On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 4:43 PM Eric Auer <[email protected]> wrote:
> > While you are creating that very promising VBE/AI AC97 > driver, do you have a list of games which support that > interface or which support miles / ail / digipak / midipak > replaceable sound drivers or docs about the driver format? > > Thank you :-) Someone posted a fairly extensive list on the VOGONS forum here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=39270&p=358631&hilit=bristlehog+miles#p357303 The list is grouped in sub-lists per modular audio driver standard. The first one, "*Audio Interface Library and MIDPAK - ADV drivers*", is the list of games that (at least in theory) can be made to work with VBE/AI, using the aforementioned shim/wrapper drivers. As you can see, it's quite an extensive list. I've successfully tested this with Dune II a while back. (NOTE: AIL2 and ADV are the same driver standard, both by John Miles of Miles Design.) Also, back in the '90s, I used the same trick to add Gravis Ultrasound support to games that didn't support that card out-of-the-box. Gravis actually made the Miles/AIL and DIGPAK/MIDPAK drivers available on their FTP site, so customers could "patch" existing games with those drivers themselves. Usually you'd have to replace the Sound Blaster (DAC) and General MIDI (music) drivers and then select those in the setup program. Although in the came of DIGPAK/MIDPAK, I think you could also just load the drivers before starting the game, since they were TSRs, not unlike how VBE/AI works. One current challenge is that I don't know who has the source code to the shim/wrapper drivers that allow those games to work with VBE/AI drivers. That's a shame, since it would be really nice to have those shipped with FreeDOS as well. John Miles released the source code to his AIL2 drivers years ago and you can still download them from his page, but unfortunately the VBE/AI shim/wrapper drivers aren't included in those sources. Those drivers were written a few years later. I emailed John Miles about it, and he was quick and friendly in his reply, but unfortunately he had no idea who wrote those drivers. I'm specifically talking about the source code to VESADIG.ADV and the VESAMID.ADV. My guess would be that someone at Media Vision wrote those driver, since thatś company was the main backer of the VBE/AI standard, obviously in an attempt to break Creative Lab's dominance over the DOS sound card market. The VBE/AI specification can be found in a PDF document on-line, and in one of the first pages it lists a committee of members from different companies who worked on this standard. I'm not sure what the status of that document is, since the VESA organization usually charges money for specification documents. On the other hand, this is a defunct standard, so that may not apply to this particular document. If anybody reading this happens to have any information on this topic (the VBE/AI standard in general, the source code of the wrapper drivers for other more popular DOS audio driver models, etc), please chime in!
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