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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 8 months ago by to c/retrocomputing@piefed.social
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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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[–] 1 point 7 months ago (3 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

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    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

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