Comment on 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

pastermil@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  IIRC, 98 needs a homebrew patch to not crash if you have more than (512MB? 1GB?) 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.

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  • hexagonwin@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

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

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    • f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      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.

      archive.org/details/Windows_98SE_Memory_Patch

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      • hexagonwin@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        yep rloew’s patches are great rloewelectronics.com

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

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• hexagonwin@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  yep it works, i had it working on a haswell xeon machine

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• ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  This driver will work with any motherboard that’s newer than the 915 chipset (which uses single core Pentiums). So if your motherboard supports dual-core CPUs at the very least, it will be compatible. Ivy Bridge for sure.

  I haven’t personally attempted to install 98 or ME on more modern hardware, so I’m unsure if there’s any special steps to do so, or if it just sorta works like it would’ve on an older PC.

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