[Freedos-user] Re: Re: Question: How to use CMedia CM8738 sound in DOS?

[Eric A. <eric@CoLi.Uni-SB.DE>]

Hi Johnson, cmedia.com.tw tells that their CM8737 chip has a "great"
SB16 emulation, including DMA... However, I now downloaded the newest
DOS driver from them, told my BIOS to force the IRQ to 5..10 range (so
the interrupt redirector part of the CMedia DOS driver is not needed),
and read the promise in their documentation that BOTH 8bit and 16bit
DMA are supported in DOS compatible way. I found that I had to throttle
the CPU speed from 800 to 100 MHz for some DOS games, to avoid runtime
error 200 and timeouts during SoundBlaster detection...

Still, only Adlib and NON-DMA (but at least that, nice for MOD players)
SoundBlaster DSP access work. Trying to do real DSP DMA access gives
me everything between DMA failure, SB16 detection failure, looping of
the first 0.x seconds of the intended sound, and creative silence (TM).
Better than the noise which you get when trying to use DMA 1 for both
the 8- and the 16-bit DMA, I guess.

So there have been some improvements during my experiments, but I can
still only hear DSP DMA based sound in DOSEmu, which simulates a SB16,
while that CMedia chip just fails to do what is promised that it would
be able to do.

Well... does any of the readers have a CMedia based soundcard or on-
board sound system which DOES work right in DOS, or can anybody tell
me some nice PCI soundcard which works really okay in DOS? How about
those fancy SBPCI / SBLive DOS drivers, are they stable with most DOS
programs? Or the VIA onboard AC97 with SB16 emulation mode maybe?

Sooner or later I will want a non-ISA motherboard with WORKING DOS sound,
but for now I guess I will just have to repair my K6-2 500 system, which
has ISA, PCI and AGP slots (!) :-|.

Eric