Small windows 98 question....

[Kippykip]

So I once had a Toshiba TE2000 laptop which was built for Windows XP, but supported Windows 98 and had drivers for 98.
It used sound drivers that supported Windows 9x, but if you ran dos games inside Win98 with the sound blaster settings even though it wasn't a sound blaster card, but the sound worked (Don't know when in the 'restart in dos mode' if sound worked)

Anyway I will be building a computer with 98 and a AC97 Sound card so I could play my old games without emulators or virtual machines

I was wondering if I was to play a dos game (E.g. doom) in Windows 98 mode with the AC97 Drivers installed, Will it play sound like the TE2000 Laptop did with the sound blaster settings on?

A random question but yeah I couldn't find anything

 

[FAST6191]

Gah soundblaster emulation....

Link of choice, not really an answer to the question but some nice background you would probably like to read up on if you are embarking on this sort of thing http://macgateway.com/featured-articles/sound-card-history/

Soundblaster emulation then. There are five things that are likely to cause those that dealt with PC games back then to start rocking in the corner (IRQ settings, MSCDEX for CD drives, dos4gw, himem and the soundblaster stuff). For various reasons the soundblaster became the default sound card and as it was simple enough various sound cards were then sold as "soundblaster compatible", it was soundblaster compatible in the way that Libreoffice is MS office compatible (mostly works fine, there were occasionally some oddities, occasionally better than the real thing...) and in all likelihood that is what you got back then (mainly as by the XP era the actual soundblaster stuff was the domain of prosumer/those with a reason to but a half nice soundcard).

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Sound <- my suggestion for general stuff. For game specific stuff look up the games as they often had source code and got ports so they worked like they did back in the day but on modern machines, doom is probably the foremost for this and as most things used a doom engine or a doom a like engine you have an awful lot there too.

Much like soundblaster stuff AC'97 is something of a rolling standard though a more open one so a lot of sound cards will aim for it. The soundblaster stuff is somewhat separate.

 

[Kippykip]

Gah soundblaster emulation....

Link of choice, not really an answer to the question but some nice background you would probably like to read up on if you are embarking on this sort of thing http://macgateway.com/featured-articles/sound-card-history/

Soundblaster emulation then. There are five things that are likely to cause those that dealt with PC games back then to start rocking in the corner (IRQ settings, MSCDEX for CD drives, dos4gw, himem and the soundblaster stuff). For various reasons the soundblaster became the default sound card and as it was simple enough various sound cards were then sold as "soundblaster compatible", it was soundblaster compatible in the way that Libreoffice is MS office compatible (mostly works fine, there were occasionally some oddities, occasionally better than the real thing...) and in all likelihood that is what you got back then (mainly as by the XP era the actual soundblaster stuff was the domain of prosumer/those with a reason to but a half nice soundcard).

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Sound <- my suggestion for general stuff. For game specific stuff look up the games as they often had source code and got ports so they worked like they did back in the day but on modern machines, doom is probably the foremost for this and as most things used a doom engine or a doom a like engine you have an awful lot there too.

Much like soundblaster stuff AC'97 is something of a rolling standard though a more open one so a lot of sound cards will aim for it. The soundblaster stuff is somewhat separate.

Thanks for that! that did help explain some but also
I don't want to use dosbox or virtual machines, I want to play them like I did as a child
I just don't know why the laptop supported sounds (in dos applications) when it wasn't a soundblaster card, but using the sound blaster settings, it works anyhow

The name of the laptop driver had WDM in it, does that have something to do with it? A couple of forums on google said something like that.

EDIT: Changing to a sound blaster PCI 128, It supports dos games and stuff

 

[FAST6191]

Other than the lack of a gameport and fuzzy low res CRT I am not sure what the difference is myself and as modern ports/hacks/remakes allow for enhancements if you want them then even better.

WDM stands for Windows Driver Model and is nothing to do with soundcards per se. It might have been that the WDM version of the driver also had soundblaster emulation inbuilt but that will have to be saved until we are discussing actual models of card and whatnot.

Why it happened -- old sound cards were simple enough devices when it comes down to it. If your third party sound card spoke the same language as the soundblaster (easy enough for something basic as people had to know how it works to program to it and in DOS days most games were built with drivers actually in the game) it would then appear/act as a soundblaster as far as most games were concerned, naturally different devices had varying levels of compatibility but that is a slightly different discussion.