So has anyone successfully tested an X-Fi card yet? Do they work?
I have an "XtremeGamer" in an old PC, could pop it in, see if it does anything...
Should be EMU20K1 according to wikipedia. Haven't used it in years, I believe it was crashing Windows with Creative's awful drivers.
Could get CD audio through it if I understood right.

I've also been testing with Realtek ALC898 and a lot of games work pretty well when the rest of the hardware allows! Might post a list later.

feda wrote on 2024-08-23, 01:54:

So has anyone successfully tested an X-Fi card yet? Do they work?

The GitHub page says: Source code exists, but "doesn't work yet". The driver appears to have been ported from Linux.

Can anyone post here a compiled version of SBEMU 1.0.0-beta.5?

krotan wrote on 2024-08-23, 11:43:

Can anyone post here a compiled version of SBEMU 1.0.0-beta.5?

vico wrote on 2024-08-23, 15:33:

krotan wrote on 2024-08-23, 11:43:

Can anyone post here a compiled version of SBEMU 1.0.0-beta.5?

Thanks to for alles member ! I in the case collect the versions 😀

vico wrote on 2024-08-23, 15:33:

krotan wrote on 2024-08-23, 11:43:

Can anyone post here a compiled version of SBEMU 1.0.0-beta.5?

@kroton Weren't you able to download it directly from the release page on GitHub? It's right there at the bottom of the page, under "Assets".

Please let me know if that download isn't working, for whatever reason. Thanks.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-08-20, 05:03:

It might be worthwhile to make sbemu 'multi cpu aware', just to saddle core 1 (and not core 0) with such servicing.

That would require the implementation of a multi-core process scheduler in SBEMU. At that point, we'd be basically turning SBEMU into a mini-OS. Although it's an intriguing idea to unlock the unused core(s) of modern multi-core CPUs in DOS, it would blow up the scope of the SBEMU project considerably. Perhaps if an EMM manager such as Jemm could be extended to offer multi-core support, and expose such functionality through some sort of DOS API, that could be a way for SBEMU and other emulators to tap into such functionality.

Even on single core systems, if you can get 2 lpt ports, (consuming both irqs 5 and 7), then covox speech can be on lpt1 and opl3lpt can live on lpt2.

Yeah, I'd very much like to see support for such parallel port devices in SBEMU. But at some point, wouldn't it all become too big to integrate into a single emulator? Perhaps at that point it might be worth considering spinning off SBEMU into such a sound "redirector" project that would redirect sound and music to other device types, as opposed to emulating such devices completely in software. Either that, or make SBEMU more modular, with the ability to have it load different output/backend drivers, as needed. A GitHub issue already exists for this.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-08-21, 12:39:

I am curious what porting method was used for linux kernel driver integration.

I'd want to try integrating intel_sst and intel_sst_acpi, to see if I can get my baytrail audio turned on.

A "porting guide" for sound drivers from the Linux kernel has been requested in this GitHub topic. jiyunomegami, who introduced the first ported Linux drivers in the SBEMU project, replied in that issue thread with quite useful pointers and information, which should provide you with a decent starting point. By the way, any additional info and examples that anybody could contribute in that thread would be absolutely welcome! 🙏🏽

There was some successfull attempt to enable multicore under dos, it needs programming the APIC. It seems not so hard to start another core with some simple code but sharing resources would.be harder. Afaik it didn't result in any usefull dos program that would use it. But in case of sbemu i think that multicore CPUs has enough power to run sbemu and old dos apps anyway...

RayeR wrote on 2024-08-24, 23:10:

There was some successfull attempt to enable multicore under dos, it needs programming the APIC. It seems not so hard to start another core with some simple code but sharing resources would.be harder. Afaik it didn't result in any usefull dos program that would use it. But in case of sbemu i think that multicore CPUs has enough power to run sbemu and old dos apps anyway...

I guess one useful way to a separate (otherwise idle) secondary core would be to have it emulate hardware DMA operations for output devices that lack any kind of DMA, notably parallel port devices such as LPT DACs (Covox Speech Thing and such). So dedicate such a core to reading the area in RAM that the emulated sound card would be reading through the DMA controller, and sending the stream out through direct I/O. On the other hand, having a dedicated core just for emulating an OPL2 or OPL3 chip would be cool too. Ditto for emulating a Roland MT-32 or a wavetable synthesizer. On systems with sufficiently fast single-core performance, it might not add any performance benefit, but perhaps there are some earlier generation dual core systems that this would help with?

I don't know, perhaps any dual core system is already more than fast enough to emulate all of that stuff on a single core, while still having more than enough CPU cycles left on that same core to spare to run the actual game. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Updated compatibility report, I noticed an issue (no sound) with 1.0 beta 4 on the Jetway J7F2 (VT8237R+) reported on GitHub in crazii/SBEMU#112.
I just re-tested mine (the same system as before) and it works fine in 1.0 beta 4 and 1.0 beta 5, both real mode (Wolf3D) and protected mode (Doom).

Thanks for (re)testing that, jtchip. Can you maybe share those findings in that GitHub thread as well? Thank you. 🙏🏽

digger wrote on 2024-08-26, 11:25:

Thanks for (re)testing that, jtchip. Can you maybe share those findings in that GitHub thread as well? Thank you. 🙏🏽

I posted it here, hoping to avoid having to create yet another GitHub account 😀 It was mainly so that crazii doesn't chase down a potentially non-existent bug.
This brings a wider question though (mainly for the mods), as this thread is very long, should SBEMU (and VSBHDA) have its own forum section here? Perhaps widen the scope of the VDMSound section, which isn't as active these days, to "sound emulation".

It would likely make more sense to rename MIDI Emulation to Sound Emulation than to mess with VDMSound, VDMSound was moved to Magrathea since development stopped on it.
or
move this thread to PC Emulation.

digger wrote on 2024-08-24, 13:09:

Please let me know if that download isn't working

I can't download either SBEMU.zip or SBEMU-FD13-USB.img.xz from there. Maybe because I have Windows XP.

It depends on your browser. Github became f*cked up with tons of JS and download doesn't longer work in old browsers but if you use some newer like Mypal or Supermium under WXP you'll be able to download it 😀

Thanks, I'll try.

A bit of an off-topic tangent:

As much as I understand the nostalgic appeal, I strongly recommend against accessing the internet from Windows XP. That OS hasn't received security updates in over a decade. And neither Chrome nor Firefox support it anymore, so you can't get up-to-date versions of popular browsers for it anymore. Even the r3dfox fork doesn't officially support XP.

Are you at the very least using Windows Embedded POSReady 2009? Because at least that variant of Windows XP continued to get updates until 2019.

Seriously though, don't use outdated operating systems to browse the internet. Even much newer operating systems have had to be patched against remotely exploitable vulnerabilities.

I guess you can substantially reduce the risk by disabling JavaScript, but then you still have other vulnerabilities to worry about, on top of the fact that most websites won't work. Why even bother?

Yes I use WXP embedded with latest available patches. I have disabled network ports and services that are not used. Hehe I guess that most current viruses and rootkits are compiled for w10/11 and even couldn't run under WXP 😀 (who would bother with targetring ant testing it for XP as very minor plaform now? Except NSA, e.t.c. who need to hit very specific targets in inustrial env. that could still run XP)...

DosFreak wrote on 2024-08-26, 23:14:

It would likely make more sense to rename MIDI Emulation to Sound Emulation than to mess with VDMSound, VDMSound was moved to Magrathea since development stopped on it.

Thanks for replying, renaming MIDI Emulation to Sound Emulation sounds sensible. Then the discussion could be split into bug reports, feature requests, development, etc. and the discussion of downloading from GitHub using old, unsupported operating systems moved to a different sub-forum 😀

crazii wrote on 2023-03-05, 06:13:

SBEMU-1.0beta4.zip

If beta 5 is released you can update OP