The quest for Sound Blaster compatibility on modern hardware

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Buy a vintage laptop

>>4103636
The sound card would be the least of your worries. You wont be able to use cd audio in games either.

If you want true DOS compatibility, you HAVE to have an ISA slot. There is no workaround to this due to PCI not having IRQ. And don't fall for the SoundBlaster 16 PCI meme, it emulates (very poorly) IRQ hooks and an OPL3. Sounds awful and has tons of compatibility issues.

But fret not, you can get a Pentium 3 or Athlon processor and board for cheap that have a true ISA slot. Avoid P4 boards with ISA because a fair amount of them are emulation IRQ or don't have it at all, thus limiting the kind of ISA boards you can use on it.

I good P3 can do everything old ass DOS up to the early 2000s if you so wanted.

Also, GeForce 2 thru the FX line have fantastic DOS compatibility, good VESA support, support for palatalized textures (was dropped in the >=6 series). You can literally get Geforce FX APG cards for $10, and have as good if not better compatibility then the best S3 cards of the era. Avoid ATI cards like the plague though, shit DOS compatibility.

Also, not all Sound Blaster cards are built the same. All Pro and Pro 2 cards are grate, bt make sure you look up the 16 cards, many are Vibra and don't have real OPL chips.

>>4103692
Forgot to post it, but here is a fantastic chart of video card compatibility for DOS.
If you're not going S3 Trio/Verge then go Geforce whatever.
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

>>4103692
Replace everything I said about IRQ with DMA. My brain is fried from work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_16
Has a halfway decent list of which CT model numbers have what so you know what to avoid.

>>4103692
>>4103696
>>4103708
Damn, I guess there really is no choice but to scavenge for old late 90s / early 00s parts on eBay. Thanks for the info.

>>4103687
A sound card is needed to stream audio from the CD-ROM drive, so they go hand-in-hand.

>>4103713
>A sound card is needed to stream audio from the CD-ROM drive, so they go hand-in-hand.
I'm not aware of any sata cd drives with an audio port.

>>4103713
The absolute best you can get is an industrial C2D mobo:

www.commell.com(DOT)tw/Product/SBC/PMSA.HTM
(fuck 4chan spam filter)

has a single ISA slot.

honestly, though, get a baby AT super socket 7 for DOS gaming.
High speed CPUs kill old games, and a SS7 can be underclocked to 386 speeds through cache disabling.

BabyAT is also super tiny, with the only external port required being a circle for an AT keyboard.

You could build a custom case for such a board very easily and cram everything you need into an ultra small footprint.

>>4103716
Yeah you got me there. :|

>>4103727
You can just make an iso image and mount it though if you don't care about using the actual CD.

>>4103720
>The absolute best you can get is an industrial C2D mobo

I've looked at those before but I'm pretty they have neutered ISA slots with no DMA.

>>4103692
>Avoid ATI cards like the plague though
newfags on /g/ will go mad if they read this

>>4103740
ATI really use to be a mixed bag back then, think a lot on /vr/ forget this even.
They were great Windows cards, and the All In Wonders were cool as fuck at the (I wanted an AIW so bad), but they just suck with DOS.
Can't even scroll in Commander Keen without it going all janky. VESA compatibility sucked as well so not good for late dos games even.

>>4103692
>If you want true DOS compatibility, you HAVE to have an ISA slot.
There HAS to be a way to emulate this on modern hardware. There no fundamental reason why this couldn't be.

>>4103759
Well, sure if by emulation you mean DOSBox or PC-EM, but otherwise no.
Its fundamental in how ISA, PCI, and PCI-E are designed. ISA allows for Direct Memory Access to the card's memory space, PCI and PCI-E don't. So you can't simply have an adapter since the host interface doesn't even have the memory access that the guest would need.

Back during the early to mid P4 days there was a work around built explicitly for PCI sound cards in mind, it was a secondary cable that went from your sound card to the motherboard that would fake DMA calls along side a DOS TSR. Look up SB-Link, its the name of the interface its a bit exotic and not many motherboards had it.

>>4103776
of course i mean emulation. old sound card hardware could be emulated if they were well enough documented. as a user, I just always plugged my sound card in and forgot about it, but programmers had to have at the very least an API, and possibly had more. It's conceivable full blown register map with hardware documentation are out there for old SoundBlasters, say. If this is the case, I honestly don't see much point in the old hardware. Maybe having nice capacitors is a plus, but signal processing is very good with modern hardware and algorithms.

>>4103806
It sounds like you're basically saying "Who needs authentic hardware when there's DOSBox?" in which case you may be in the wrong thread.

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The most modern platform I've ever gotten DOS sound working on is ICH7/Socket775, and even then only with an Aureal Vortex2. The Aureal cards don't rely on DDMA to function in DOS and use some other PCI functionality instead, but even that functionality was removed after ICH7.

>>4103692
>If you want true DOS compatibility, you HAVE to have an ISA slot. There is no workaround to this due to PCI not having IRQ
Not strictly true, if you have a PCI sound card and a motherboard that both support PC/PCI (aka SB-LINK) and you run a special cable between the two, it will emulate ISA with 100% accuracy.

Modern Intel CPUs integrate the I/O and bus controller onto the die.

Good luck getting them to recognize ISA devices without piggybacking off of a PCIe lane (which absolutely won't work with MS-DOS).

Short of some future hypothetical 486-based FPGA clone, it's fleaBay or bust.