Hi everyone, A few months ago, John W. Ratcliff released the sources of most of the DIGPAK DOS sound drivers on GitHub. He wrote those drivers in the '90s and used to license them commercially under the name The Audio Solution.
DIGPAK drivers are used in many DOS games, and provide hardware abstraction to software developers through a well-documented INT 66h API. A few days ago, he clarified the license terms under which he was releasing this code. He has chosen to release it under the MIT License. His repository can be found here: https://github.com/jratcliff63367/oldsource It would be great if we could include these drivers in the FreeDOS distribution, and perhaps also use them as a basis for the development of DOS drivers for more modern audio hardware. Unfortunately, these drivers have been written in TASM Ideal mode dialect. To my knowledge, there are currently no open source assemblers in existence that can build such sources. Would anybody here care to help "fully liberate" these assembly sources by porting them to another dialect, such as regular MASM (that can be built with WASM or JWASM) or NASM? I know that VBE/AI is considered a more modern DOS sound API to standardize on for DOS driver development, but at least the DIGPAK drivers are already out there, and now with sources too. Also, one of the DIGPAK drivers in these sources is a wrapper around VBE/AI, which would be particularly useful, since it would allow possible future VBE/AI drivers to be made to work with many existing games. I've gained some experience from trying to port the sources of Virtual Sound Blaster (VSB) from TASM to other assembly dialects, and although I haven't been successful with that, I have gained some experience from it. With some help from other more experienced assembly coders here, I believe I can be more successful porting these drivers. Who's up for helping me with this? Your help would be greatly appreciated. :)
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