I've got an old P3 1ghz Dell Latitude that I formatted to boot natively into DOS 6.22. Is there any way (drivers, etc) to get soundblaster emulation for old DOS games?
I want to clarify.. I want this to work natively in DOS, I want to avoid emulation if at all possible. The factory Dell drivers don't go beyond Windows 98 for this given laptop.
In native DOS soundblaster emulation means emulation in hardware. To my knowlegde there is no software solution available for native DOS. You pretty much need an actual Soundblaster 16 sound card for compatibility with as many games as possible. Other soundcards providing Soundblaster emulation (often claimin to be "100% compatible") will work to various extent, but probably not with all games.
Clearification: DOS games don't access the soundblaster through any driver but by the hardware directly. If drivers are used there is no standard what so ever, each developer has their own for their games (which might not even be ABI compatible between their games).
You can check Dell support page whether the PC is old enough to have DOS drivers. Otherwise, your best bet is to install Linux and run DosEmu
Your course of action depends on what audio-card is in the Dell. If it is a proprietary card, you’ll have to resort to an emulator like DosBox.
If it is a brand-name adapter, then you should find out the exact make and model and search for DOS drivers for that chipset.
There are DOS drivers for SB16, AWE64, etc. which may or may not be compatible with your particular card. It looks like Creative still has drivers (even DOS drivers) available for older cards. You an also look for SBPCI which was a common set of DOS drivers for the PCI version of SoundBlaster since it did not work with the older drivers.
