# Using The DOSEMU Sound System (SBEMU)

Alistair MacDonald, updated by Stas Sergeev and subsequently by Ben Davis.

<A.MacDonald@slitesys.demon.co.uk>

dosemu-1.2

The document describes the use of the DOSEMU Sound code (SBEMU), and what you can expect from it.

## Introduction

It is much better to be pessimistic about the capabilities of DOSEMU's sound code. The code itself provides an EMULATION of the popular SB cards. The actual level of emulation that can be achieved is dependent upon the capabilities of the sound driver on your system. Currently the emulation can only talk to the OSS driver (included in the Linux kernel) although it has been written in a modular fashion to allow other drivers to be written. For more details on the internals please see the WWW pages at http://www.slitesys.demon.co.uk/a.macdonald/dosemu/sound/.

The SB and DMA emulation was extensively reworked a while ago by Stas Sergeev to the point of emulating the SB Pro quite well. Ben Davis has since added SB16 support. So the pessimism in the last paragraph may no longer be justified. However, there are programs that don't work or don't work well. (SB16 support implemented 22-24 May 2003.)

## What to (and what not to!) expect

The emulation consists of a number of parts, and I'll examine these separately.

### FM

The FM driver is the least complete. Most of the chip functions are there, but no audio output occurs. This means that software which uses the presence/operation of the timer should detect the timer presence, but if the audio needs or uses FM you will hear nothing.

### MPU-401

This is the MIDI emulation. This should be fairly complete. For using with OSS you need either an external daemon 'midid' (this is supplied), or your sound card must have a Wave Table synthesizer and /dev/midi configured and working. Note that if you use ALSA, you don't need a Wave Table. It is possible to use TiMidity++ instead.

### SB (Digital)

This is the digital aspect of the audio output. It is the most mature. Most of the functionality up to and including SB-16 is implemented. Note that SB MIDI is not implemented, although MPU-401 emulation (above) is.

## Using SBEMU

SBEMU needs to be turned on at run-time. Then your DOS applications need to be configured to use the emulation (just as they need to be configured to use the real Sound Blaster card). The basic steps are given below.

### DOSEMU Run-time Configuration

The default settings are:

        Base Address:   220
        IRQ:            5
        DMA:            1
        Midi Port:      330 (Not normally needed)

Note that these do NOT need to be the same as your real sound card.

#### Changing the SBEMU settings

The DOSEMU Sound settings are controlled by the following entries in `/etc/dosemu.conf`

Note that there is some overlap here with the configuration notes in the README. This will be addressed at a later stage.

:

    $_sound = (off)		# sound support on/off
    $_sb_base = (0x220)
    $_sb_irq = (5)
    $_sb_dma = (1)
    $_sb_hdma = (5)
    $_sb_dsp = "/dev/dsp"
    $_sb_mixer = ""
    $_mpu_base = (0x330)

Note that these are the default values. `$_sb_dsp` and `$_sb_mixer` are pre-configured to work with the standard OSS-Free driver. You are unlikely to need to change these values unless you have multiple drivers in your kernel (such as the Ultra project drivers). Note: `$_sb_mixer` can be set to "/dev/mixer" if you want DOSEMU to be able to change the volume on your sound card, but most people don't like that, so it is disabled by default.

There are several driver-specific settings for each supported underlying driver (only OSS right now, or the OSS emulation of ALSA). In general you don't need to alter the default values, but many OSS drivers appear to have some very nasty quirks, so some tweaking might be necessary if you have some problems with your particular driver.

    $_oss_min_frags = (4)
    $_oss_max_frags = (0x20)
    $_oss_stalled_frags = (1)
    $_oss_do_post = (off)
    $_oss_min_extra_frags = (2)

`$_oss_min_frags` specifies the minimum number of fragments to divide your card's DMA buffer to. If you buffer underruns, try increasing this value.

`$_oss_max_frags` specifies the maximum number of fragments to divide your card's DMA buffer to.

`$_oss_stalled_frags` is a hack to work around a bug found in most of the existing OSS drivers, including the SB one. Even when the playback is completed, these drivers are reporting that one fragment is still in use. If your driver doesn't have that problem, feel free to set this to 0.

`$_oss_do_post` is a hack that makes it possible to work with drivers that do not honour the SNDCTL_DSP_SETFRAGMENT ioctl command (unpatched Aureal Vortex binary driver is a known offender). This hack is incompatible with the standard OSS drivers and must be disables unless your driver doesn't work otherwise.

`$_oss_min_extra_frags` can be increased if you have underruns.

#### Configuring Midi

The midi driver can be used in two way. It is possible to direct the output of the SBEMU midi driver directly to a sound card, or through the `midid` daemon. All midi traffic is directed at `~/.dosemu/run/dosemu-midi`. You will need to create this, or link it to the appropriate device, according to your configuration. Details about this are given below.

##### Using Midid

This is the preferred method of producing MIDI output. This daemon is built by default and lives in the same directory as your other DOSEMU binaries. You will need to create the output pipe for the SBEMU driver:

    % mkdir -p ~/.dosemu/run
    % rm -f ~/.dosemu/run/dosemu-midi
    % mknod ~/.dosemu/run/dosemu-midi p

If you already have a `~/.dosemu/run` directory then the `mkdir` will fail. This is not a problem.

Finally, you need to start the midid program:

    % midid ~/.dosemu/run/dosemu-midi &

This will run the driver in the background, giving you your prompt back.You should now run DOSEMU. Midid will terminate when DOSEMU terminates.

##### Sending Midi direct to a device

To use this method with OSS, you simply need to link the SBEMU midi output file to the input of your MIDI device. The simplest method of doing this is:

    % mkdir -p ~/.dosemu/run
    % rm -f ~/.dosemu/run/dosemu-midi
    % ln -s /dev/MyMidiDevice ~/.dosemu/run/dosemu-midi

Where `/dev/MyMidiDevice` is the path to your midi device. If you already have a `~/.dosemu/run` directory then the `mkdir` will fail. This is not a problem.

For ALSA, things are a bit trickier. Here is an explanation from Robert Komar:

The kernel-side basics for getting it working are described at http://www.midi-howto.com. For ALSA, I load the snd-seq-oss and snd-virmidi kernel modules along with the usual ones started by alsasound. I then start timidity as a daemon as follows:

    % timidity -iA -A100 -B2,8 -Os -EFreverb=0 -EFchorus=0 > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Note, that you have to get a recent development version of Timidity++ (I use TiMidity++-2.12.0-pre1), and you have to specify support for the server when running configure before building Timidity++.

At this point, you should be able to use `pmidi' to list the various midi ports and to play music on them. Check to see that you can play midi music via the Timidity++ server.

I then connect the timidity server to a virtual midi device so that I can access it through the /dev/snd/ interface (rather than only through an ALSA-aware program like pmidi):

    % /usr/local/bin/aconnect 75:0 128:1

The addresses would probably be different in your case, but the midi-howto site covers these details fairly well.

Listing the midi ports with aconnect on my machine shows (I have a SoundBlaster Live! Value card):

    # aconnect -o -l
    client 65: 'Emu10k1 WaveTable' [type=kernel]
        0 'Emu10k1 Port 0  '
        1 'Emu10k1 Port 1  '
        2 'Emu10k1 Port 2  '
        3 'Emu10k1 Port 3  '
            Connected From: 74:0
    client 72: 'Virtual Raw MIDI 1-0' [type=kernel]
        0 'VirMIDI 1-0     '
    client 73: 'Virtual Raw MIDI 1-1' [type=kernel]
        0 'VirMIDI 1-1     '
    client 74: 'Virtual Raw MIDI 1-2' [type=kernel]
        0 'VirMIDI 1-2     '
            Connecting To: 65:3
    client 75: 'Virtual Raw MIDI 1-3' [type=kernel]
        0 'VirMIDI 1-3     '
            Connecting To: 128:1
    client 128: 'Client-128' [type=user]
        0 'TiMidity port 0 '
        1 'TiMidity port 1 '
            Connected From: 75:0

Before running dosemu, I go to the .dosemu/run directory and redirect the output from dosemu-midi to the virtual midi device connected to the timidity daemon:

    % cd ~/.dosemu/run
    % cat dosemu-midi > /dev/snd/midiC1D3

[ note that the permanent symlink should also work, see above --SS ]

Note that midid isn't required in this case. In another terminal, I start up dosemu and run the games with music playing via General Midi. Et Voila! I get sound effects and music while playing Duke3d! (and just in time, since my version of Win2K won't play these old DOS games with sound and VESA video modes).

### Configuring DOS

You should set your BLASTER environment variable to match your DOSEMU settings. Note that these don't need to correspond to your real sound card. For a base SB with the values above, use the following DOS command:

    set BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 T6

The T6 identifies this as a Type 6 SB device, i.e. an SB 16. Here is a table of SB types:

1. Legacy SB

2. SB Pro

3. SB 2.0

4. SB Pro 2.0

5. SB Pro MCV

6. SB 16

### Configuring the Applications

Bearing in mind what was stated above, the following are the recommended methods for configuring applications to use SBEMU. The first is the preferred method. If you need to manually set any parameters remember to use those you configured DOSEMU with.

#### Midi with Digital Audio

Configure the applications to use 'General Midi' for Music, and 'SB' for Digital Audio. This will work if your card have a Wave Table (/dev/midi) or hardware mixing ability (TiMidity++).

#### SB Music with SB Audio

Configure the application with 'SB' for Music and Audio. Note that if the system plans to use FM for the music you will not get music.

#### Midi Music, No Audio

Configure the application with 'General Midi' for Music and no Audio.

## Debugging SBEMU

The debugging output for SBEMU is enabled in the same way as all DOSEMU debug, and collected in the same manner. The debug flag for sound is 'S'. Because the DMA controller is hardware it uses the debug flag 'h'. To get basic debugging information into a file called `sound.out` use:

    % dosemu.bin -D-a+Sh -o sound.out

You can get slightly more verbose output if you use level 2 debugging (e.g. use `-D-a+2Sh`). If you need someone else to look at the debug output then feel free to send it to the list or report it at the SourceForge bug tracker at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=457447&group_id=49784&func=browse , but PLEASE, remove any unnecessary debug output, and give a DETAILED description of the problem.