6th May 2008, 7:37 PM
They are NOT all using the same resources, that's the thing you have to understand.
They are all different IS the answer. Here's the situation. Depending on the "setup" a game has (and some have no setup options and just go on automatic) it'll try to access various hardware. Most of the time, it's through a direct communication with the hardware. That is, it cuts out the middleman and just gives very specific machine code instructions to the sound card.
That is WHY X-Fi "has no built in sound card support". The old machine codes are no longer applicable with X-Fi. Actually, that's been true since at least Audigy. The only reason Audigy could support DOS sound (the kind I was describing before) was because it had a special driver coded specifically for it to translate the machine code instructions into something the windows OS could understand and then send to the card.
Now here's the thing. There ARE DOS games that use MIDI in various ways. Some of them have a special option in their sound setup called "Microsoft Sound System", and this sound option will not use direct machine code access but instead attempt to access the MS sound system.
Any game that has this support WILL have sound support.
Your confusion seems to be the whole "X-Fi doesn't support DOS" thing. Well, no, it doesn't. But, it DOES accept any data from the Windows sound system, and as I said, that sound option will NOT try to access the sound card directly, but go through MS's system. In other words, the sound card not only "supports" that but has no choice BUT to support it. It can't tell the difference because the main question is: what does the MS sound system support? Clearly it hasn't changed it's input ever since that system was set into place and still supports old DOS games in that way.
They are all different IS the answer. Here's the situation. Depending on the "setup" a game has (and some have no setup options and just go on automatic) it'll try to access various hardware. Most of the time, it's through a direct communication with the hardware. That is, it cuts out the middleman and just gives very specific machine code instructions to the sound card.
That is WHY X-Fi "has no built in sound card support". The old machine codes are no longer applicable with X-Fi. Actually, that's been true since at least Audigy. The only reason Audigy could support DOS sound (the kind I was describing before) was because it had a special driver coded specifically for it to translate the machine code instructions into something the windows OS could understand and then send to the card.
Now here's the thing. There ARE DOS games that use MIDI in various ways. Some of them have a special option in their sound setup called "Microsoft Sound System", and this sound option will not use direct machine code access but instead attempt to access the MS sound system.
Any game that has this support WILL have sound support.
Your confusion seems to be the whole "X-Fi doesn't support DOS" thing. Well, no, it doesn't. But, it DOES accept any data from the Windows sound system, and as I said, that sound option will NOT try to access the sound card directly, but go through MS's system. In other words, the sound card not only "supports" that but has no choice BUT to support it. It can't tell the difference because the main question is: what does the MS sound system support? Clearly it hasn't changed it's input ever since that system was set into place and still supports old DOS games in that way.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)