page:
https://github.com/volkertb/ich2player

If this successful, perhaps we can start developing a VBE/AI driver for
Intel HDA (and compatible) devices, as well as other more modern and common
sound devices.

Speaking of VBE/AI, do any of you happen to know who has the source code of
the released VBE/AI drivers (for Adlib, Sound Blaster, Pro Audio Spectrum
and Disney Sound Source), and has the rights ro release them as open
source? That way, we would start out with a list of already supported sound
card and audio devices to ship with FreeDOS.
_______________________________________________
Freedos-devel mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel

Reply via email to