Full-Screen DOS Mode in Vista

[A Black Falcon]

Oh yes, CD Audio works fine in DOS games. But I'd have expected that, as it has nothing to do with the Soundblaster card. I was just playing Caesar II... didn't miss those constant "Plebs are needed!"s. :D

(and some have no setup options and just go on automatic)

Yeah, for instance as I said Hexxagon has no setup besides "Soundblaster or PC Speaker" in the ingame menu, and while Raptor does let you choose, you don't configure, just choose the source, such as General Midi. Caesar II's CD Audio works, but the sound effects -- set up to soundblaster -- don't work. Simcity 2000's music works but not sound. I'm not sure what it's set to though, you can only configure sound when you install the game and I don't have the install disk right now.

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.

My point is that, even if this is the cause (I'm not sure), you cannot identify it by what the games call it ingame, in the config program, or anything else, as far as I can tell. You just have to try it and see whether sound works in that game...

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.

Yeah, I know that. You need something older than an Audigy for real backwards compatibility.