SBEMU icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
SBEMU copied to clipboard
verified publisher icon crazii

Sound Blaster Live features

Open dbenoy opened this issue 2 years ago • 3 comments

The FM synth from this software is much better than the official Sound Blaster Live DOS drivers, and those drivers require supported (older) motherboards to work, so this is great work thank you!

But there are a few key features missing that would make it a better replacement. Since, unsurprisingly, both drivers don't seem to coexist at once. It would be nice if SBEMU also:

  • Turned on the CD audio to support games like Quake and Warcraft II (SC_SBLIV.C line 422 is the area if I'm not mistaken? It might just need 'AC97_CD_VOL' to be set, as well?)
  • Forwarded the game port to the device (I peeked at the gameport driver in the Linux kernel. I'm not very experienced with this but from what I can tell, it provides a bidirectional IO port that behaves exactly the same as the classic gameport IO port 201h, so it'd just be a matter of forwarding it unchanged, I think?)
  • Supported MIDI? Just accessing it through a GP->MIDI adapter would be nice, but maybe it'd be possible to cram MUNT into here and have MT-32 support too?

Perhaps these things should be their own software, like GPEMU for game ports (possibly to support USB ones in the future?) and MIDIEMU for a MIDI card? Or maybe they should all be inside SBEMU?

I'd like to help out but I'm not sure how to build the source. Can you provide some instructions?

Also I see MPXPLAY supports Sound Blaster X-Fi. I have one of these cards, so perhaps I could help testing that. Not sure what's involved with supporting an additional card.

dbenoy avatar Mar 18 '23 20:03 dbenoy

Sorry for spamming this project's issues, but CD audio support is implemented in SBEMU-X, I have verified it working on SIS7012, but haven't tried it on other cards (but I assume it's working), would be great if you could test on the SB Live:

Documentation: https://github.com/sbemu-x/sbemu-x#cd-audio Build with CD-Audio support: https://github.com/sbemu-x/sbemu-x/releases/tag/2023-10-20

The "sbemu-x.exe" should be used as a drop-in replacement for sbemu.exe.

Note that you DO need the analog CD-Audio cable going from the CD-ROM drive to your sound card, this just unmutes CD-Audio, everything else is handled by the card and MSCDEX.

PR for this upstream project: #36

thp avatar Oct 24 '23 20:10 thp

Game port - as you mention probably a good fit for USBDDOS

MIDI - one part of it is SoftMPU, so: sbemu-x/sbemu-x/issues/5 and Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA/issues/5. Since SoftMPU uses DOSbox code, I assume more of it can be lifted to match latest capabilities of X and Staging.

Torinde avatar Dec 10 '23 17:12 Torinde

About the Joystick - the website focused on Win3.1 drivers has some Joystick items with source code (if I'm not mistaken):

Torinde avatar Dec 30 '23 22:12 Torinde