Make the Pascal (test and build) sources work with Free Pascal or GNU Pascal

volkertb / temu-vsb

TEMU ("Tandy Emulator") and VSB ("Virtual Sound Blaster"), two nifty MS-DOS TSR utilities originally developed by Andrew Zabolotny (Андрей Заболотный).

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Make the Pascal (test and build) sources work with Free Pascal or GNU Pascal #3

Open volkertb opened 7 years ago

volkertb commented 7 years ago

The x86 assembly source code files of VSB are accompanied with some Pascal sources, for both testing and building VSB:

sbemu/mvsb.pas -> the source of a build tool that combines the QEMM-specific and clean DOS variants of VSB into a unified executable for convenience.
sbemu/sbdma.pas -> tests the correct emulation of Sound Blaster DMA playback functionality
sbemu/sbcode.pas -> tests the correct emulation of an undocumented encryption feature in Sound Blaster hardware

Most likely, these are Turbo Pascal sources. It is important to get these test and build tools to succesfully compile and build as well. Hopefully these sources will require no to little modifications to compile and build with open source alternatives, such as Free Pascal, GNU Pascal, or other open source Pascal implementations listed at https://www.thefreecountry.com/compilers/pascal.shtml.

juegosenlazaruscr commented 4 years ago

FreePascal programmers could call your TSR to produce sound with some interruption? Hi, from some years ago. I released a FreeDOS game each year written on FreePascal (Go32v2 it is for 386 mode). The games have sound on Windows, Linux and Mac, juegosenlazaruscr, but my FreeDOS versions do not have sound for now. I thank you, if you give some hints to produce sound... For now, my only positive test with soundblaster on FreePascal (Go32v2) is playing 8 bit wav files with DosBox emulation... but I prefer FreeDOS in order to use a totally independent OS. NOTE: My games need the memory of 386 mode...

volkertb commented 3 years ago

@juegosenlazaruscr Sorry for the late response, but I would recommend against using this project as a reference when you are writing new code. I would recommend you use a clean industry standard HAL/API such as VBE/AI for implementing audio in your (Free)DOS games. You can download the VBE/AI Specification 1.0 PDF from VESA (free email registration required). You can also find a VBE/AI SDK on-line if you google for it. (Not sure about the license terms when you include any of the SDK code in your projects, though.) There are existing VBE/AI drivers for Sound Blaster, Pro Audio Spectrum, Disney Sound Source, Adlib (OPL2) and (I believe) General MIDI.

Also I am currently trying to figure out how to write VBE/AI drivers for newer sound devices. The cool thing is if you write your games to use such a standard API, you can easily add support for newer sound devices as drivers for them are developed.

Good luck!