SBEMU Just Killed Your DOS Gaming PC
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- Опубликовано: 5 сен 2024
- SBEMU is a new DOS program that emulates a Sound Blaster card. It uses its own sound handling code to playback DOS game audio natively on modern hardware - magic!
If you have an Intel ICH chipset or Intel High Definition audio, it should just work.
Amazing work by crazii. You can grab SBEMU here:
github.com/cra...
Keeping and restoring vintage hardware should never go away, but hopefully this alternative will make the former more affordable.
Agreed!
It will allow you to hit the "sweet spot" when it comes to the cheapest used retro hardware - before sbemu, the only way to get proper sound output in an MS-DOS game was to have a PC with an ISA slot and an appropriate sound card. Those are the PCs and motherboards that now sell for a premium price and are getting so old now that you probably have to start replacing blown capacitors on many of them.
Now you can use sbemu to simply emulate ISA slot sound cards on a newer PC with no ISA slots.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 As an added bonus, you could put the money saved towards a powerhouse GPU for modern games!
@@falcon-ng6sd That won't be happening. The last AAA game I bought was pre-2010 except for Fallout 4.
Paying $80 a pop for "games as a service" "just another Unreal Engine asset flip" that will be finished after 18 months of buyng more DLC for it is not my definition of "fun".
I am already sticking a GTX960 and two GTX750TI cards on eBay because NVIDIA is a heap of sh1t on Linux, which is the only OS I use since Windows 7 died anyway.
No, sir. When mummy and daddy buy their gamer-brat an expensive new GPU for Christmas, I'll be there eagerly awaiting on eBay to buy their old AMD GPU at a bargain price - at least they work in Linux.
Not clickbaity enough; try harder!
DOSBox is out there since 2002. So... You could always play DOS Games on modern PC's. You can even route the MIDI Music to Windows and using COOLSOFT Midi Mapper and MIDI Synth to load SFZ Banks to improve Music quality.
Yeah,i honestly dont get it either. There are also OPL emulators as midi devices. This seems to be really some nieche thing. I am 42 btw. I lived through the DOS era. Dosbox always felt like the real thing. Sure, if you insist on the least amount of emulation then this is nice for you. But saying this is a game changer? No. sorry.
I suspect the REAL point of this is that it allows us to use an SB emulator in REAL DOS, on modern bare metal systems. DOSBox may well be a thing, as are countless other emulation options, but having support on modern, bare metal systems means that it removes the need to run 20+ year old hardware to have the requisite support for ISA cards, and also the need for the increasingly expensive ISA sound cards in the first place.
It's the difference between a fully emulated system in something like DOSBox, and only partial emulation on a modern DOS like FreeDOS. Additionally, combined with the extremely low (read: basically non-existent) overhead on something like FreeDOS vs Windows, means that you can likely use every bit of spare power for the best quality emulations of OPL2/OPL3 FM chips, as well as the best quality emulation of other needed hardware.
Combine this with a memory resident version of MUNT, and you can basically cover 90% or more of the entire DOS library with one system, barring compatibility issues like games with logic tied to CPU speed.
This means you can run DOS on modern PC instead of oldschool retro PC. There is also a PCem project which makes real emulation, not that dosbox visualization thing. But PCem is slow. If one can run DOS on real machine and manage somehow processor speed, that will be a game-changer. Even running in virtual machine like VirtualBox would be nice.
I was born in 90 and didn't have an own PC till I was 11 or so.. it sad that I missed most of the dos era
@@Xmaster1990 born in 2005 here, I feel the same way except I missed out on the ENTIRE old internet
Honestly I don't see the appeal. In a world in which DOSBox exists and offers support for SB, SB32, AWE64, GUS,...., bothering to run it natively is just redundant.
For me it's a nice addition to my DOS VirtualBox VM. Not everyone wants to use the pseudo-DOS that is embedded in DosBox. I prefer to have a custom built system in a VM. Also, with a VM you run things on the actual CPU, not software emulated. Performance is so much better.
@@lordwiadro83 I really disagree with this. You 100% are able to customize dosbox to your hearts content. Hardware these days can easily run any dos program or dos in disbox itself without breaking a sweat. Running it directly on the cpu or emulated has such a marginal difference as to be unnoticeable
@@firmyth Nothing is more customizable than a system that you build yourself. And good luck running late DOS games at high resolutions in DosBox.
@@lordwiadro83 what do you mean? With disbix you customize with a few commands- with a physical box you have e to actually find, buy, build, troubleshoot hardware etc... and in dosbox I have never had an issue running at any resolution- not to mention dos programs would never run higher than say 1024x768 anyway... not sure what kind of gotcha you thought you were saying there
I love DOSBox. But I also love real hardware 😎
This also potentially opens up windows 95 games as well since the sound portion is now covered with this project. If we could do the same for true color graphics and glide interpretation on either the CPU side or a basic driver layer for graphics card then that is almost every base covered for vintage PC gaming.
See, I would love to see someone put this together with a basic installer package for Windows 95 or 98, so you can run older OSes on modern PCs with as little needed tinkering as possible.
3.x is the most immediate possibility with this kind of a solution, of course, but there are a lot of 9x games that would benefit immensely from better accessibility on modern hardware.
Googling a bit, it seems there was a software 3DFx emulator project done by some Russian(?) guy many-many years ago (search for "3Dfx Emulator v0.2 from ELZ SOFTWARE"). Unfortunately the download is unavailable now. But it would be an interesting feat to emulate a 3DFx card in a similar way as SBEMU does with the audio portion. Since there's no such thing as DOS driver for modern 3D cards to translate calls directly, I guess the easiest would be to just do software rendering on the CPU into hires SVGA with UNIVBE. For 2D there's VBEMP which does something similar to drive modern VGA adapters with vintage Windows versions. There's a Mesa3D software renderer for it, maybe OpenGLide can run on top of it somehow?
Here me out. New games
@@trueKENTUCKY Eh, yes and no. While new games just work out of the box if you aren't Bethesda, older games from around this era often don't get remade or rereleased which leaves them in a state where they become lost forever and there are still games from this period that haven't even been rereleased yet, like interstate '76 or the early MechWarrior games that are almost impossible to play. It's projects like this that help aid in the historical preservation efforts of these games otherwise they become lost to time.
the majority of these run on your modern system with dgvoodoo2 (some might need a few compatibility flags)
Came for the DOSBox vs native arguing in the comments. Wasn't disappointed. Or was.
It’s all out war! I had no idea 😂
This makes me want to try to set up a small USB flash drive with FreeDOS and SBEMU.
The games I played barely depended on SoundBlaster capabilities but I can see this being more excitement than having a DOSbox fork running in a window which I can close all the time.
me too, never free unused, USB drive when you need one 😞
Hipsters = full usbs XD
I love when a new open source project starts being used and promoted. But I'm having a hard time figuring out why this should be better than usin QEMU or DOSbox.
@@1pcfred i remember going to the mall and paying like $60 for a Red Hat Linux box with 6 cd-rom inside. 😅
@@PascalBrax I bought a Red Hat 5 boxed set myself. I turned that into the first embedded Linux distro. It sucked so bad I threw it and it stuck in the wall. Never get the .0 release!
Agreed - it's great to see an new emulation option out there, but DOS gaming hasn't been held back for decades. If this were for Windows 95/98 era games I'd be much more excited.
I came here to see if anyone has made this comment. I have been using DOSbox for years.
Yeah DOSbox, does SB emulation and allows MSCDEX use for CD Rom games also
All hardware will eventually die. How can with keep it alive? Via emulation, software and/or hardware. From the perspective of a hardware collector and preservationist, this is an awesome project that I hope everyone will take into consideration when getting into the hobby. Vintage PC parts are really expensive to get a hold of nowadays so innovations like this will keep the community alive decades from now, especially with SBEMU and many other software and hardware projects being open source!
sad but true as it integrating with the sound card (the bit that makes the sound noises, and even on moden systen there will plenty of head room, could not mix in some orthentic old timer pc sound play at tha prorate time Hard disc clicks jet engine fans at intense time, and anything else Pc make sounds come from old PC kit?
this is fine, as long as the schematics are kept alive the hardware can be recreated perfectly using FPGAs.. well, sort of fine.
Apparently you actually boot the PC into a DOS and run the old games directly on the metal. It wasn't clear whether it was all running in a virtual machine (which of course it can as well). That's impressive.
That’s right! This is native DOS, with sound, on a modern PC :-)
Glad we can keep playing DOS games “on the metal” for some more years to come :-)
@@jamesfmackenzie why is that better than dosbox? genuinely asking
@@jamesfmackenzie your still gonna run intro problems due to the modern hardware being many orders of magnitude faster than the hardware most DOS games where conceived for, and that renders a huge chunk of games completely unplayable unless you also severely underclock your CPU... and that may also cause system instability because modern CPUs are simply not built to run at 33/66MHz (which is already too fast for most 80s games).
Basically more hassle than Dosbox for the same experience.
@@laci272 It's not.
I wasn't aware that we had problems emulating SoundBlaster 16 audio in 2023, but finding out we did and that it's no longer an issue is awesome. Some of my fondest memories are rooted in SB16 and Pentium 1/2 era gaming...back when games were released in a completed state, and you didn't have to worry about patches and updates.
and DLCs 😂
I miss that Era. Games were fully functional before the customer got in. No patches, no updates, no dlc, no bs. Games just worked!
@@dude60415 You and me both, I loved knowing that everything I ever needed to care about was on the disc or cart already.
we did not have a problem we had dos box since 2002 it runs dox on windows many programs to help it as well try dos box with d-fend reloaded is very user friendly easy an you dont need a bootable usb
@@dude60415 Except they didn't.
If I run Duke Nukem 3D off of the CD the games crashes near the sewer part in the 2nd level, there are several bugs regarding difficulty levels and enemy behaviours in Blood without the patches, to get my 3DFX Voodoo 3 working with Need for Speed III I need to apply some community fix, otherwise it's software mode only. And God forbid you try to play some early 90's or late 80's games with a slightly too fast cpu.
Good with alternatives, but I will stick with my dos rig.
There is always a place for real old hardware. I have lots 😎
Keep up the great work, James! This could fix the shortage of both FPGAs and retro parts in the near future, and prevent people from having to drop a load of money on new equipment.
Thanks Lawnie! 100% agree - this opens up options, and that can only be a good thing 😎
I don't quite understand what's going on. Why aren't people just using DOSBox?
@@Thornskade This actually sounds more akin to the long abandoned VDMSound.
@@RodBeauvex I don't even understand what you're trying to tell me
@@Thornskade Exactly what I was thinking.
It's like some people are living in a parallel universe where dosbox doesn't exist.
Edit: just googled it and found a reddit post shitting on this clickbait video.
This is a great advancement, but it won't kill the old DOS Gaming PC's. A lot of people like playing on original hardware, and not emulators.
That said, there is only so much of the old hardware around, and it is increasingly becoming unreliable, and as you mentioned, very expensive.
Thanks for the great video.
I would rather emulate a sound cards and play on a cheap and available motherboard, then spend out the ass for proper Era accurate hardware. It's still bare metal; it's just the sound. Another option is to add an isa card with the lpc bus.
A bit behind on this video, but I'll comment anyway.
SBEMU is a DOS Gaming PC killer? So was VDMSound, DOSBox, WHDLoad and Bochs. I am sure I missed a few others, but point stands; when these tools released each claimed to end the retro PC idea, but those retro PCs are still being built and bought. For us that don't currently have the money though, or willing to be seen in your local thrift store, recycle center or dump; these tools are great.
While attempting to get to the "bare metal" as closely as possible to play these old DOS gems is the best possible path for an enjoyable experience, SBEMU at least for me, is not my choice and doesn't have the feature set for my personal vast library of DOS games requires. I have managed to hold on to 99% of the DOS software I had growing up. My father was also an avid video game nerd and we both amassed a large library of games and his occupation the US Air Force afforded us the opportunity to even invest in some things the average gamer has. I also have a set library of installed games, ready to be used with DOSBox and its flavors. I am currently on DOSBox-ECE and so far, for me it, it is the best flavor I have used this far. I am on Arch Linux and couldn't be happier.
I have watched from the VOGONS board and have had interest a slight bit in the SBEMU project. However, I don't think I will actually be using it.
No Roland Sound Canvas support is a problem for me. I prefer the DOS environment DOSBox emulates to allow me to setup the MIDI and OPL of Rolland instead; All my MIDI is piped through it and sounds much better.
No Gravis support. One day, while poking around a computer shop, the owner (whom I got to know as helped me, with my father tagging along, pick parts for my first computer that I would build on my own. 1992 and 10 years old was a good year for me) He had an extra Sound Canvas set he suggested I take home and try using. I already had a couple games that were designed with it in mind. I had it for a few weeks and was about to return it, but a series of unfortunate events for that owner forced him to close shop and we lost contact with him. So I kept it.
For me, I don't think I will be using SBEMU as a daily driver any time soon. What I am excited about is that Sound Blaster emulation might be more efficient than what is in the DOSBOX main code that it borrowed from anyway. It has already made its way back into DOSBox Staging.
In the end, what is going to win over a user's preference is the ease of setup and joy they get out of it. My computer is not 8 years old. I haven't kept up on the update path I was supposed to, half those 8 years has been spent in poor job prospects, pandemic, job loss and inflation. This next year however, I am building a new computer and might be switching to PCem to emulate hardware and get closer to a "real machine". Why am I doing this as I mentioned you can still get that old hardware? Space. I don't live in a large enough place yet. Also in Las Vegas, most of the retro hardware is gone and the dump doesn't allow people to sift through it.
the nostalgia and fun of playing with the real metal will always be there, but if there's one software that's made me feel like it's a DOS Gaming PC Killer it's PCem, the support and capabilities it has are just out of this world
Both PCem and DosBox have input lag. I play action games, so a bare metal solution like sbemu is godsend.
Having said that I love PCem because of all the flexibility it affords for win95, win98se even dos specially with 3DC.
@@championman7992 No doubt. Bare metal is the best solution, but not available to everyone. A stronger CPU I have noticed with DOSBox allows for twitch responses. So far, with my setup, I haven't noticed much in the way of lag. I am on an i5-660K, no overclocking and low latency RAM. But, I am also on an Arch Linux system for the last year and a half, so... that may also have something to do with it. Once I am employed though, I would like to invest in a machine for DOS gaming. We will see ;)
@@championman7992 I've yet to see any input lag in either of those, that being said I'm rocking an 11th gen i9, so I'm sure that's got something to do with it
It sounds just like my childhood !!! Thankyou !!
This absolutely does not make old hardware obsolete, for many reasons:
1. EFI systems may not be fully IBM compatible, which means bad news under DOS, Windows NT (2000, XP, 7, 10, 11, etc.) uses a virtual machine where the DOS program has no direct hardware access, EFI systems also do not support the floppy drive interface, and DOS is severely limited without a floppy drive or hardware floppy emulator. If you want a BIOS system, you're looking at a motherboard that is 10 years old or more.
2. For many people, historically accurate experiences are an end in themselves, including the experience of building and using the computer. Sure, I could use a floppy emulator in my Athlon, but I have real floppy drives in both 3.5" and 5.25". I could use a generic $10 SATA optical drive with an adapter, but I scored a very early DVD-ROM drive made for a beige Mac with an old-school ATAPI interface and a '90s aesthetic. I could use any random 4:3 LCD monitor with a VGA output, but I use a 21" Trinitron that weighs over 80 pounds. I could just have the Athlon and be done with it, but I'm also building a 200 MHz Pentium Pro machine.
3. Some games have specific hardware requirements other than a Sound Blaster, like a processor that runs in a certain range of acceptable speed (like Wing Commander and Descent), weird video modes, etc. SBEMU won't help you with these, you need a computer built to a specific set of specs (or DOSBox).
4. Driver software like Sound Blaster emulation cut into conventional memory in DOS, which is extremely precious--you get 640 kB, and some of that will be used by the system itself even with all the tricks for loading as much as possible "high". One of the rules for my Athlon build was that it had to have an ISA slot for its sound card for this reason. Some DOS games (especially around 1991-93 when budgets and scope started ballooning but DOS extenders were not yet popular) requited 600kB of conventional memory or even more! Sound Blaster emulation is a *notorious* memory hog and will make some games unplayable.
5. The primary users of this will likely be running old hardware anyway, it will just open up full DOS support to a larger range of old hardware--there were millions and millions of late '90s/early '00s consumer-grade PCs with nothing but motherboard AC97 for audio, and they can be turned into (limited) DOS rigs with SBEMU. It will let your great aunt's old eMachines run Doom (though it won't let it run Wing Commander, TIE Fighter, or Ultima VII). It isn't really worth much of anything on a modern EFI machine.
6. DOSBox already exists and runs old DOS titles *far* better than they could possibly run natively on modern hardware. You can create custom virtual machines to simulate very specific hardware configs required to optimally run finicky titles like Ultima VII and TIE Fighter. It runs under Linux and Mac, it corrects for aspect ratio on widescreen monitors and pixel-scales to an arbitrarily large resolution, it is much easier to configure than a real DOS machine.
Yeah, it's cool, but it's not a revolution, and it's not a replacement for my Athlon, let alone a 386 or 486.
IMHO retro gaming hardware is not just about the ability of running retro games. It's also the nostalgia, the memory lane of playing the old game on the old hardware. A time capsule if you will.
Much like when you play on an original console and not an emulator. Like having audio from a SID chip instead of the software emulating the hardware of the SID chip.
Having an old computer, the experience of old mechanical keyboards, the analog CRT charm, the noises an old computer makes, the smell of 3M floppy disk labels, it flies you (back) to a world of its own. No amount emulation or bridging the gaps between new systems and old software can substitute this, but this is just my two cents.
in addition to retro gaming, retro components and old computers are part of the interior, a collection moment, museum exhibits, investments, and just pleasant moments of nostalgia. No emulator will do this!
... and once you're into the game, you forget all about it. It's all in your head guys. To me it's all about the games, the rest is just a waste of place and money.
This is a good alternative to DOSBox and other similar emulators, but I hear some crackling and scratching happening in the sound, particularly in DOOM. I wonder what's causing that.
That's the setup emulating having a mouse loose inside your PC, gnawing away at things
This was a common issue in the 1980's and 1990's
@@TheVicar and don't forget about that message you sometimes get on the computer. i remember it had something do with a high ranking military officer named General Failure and reading something called Drive A: or C: If i recalled correctly?
Why are people downvoting this video?
I think the title was too provocative. I got a lot of bad feedback for it 😢
Hope you enjoyed the video! 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie Clickbait earns ire.
Nice, this is fantastic news. Hopefully it'll work well with some of the older thin client boxes that are cheap to pick up.
Agreed! I have a mini Lenovo ThinkCenter PC (m93p Tiny) and it works great!
Plan to try on HP T610, Was going to sell as only useful up to now for DOS gaming with DOSBOX or similar.
It's a cool project but I'll stick to DOSBOX given it has many other benefits such as MT-32 emulation if you use certain forks, shaders, savestates, etc. and of course you can multi task.
I use RetroArch
Can it emulate the legendary awe 32? there are many games where the unique music available to that setting have been gatekept. For example magic carpet will never sound close to its ps1 counterpart unless heard on an awe 32.
That's a nice addition and good and useful work, but not a breakthrough. I have several retro systems and I love every aspect of them - rare and interesting hardware, real CRT, noise of harddrives and even floppies (even 5.25 inches), old case, old plastic speakers, everything cleaned and properly restored - that gives me that nostalgia feeling and experience I either had or had not. That's the point. Another option is proper emulation with different supported devices that cannot be obtained like GUS, Tandy and so on. SB/Adlib are pretty basic and standard. Third option is playing the remasters of late games. And this driver is just something in-between when you can use real DOS on real but modern PC instead of emulated DOS, having some advantages but with lots of limitations (DOSBox is more powerful) and much less real experience. Because the old game is not only sound but overall feeling.
Oh wow just tried this on a core i7 laptop. Same method, freedos and now I have a bootable usb pen drive loaded with dos games and almost all of them have full dos sound.😮 Thanks for the video that's pretty incredible. I had no idea this existed
Let's promote this for more geeks running dos games
The more the merrier! 😎
I have tested this successfully on 2 laptops:
- IBM Thinkpad G40 (Windows XP)
- Lenovo B575e (Windows 8)
It just worked using the same DOS bootable USB stick i made on both laptops.😁
Nice! Glad it’s working well for you 😎
I’ve had good success too - SBEMU is great!!
I grew up in the 90's and had a few consoles but my first love was the potential of pc gaming to the point of obsession. Problem was for many of these old games i didn't have the patience of an adult to take my time, now that i do i find myself really enjoying many old titles in both a sense of nostalgia and a new sense of adventure and purpose to complete these dusty indie titles (most of all when it's 1 am and everyone is asleep and its just me, the game and some crickets outside).
I feel exactly the same! It’s a great feeling to rediscover an old game and fully experience it 😎
I love that feeling of nostalgia when you hear the theme tune to something like Fury of the Furries and immediately you are 13 again for a few moments with the smell of floppy disk labels fresh in your mind.
@@krashd says "furries"
"ever-inflating prices" made my heart sink. I have plans to one day re-build my 1999-era PC and I never for a moment realised that parts likely become pricier every year as more of them break or get tossed out. I still have my Spectrum and two Amigas but I never thought to keep hold of old PC parts 😐
It's really sad that people recycle old CPUs and boards for the minuscule amount of gold inside. Higher prices for older stuff might help offset this destruction by paying more than the scrappers do.
Yeah, prices are really going up, especially in the last 2 years or so :-(
After years and years of seeing good quality monitors being tossed in the trash, I tried to get one and it was really hard. Repair shops are dismissive and tell you to "get a new one", they're not servicing CRTs anymore! (around here at least)
I nabbed a TV and a monitor (for pocket change), I'll be picking the monitor next week and I hope it's in working condition
@@MadsterV Biggest issue is large electrolytic capacitors that need replacing. I fixed my CRT monitor years back by doing that. Other issue is a dim screen if it's been used for years, which can't be fixed (the coating on the filament that generates electrons wears out).
@@gblargg yeah the big TV needs new caps, the image cannot be centered by pots anymore
That C&C music sent shivers down my spine! Nostalgia overload.
Can you do a video explaining why this is better than dosbox? I thought sound blaster was pretty well emulated
Every time I've set up an emulator for DOS or even Win95 games, I've eventually given up trying to get rid of audio stutter.
It's not that it's unplayable, but every so often you'll hear a stutter, and it kind of just gets to a point when you don't want to put up with it and have spent literal days trying to fix it, trying different emulators, asking questions to empty forums, trying everything under the sun...
@@delphicdescant I never had an issue tbh. I first installed Doom on my 486 DX2 machine with SB16 and still play on DOSBox. I totally dont see an issue.
@@delphicdescant Have you tried Dosbox-X? I don't understand why this project is so overlooked. It works great in many games I tried, including sound obviously.
@@pin00ch Yeah it's great that you haven't had trouble with that specific game, on your specific system.
Who said it was "better than DOSBox"? It's simply a way of playing DOS games more on native hardware than using emulation - whether one is better than the other is purely down to personal taste in most cases.
Retro PCs won't die until there's a program to turn your monitor into a CRT.
"Love me lovely cathode-ray,
mother me in your glow" - Regurgitator _Happiness_
You need an adapter, not a program.
@@caligoclarus indeed, miss those days looking at the pixels on the CRT monitor, there was magic there.
Nah I don't really have much nostalgia about these awful CRT monitors, they are bad for eyes, awful for recording. Nothing good about them. The only thing I always liked about CRT monitor was that moment when old cheap 14 inch crt changes resolutions. I like that effect.
Same for the old harddrive.. I never liked just how loud they are, but I like the noise it makes when it spins up and that head clicking when it's counting ram, but after that it should just STFU, or make noise only when it seeks, no that loud spinning noise platter makes.
Someone made the hdd click emulator.. but that's just not it, someone needs to make a device that would make the spinup noise.. it wouldn't be too hard, maybe I will make one to use with the CF card.
But yeah for me I pretty much only care about the tower itself minus the original noisy and unreliable hdd.
@BeardsNTools Variable resolutions look best on CRTs. Flatscreen only display their native resolutions well, while for CRTs every supported resolution was "native". Old games also require aspect correction on new monitors, which screws up the pixel art as it can't be done lossless.
I like the correct pixel aspect ratios!
Thanks! It took me a while to find a pixel perfect scaler in my video editing software 😂
@@jamesfmackenzie modern stuff makes the retro stuff so difficult -- like programming indexed color on a gpu: they're not designed to do that
That didn’t sound right. The adlib sounds in the opening screen of Doom were all messed up and the sound during the game had all those crackles.
Finally a solution! I posted a video 2 years ago showing another way of getting sound in dos. But this way is so much easier and works flawlessly! Thanks for the video!
No worries! Glad you enjoyed it!
I've got an old Pentium3 for DOS, but it's showing its age.
A modern PC would still have the downside of not letting me have my floppy disk drives, but that's not an insurmountable obstacle once I back everything up.
What I'm kinda curious about is how well SBEMU reacts with SLOWDOWN. I use SLOWDOWN for a small handful of very old games that would otherwise see the P3 as too fast, and for the most part it works well on bare hardware. I'm curious if SBEMU would have trouble mixing with it, considering it's a software solution.
You can get a 3.5" USB floppy drive for cheap these days.. Unless you mean a 5.25" drive.. good luck in that case :P
yeah the (non)compatibility with slowdown apps would be an interesting thing to know, maybe slowdown could be added to the program itself so the audio wouldn't get affected
@@phattjohnsonBut those are USB devices inherently, which DOS has no support for.
@@BringMayFlowers I believe i seen a USB driver floating around but maybe only for a memory stick...
There is also a project called the dISAppointment which allows you to access an ISA connection on modern devices by tapping off the TPM module connection that's usually present on motherboards these days.
I’m very excited about this project! 😎
Wow, an actual use for the TPM that is for the user's sake.
Believe it or not TPM is not the boogeyman people make it out to be.
@@soundspark maybe not for older motherboards that have a header to connect external TPM modules (since it gives you direct access to the ISA bus), but it definitely is for the newer ones which are Soldered on to the motherboard.
@@draconic5129 Still it's a passive device not out to get you.
I spent so many hours playing dos games, Dune 2 and anything battle of Arakis related is my jam. When you were playing C&C I had some good nostalgio with the "yessir, affirmative, youuuuu got it, boarding!"
Nice! This gives me some ideas for using a few PCs I have kicking around to natively run DOS games nicely, maybe for a LAN party 🤔
God I love hearing that FM sound for the midi music instead of the crappy awe32 soundfonts we usually hear
Doom really is one of the best games of all time. Awesome sound and music too.
Apart from DOOM and Duke Nukem, there is no sound anywhere. Wolfenstein 3d, Spear of Destiny, Flashback, Black Thorne, Warlords 2, Warcraft 2 - sound is not detected.
But what about controllers if our Modern Machine only has USB (which is highly likely)?
Yes, unfortunately DOS support for USB controllers isn't so good 😞I'm looking for a good solution but none found yet
There is none. Do you see any usb controllers now on any hardware platform? maybe zip drives, parallel, serial, sound simple low speeds. best option is to get a USB docking solution. You're better off running dosbox if you want the full dos experience with MIDI emulation too
Nice summary of the software, James!
But we retro gamers do this for the LOVE OF THE HARDWARE even more at times than just the games.
Heck, a fun time is rebuilding a Windows 95 system in a Gateway 2000 Pentium Pro 200 MHz tower on a rainy Saturday.
This weekend, I’m building a retro machine using an old Supermicro server/workstation board - so I definitely have the hardware bug! 😂
@@jamesfmackenzie ahhh, I knew that! Ya know?
The only PC I have that I would want to run DOS on may have ground looping issues with its audio codec, and also currently lacks a CPU cooler. I have two tablets and a thinkpad and all make better Linux machines.
I thank you for your commitment to this cause.
Oh this is great! I hope Fast Tracker II works as well, that'd be mint!
I hope so too! :-)
Until all the wavetables are properly supported (like mpu401 mapping and sound font emulation for AWE) I don’t think there is a legitimate alternative to old PC hardware.
Doesn't pcem do already all that iirc? Sure enough it takes quite a bit of resources from computer to emulate.
I just tried this, and it blows my mind. It works. It just works.
Yep! I felt like it was magic too! 😂
@James Mackenzie I should have also added, "What sorcery is this?" Lol
always very excited about advancements in emulation.
That's pretty cool actually! Thanks for sharing! But I hear a nasty high frequency noise on your recording - what's with that?
Yeah, it was my fault - I got my recording levels wrong (microphone vs line-in). The actual sound quality is great 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie I'm glad, I'm definitely gonna try it, as I'm getting afraid of using my old machines when I haven't replaced the caps yet...
Awesome breakthrough for sure! But I prefer to use a old PC. Nothing beats the nostalgic feel of actual use of a old PC.
Agree! Totally!
Unfortunately I dont have the space to put up a whole second desktop pc. The sounds, clicks and beeps, the feel... its pure nostalgia.
So I have to run virtual machines on my shitty Win10 pc. Oh, well. You have to work with what you have. 😂😂😂
@@schlumbl84 I hear ya on that! most people don't have the room! Glad technology allows people to play these cool games again!
@@PCUSER486 Youre right.
Although I really enjoy the new technology for old stuff, I sometimes miss the real feel. 😅
I also have a huge Commodore 64 set and many games. But, again, no space to put it all up.
I get my fix with awesome retro gaming consoles, devices and emulators. But my muscle memory would still guide me through all the keysets and movements to operate my good old C64 😂
The feeling of using a real retro PC is irreplaceable. In addition, it is not enough to emulate 16-bit sound, the music is also part of it. Very often it was the midi sound that made the game special. I'm thinking of my ISA Maestro32/96 with 4MB Wavetable ROM. So I will probably keep my Voodoo2 SLI system with K6-2 400 until the end of my life. I also have spare parts.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Whoa-ho! Yor are judging too early, my friend.
I indeed like to learn new things.
But I found out that learning a whole new operating system is very time consuming.
Whether this is new is debatable but it certainly hasn't been possible for years now. It can be done on XP thanks to VDMSound. And then Vista came along and suddenly it wasn't possible again. Of course that was running under Windows but there was still the ability to run the majority of DOS apps without emulation on XP at food framerates, just without sound; unless you used VDMSound. And of course we still had our CRTs back then.
Very nice, sounds CRISP.
This video makes me want to pull out my old Pentium III 600 desktop with SoundBlaster and one of the first G-force cards. Still have the huge 21" monitor, and SoundBlaster 4 speakers and base with surround sound. That thing just would never die. Still have a bunch of games still with the box they came in. I took care of my sh!t. lol
That’s awesome news! All my old kit was thrown away 😭
It doesn't obsolete older machines just yet since you need EMMX memory to make it work, which eliminates a ton of titles that can not work with this.
But this does mean we now have a universal replacement for the kind of emulation that used to be exclusive to sound cards such as the Soundblaster Live or Audigy cards. Very neat :D
Another question that comes to mind, is since Windows runs on top of DOS could this theoretically carry basic Sound Blaster 16 support to Windows 98? Because if that could be done, combined with the VBEMP driver you'd have basic visuals and basic sound.
I’m 100% going to try it with Win98. Then we can have a functional Win98 machine on modern hardware 😍
I’m 100% going to try it with Win98. Then we can have a functional Win98 machine on modern hardware 😍
Isn't Windows supposed to support PCI sound, WinModem, USB and all that stuff that did not functon in pure DOS. Especially unofficially upgraded Windows 98IF or USP3
@@OCTAGRAM Yes, but not for dos applications.
I'm guessing this is more important for using a newer system that's not quite meant for DOS, but not really modern perse, like older dell optiplexes. On my main PC, I can just use PCem and emulate everything up to like a Pentium MMX 200 or so, and I output it to my CRT using a HDMI to VGA adapter. Not perfect, but it works pretty darn well.
"Not perfect, but it works", you could but look perfect, as for speed it may well be too fast, releasing all the horse power a 2023 model PC on a 80's 90's 2000's game even the most budget system be running system boot up times in seconds almost making phone boot time look slow, a half descent pc with a bit of grunt it going to take more time doing memory check than the actual boot to desktop/dos prompt
@@dh2032 You're emulating an old CPU along with all of its quirks, it's not a virtual CPU/environment. Everything is as slow as it was back in the days. If you think a P200 is too fast, emulate a P75 instead.
@@flandrble yep you get it haha!
@@dh2032 the issues of it not being perfect but works are actually related to the graphics api calls in full screen vis a vis my crt and PCem. This means sometimes it can be difficult to get it to faithfully switch resolutions and refresh rates properly, especially when loading win95. As to the accuracy and precision of the emulation, it's spot on! The speed is what it would have been, other than hdd seek times being sped up by a nvme ssd. Also the speed of games only really mattered for, what, pre 386 dos titles? I'm not aware of any windows title, let alone a svga title, that tied it's frame rate to the cpu clock speed. PCem is a fantastic utility that faithfully emulates thousands of pc configurations. You should consider learning more about it before you say such things without any periods.
I didn't know that it was just "sound" that was holding people back and keeping the retro community alive. I know for myself and most people I talk too we prefer original equipment just because there is no real one and done piece of software (of which there are many) to run all of your dos games and other software on your modern pc. More of the game just wont boot or run vs the sound.
Am I missing something here? This sounds cool but sound already works through DosBox.
So you're complaining about having choice here? What's wrong with trying this stuff out for yourself and finding out what works best for what you want in what circumstance? If it's DOSBox then great, use that.
I can immediately tell the generation people are in by the way they write their comments - very few millennials seem to ever want to put in time and effort to experimentation and trying things out for themselves - they always want someone on a RUclips video to give them all the answers.
Yeah input lag is missing here since its bare metal. And also for all the games that work with audio, subpar experience that dosbox gives is also missing, you get proper bare metal experience.
The sound in Doom had a serious crackling sound in the background. This isn’t supposed to be there. The audio quality is not up to the quality of normal DOS. 🤔
Part of that was my bad audio capture. It sounds quite good in real life :-)
Rogue Spear sounded phenomenal on the SoundBlaster card.
Would love it if they could do something like this for video as well, imagine being able to run Windows 3.11 with sound at high resolutions (for the time) on current hardware, although obviously it would need some sort of universal driver.
I agree, I was also thinking about a universal video driver
Wow, that really sounds correct!!
I just thought games weren't quite as good we remembered
I respect the effort, I’m happy I don’t have to go to these lengths anymore. I mean from the first time around, when I had no choice but to concern myself with IRQs etc. win95 rocked my world 😅
Does this mean the Doom I have been hearing for 20 years on Dobox, all the source ports and the newest revision on Steam are just emulated sound?
Cool. When you play doom at the end with sound, where is the constant background crackle coming from? Is that SBEMU or just how it was recorded?
old games sound different depending on the sound card you had, soundblaster was one of the most commons but some composers used something else and made their games with then in mind, its a shame its hard to track down the sound card used by each composer to know the "canonical" or "originally intended" sound.
and its hard if not impossible to simulate then all.
but we can try a few of then downloading sound fonts for diffent cards and using programs like fluidsynth togheter with other tools like wine,dosbox etc.
Every DOS game should have a list of hardware that you need to set up in DOS box so that the game runs as perfectly as possible.
@@bland9876 they didnt had an time machine to know that would be an issue in the future
@@igorgiuseppe1862 You dont need a time machine to know that eating (mcdonalds etc), hair cutting and the like would be always profitable...... if you have no standard, everyone is doing their own thing you should expect problems and confusion in the future.
@@samfkt anyway they didnt had to know that we would still care about old games in the future or that this problem would be possible to solve or anything like that
Not sure; why not to use DosBox or build a virtual machine with Win9x / ME / XP on a Win7 PC (c:\users\\virtual machines) ?
All it's missing is a low pass filter to smooth out that crackle. A toggle would be great for people raw dogging on some shitty period-correct speakers.
No, the crust is the charm
Waiting for the first review of this. Would be interested to see how much memory the driver occupies since could be an issue for memory sensitive games.
It's pretty good! After running SBEMU, I still have 602KB of conventional memory free (28KB used)
@@jamesfmackenzie that's incredibly good.
Good video and you have a new subscriber as a result.
But I do think you're missing one important point - it's not an "either or" scenario.
Being able to emulate old hardware has not killed off the demand for old hardware and the ever-escalating prices of old hardware and old games on the used market is essentially proof of that.
This is nice and every new solution is welcoming!
But what are the advantages of SBEMU over DOSBOX? What added value does SBEMU has that DOSBOX doesn't already have?
IMHO I would still prefer RetroPC over modern, because the feeling is just right. I know it's probably placebo, but I still like it and we live in a free society.
You would still need retro PC though for running 16bit windows 3.1/95 programs, that can't be ran under modern 64 bit windows.
Also, what about general MIDI? Is it supported?
I cannot speak for the author, but for me SBEMU is the way of saving old-but-not-old-enough hardware. For example, I have an Asus EEE PC netbook from 2007 that is very compact and has a CPU comparable with Pentium III (900 MHz mobile Celeron). It has all the potential to became a really great portable Retro PC, but it has only an HD audio sound card, and no parallel port for Covox speech thing or OPL2LPT. Up until yesterday I believed that there is no way to make it output sound from DOS games - thankfully, this video showed up in my feed just in time to prove me wrong.
@@olexanderkidenko4423 I'm thinking the same thing with a Toshiba NB205 Netbook that I have. It has a 32-bit only intel atom n280 CPU. Not fast enough for DOSBox or good enough for really anything else with a now rather low resolution screen. A portable DOS gaming device would be perfect home for it if I can get the hardware to work. SBEmu would be one such major hurdle resolved.
I’ve done the exact same with my Lenovo m93p Tiny. With SBEMU it makes a great little DOS machine - and super fast too for those high res VESA modes :-)
@@olexanderkidenko4423 HOLY SHIT.... thanks for this idea. I just came across my old EEE PC the other day!!! I was like: "oooh look at that, I'll probably never use that again." Not any more!
It amazes me how is that most of people talking about history of PCs never mention awesome titles that set a standard in the PC realm, like Mechwarrior 2, Inependence War or Freespace 2. People only go for Nintendo and racing and FPS on PC.
Well Nintendo doesn't count in this argument because it's console. But the people that hype fps titles are usually the loudest and most obnoxious. However there are plenty of us who admire games from Sierra and Interplay etc. Adventure and FMV games had a wider appeal than fps imo.
It feels like somebody woke up one morning and ultimately ended up in our universe where dosbox has been working just fine but they're oblivious to that fact. The neat thing about dosbox is you could even use a third party MIDI mapper and a synth mapper to improve the music font without any trouble. I have played many dos games on Windows versions that didn't even have proper Dos support just fine.
Been a long time since I heard Sound Blaster. I remember buying a card at my local computer fair with my bro, good times.
Finally I can pull out that Pentium 4 notebook again, where I installed MS-DOS on 5 years, ago 😄
Honestly, getting the old hardware running is the fun. Playing the games is actually boring.
Last time I’ve checked my DOS gaming PC was fine, thank you 😉👍🏾
Now all we need is porting the MT32/CM32L emulator, as well as a midi emulator with soundfont ability all within DOS!
Would love to see that! Until then, a good option is to use SoftMPU and your PCs serial port. More details here:
www.jamesfmackenzie.com/2021/07/25/mt32-pi-testing-out-usb-serial-support/
Good luck! :-)
Ok but why do people have to emulate DOS games when source ports exist?
What source ports except those based on Doom, Quake, and maybe Build engines? 99% of 1990s software and games were never open sourced.
@@lordwiadro83 Fair enough. Fortunately, Doom is the only one of those I would play.
@@lordwiadro83 again dos emulation has been around a while is the answer here too. Sbemu isn't doing anything new
@@firmyth I think your main problem is not understanding what this project does.
I mean, for MSDOS we already have DOSBOX, and for up to windows 98 PCem works incredible, I'm currently emulating a Pentium 2 with a Voodoo 3000 card, it's so good it's making me think about selling my old laptops I had for retro gaming
I tried it on 4 modern PCs and 3 of them didn't work. It's an interesting curiosity though.
I'm always glad to see things work out this way , where it's cheaper and easier to get into older games now , if it was these easy with late 90 and xp Era games. On retro seen , I do not see long for native hardware dieing out , simply it be replaced with clone hardware made with updated spec, after all it would cool to see someone make hardware clone with native 32gb ram disk for running older games, when they where only a few gigs.
I think it would be super cool if someone actually straight up made old CPUs and parts for them on a modern process node. Imagine, almost all of them would consume microscopic amounts of power, be passively coolable, and hit higher clocks than ever before. Someday 3D printers will do it i bet.
@EclipseGST94 Now that would be cool or soc with part that made up older pc, I'm not sure how closely you follow the reto video game sense, because there kind doing that all ready with fpg with super nt and Mr project.
@@samtime2711 not so much console stuff, I emulate the ones I owned as a kid but that's about it. I'll have to look into it though sounds interesting. I wonder what clockspeed a sub-10nm Pentium 4 could do though haha.
Ye, but if clocked, it too high could be like running a dos 386 game on Pentium 200 mxx. Where simply ran too fast, one can image still looking forward to seeing the motherboard with pentium and stuff , like do with some new 486 boards
@@samtime2711 that's true but it could have a feature to detect that and lower it's speed, or a button like the old days.
Funny you mention ISA, I just saw a video about the dISApointment, a card that adds an ISA port to modern motherboards, as long as they have a pinout that I forget the name of, you can now run old isa cards on modern hardware!
Any more info on this? I would love to see my Roland LAPC-I installed in a newer box.😁🎶🎹🎵Play On
@@mybachhertzbaud3074 here's the video ruclips.net/video/putHMSzu5og/видео.html
Yes - I’m very excited for this! It uses the TPM header as a way to access the LPC bus. I am actively looking for motherboards with the right TPM pinout 😂
Couldn't get it to run on my brand new PC but it works amazing on my old samsung netbook. Well, sounds a little fuzzy but it's better than nothing. This opens up a lot of potential for retrogaming without emulation. I hope this driver finds a way into Win95/98, since technically we already can do SVGA with generic drivers and software rendering won't be a problem on processors with over 1 GHz.
i like how when you load up doom it says free of charge but next to that it say suggested retail price $9.00 must be a later release of the game
Dosbox? I've never had an issue with it, even on my latest 13900K build.
I remember I tried to sell my 20 inch crt from back in the day like 10 years ago and people literally were laughing and mocking me on craigslist. I ended up throwing it away a while back. It's pretty funny how something goes from no one wants it to now it's all hipster material.
Truth be told outside of a niche old computers really have very little to no value. It's not like an old mustang or general americana cause at least you can use it for it's original intent.
You can play all those dos games on dosbox on a modern pc without going through the hassle of finding old drivers and what not. The difference is hardly worth the effort.
Actually, soundblaster audio isn't such a problem on slightly older new PCs that still had a PCI slot. There were Soundblaster compatible PCI cards.
Soundblaster made PCI cards. I have one. It is very Soundblaster compatible being as Soundblaster themselves made it. It _is_ a Soundblaster! But yeah PCI slots are a thing of the past now too. I think the PC I use has one? But I use onboard audio. What I don't miss are those fiddly submini phono jacks. SPDIF 4evah!
@@1pcfred I'm pretty sure that Haswell generation mobos still had PCI slots.
@@fungo6631 then my PC has PCI slots. The only card in my PC is a graphics card. It's only marginally better than the onboard graphics too. I've been thinking about upgrading but prices are insane today. What I got does what I need it to do too. I'm not playing triple A games.
@@1pcfred Creative did make PCI cards, I have both a Live! and a Audigy Pro ZX, but they're Windows cards first and foremost.
@@BringMayFlowers My Audigy card works in Linux. But some Creative cards don't. Onboard sound is so good these days I don't even use a sound card anymore. I have Intel HD audio in this PC and I like it. I run a SPDIF cable to a Blu-Ray player and I have 5.1 surround sound. Although the PC hardware is really 7.1. I'm not missing those two other speakers.
Seems I still need my DOS machine then. I have a Yamaha XG card in there. Games like Duke Nukem and Warcraft 2 that output general midi sound so nice on that card.
Er, wasn't there a program called dosbox which does wonders for old dos games?
This should be just what the doctor ordered for my celeron gateway machine from 1999, old enough for windows 98 gaming but not old enough for dos gaming as there is no ISA slot on the motherboard. Can't wait to give this a try!
i can't stress enough about to why this piece of software comes in handy in a scenario like this. alot of old hardware is out there like that and sadly they aren't getting any better with age.
How is this different from DosBox?
HOLY CRAP THIS IS AWESOME!
I haven't heard of this yet; I just hit the Sub button
Awesome Video! Gotta figure out how to set this up within my Retroarch possiblty
Thanks for the sub!
real hardware is real hardware
It's running on a real modern hardware using a real modern sound device. It's just intercepting the audio calls and translating them to the modern hardware. It's better than use dosbox. And much more cheap than buying good quality old hardware.
i'm not sure it's a breakthrough, it's just another emulation
The only real issue I can see with this type of setup is that many DOS games were designed for the CPU to be running at a certain speed. Also, back then multi-core processors weren't a normal household staple (heck even in the business world you couldn't really find them). This is one of the reasons I prefer to use a virtual machine to do stuff like this. I can specify the amount of memory, cpu cores, even the clock speeds, which can drastically improve compatibility.
I'm not against a project like this, but these kind of problems need to be considered when attempting to use software like this. I do hope that improvements can be made to increase compatibility. Anything that makes playing older games easier for people is a win in my book.
That's only an issue for very old DOS games that didn't respect VSYNC signals since they were drawing graphics way too slow for it to matter.
This should be great for early 2000s budget pcs with socket 370 motherboards.
i miss programming soundcards. it was so much easier. the vast majority of cards was soundblaster compatible anyway, so it wasn't particularly complicated getting sound out of whatever card anyone had. nowadays it requires many dozen lines which are calls to many dozen more lines just to get anything done, but people who never experienced how it was foolishly call it progress.
"but people who never experienced how it was foolishly call it progress." -- The people who developed and used the new cards and APIs at the time clearly exeprienced the old method and found it wanting, hence moving to the new way.
And usually they are nowadays abstracted by a crappy high-latency software layer. Windows MME, directsound, pulseaudio etc.
ALSA, Jack, ASIO and coreaudio are pretty ok though.
programming sound cards in the dos days was anything BUT easier, compared with today. i think you are suffering from the nostalgia effect.
@@giornikitop5373 Have you done anything that requires low latency and synchronization?
It's a nightmare nowadays.
@@YaFunklord yes, i happen to have. depending on what you want to do is indeed somethimes a nightmare. but that doesn't mean it was easier the old days, far from it, which was the point of my comment.
I'm shocked how long it has taken.
DOSBox already covered most of DOS gaming requirements. Including General MIDI support which make possible to enable Roland etc. wavetable synthesizer compatibility. Adlib/OPL compatibility in addition is interesting for people who want to try it. Not for me - due to limited funds for PC build and super expensive PC hardware still through nineties in my youth got fed with inferior Adlib music enough till wish to forget about it existence.