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PSA: You can use your motherboard's HD Audio for DOS games in Windows 98/ME now thanks to WDMHDA, an HD Audio driver for Windows 98SE / ME (github.com)

submitted 6 days ago by ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to c/retrocomputing

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(Thanks to /u/O_MORES for posting this elsewhere)

There's a brand new HD audio driver for Windows 98/Me called WDMHDA.

Since it's a WDM driver, it will play nice with the Sound Blaster Emulation Layer built into Windows 98/ME (sbemul.sys).

And it actually works. Here's Windows 98 and this codec tested on a Ryzen 9 PC: https://youtu.be/uhWyH0TsrCc

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[–] f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

IIRC, 98 needs a homebrew patch to not crash if you have more than 512MB of RAM.

Be careful, this DOS audio stuff is a rabbithole in and of itself. Apparently, no Sound Blaster emulation is perfect for all games and there are some things that only an ISA sound card can do. I think it was a fairly short list of problematic titles, though. I'll return to post a link if I can find it. Probably on the forums of vogons.org or vcfed.org

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

the 512MB ram thing is true, but it's just a single line of edit on system.ini, nothing difficult

[–] f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

If we're talking DOS software in 98SE, there's a few patches to limit the RAM seen by the OS to 512MB or 2GB for compatibility.

https://archive.org/details/Windows_98SE_Memory_Patch

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.today 1 points 5 days ago

yep rloew's patches are great https://rloewelectronics.com/

though that much ram isn't really necessary, setting MaxPhysPage=20000 (512MB) just works fine