DOS sound support

YES or NO sound for my old games?

I used to play my favourite games under dos with sound. I used a cheap and simple sound blaster sound card which most games supported. The basic sound blaster was the "standard" sound card for dos. I would like is to play my favourite games like Day Of The Tentacle again under parallels under OS X with sound.

Is this, or is this not possible? Does parallels emulate a basic sound blaster when I choose dos as os for my vm?

If this is possible, what are the irq and address settings?
 
Or at the risk of getting booted off the forum, Microsoft's VirtualPC (now free) works great in DOS. SB16 works too. If all you are after is DOS support for games, VirtualPC works better than Parallels or VMWare.

Robert
 
Why the commotion about sound in DOS?

I would be great to have sound for older application, it's not impossible. It's up to Parallels to decided to implement or not.

We all have the rights and freedom to express our thoughts, either it's a waste of time (to some people) or not it's just a feature. Wouldn't a piece of software be great if it could preserve the past for all us to remember or relive.

I'd just like to comment on those people who say it's a waste of time:

a wastle of who's time are we talking about?

If those individuals don't like it, look away find something else more productive or meaningful to do rather than posting negative replies and bullying others.

What the world is now is what happened in the past, called history and cannot be changed.

If the world didn't have DOS, windows wouldn't had exsist. Windows hadn't exsist here wouldn't be M$ and windows products for the world to be dominated.

Personally I think to relive DOS would be great. Currently my POS machine I'm running OSX 10.4 and Paralles with DOS for a cash register and invoicing, application was tailormade so I do not have the original source to modify but works great. Sound would be a nice option since I don't have real hardware, but my last wish would be to have MPU-401 MIDI support to connect mt trusted MT-32 sound module onto my Mac and USB Midi so I can use it once again........
 
emul8tor said:
Why the commotion about sound in DOS?

I would be great to have sound for older application, it's not impossible. It's up to Parallels to decided to implement or not.
Click to expand...
Actually, from what I can see, people are asking Parallels for something they have already done. There is sound support in Parallels. The sound hardware is emulated. Some documentation would be welcome, of course, but Parallels doesn't need to supply a DOS driver; one just needs to download the driver for the emulated hardware, and all Parallels has to do is tell us what model they are emulating.

DOS doesn't have, and never had, sound support (other than the speaker click). Sound was always provided by third party drivers.

Of course, since this is a wish list, folks can ask for anything they want, but the liklihood of getting it from Parallels vs alternative ways to get what folks want seems reasonable to discuss.

YMMV
 
joem said:
Actually, from what I can see, people are asking Parallels for something they have already done. There is sound support in Parallels. The sound hardware is emulated. Some documentation would be welcome, of course, but Parallels doesn't need to supply a DOS driver; one just needs to download the driver for the emulated hardware, and all Parallels has to do is tell us what model they are emulating.
Click to expand...
But it's possible they aren't emulating any real model, as seems to be the case with their VGA/SVGA - although that at least provides a VESA compatible BIOS which is the closest thing the DOS world has to a driver. If so then most old DOS apps won't know how to talk to the card and it won't work. The best solution, if DOS compatibility were a goal, would be a full SB16 emulation but without really understanding how a hypervisor works it's impossible to guess how much work that would be. I'm guessing the Adlib/FM synthesis side of things would be the big work whereas PCM playback should be trivial since it's just a matter of the emulated sound card grabbing samples from memory and shovelling them to the real soundcard.

I think a key point is that the various "standard" hardware devices tend to be the ones supported not just by DOS software that has to do all the work itself but also by esoteric or ancient OSs like BeOS or Win 3.11 that Parallels doesn't currently have drivers for. It'd achieve quite the opposite of what has been suggested on this thread: you'd get decent-ish support for these OSs in Parallels without the team having to engineer support for each OS individually.
 
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