dos game music hardware

Okay, so, I’ve been messing around with old DOS games lately, and the music hardware stuff is kinda interesting. I really wanted to get that old-school sound, you know?

I started by looking into what kind of sound cards were actually used back in the day. Turns out there were a bunch, like SoundBlaster, Gravis Ultrasound, and a few others. Most of them are no longer compatible with modern Windows, so that was a bit of a problem, but I wasn’t gonna let that stop me.

I did some digging and found out about this thing called DOSBox. Apparently, it’s an emulator that lets you run old DOS stuff on modern computers, and it can simulate those old sound cards. Sounds good to me!

So I got DOSBox installed and started messing around with the settings. It lets you choose which sound card to emulate, pretty neat. I tried a few different ones, and I could see that if a game supported it, it was usually General MIDI, and that MT-32 was also common. For example, I noticed the Crusader games are just mono playback when using Gravis Ultrasound, so I guess SoundBlaster is the way to go for those. It was fun hearing the differences between them, not gonna lie.

But I wanted more than just emulation. I wanted to see if I could use some real, actual hardware from back then. I found some info about people using custom hardware to record DOS game soundtracks, and that gave me an idea.

• I started looking around for old sound cards online.
• I managed to snag an old SoundBlaster card for pretty cheap.
• I also needed a way to connect it to my modern computer, but I do not care about that now.

After a bunch of trial and error, I finally got the old SoundBlaster card working in my setup! It took some tinkering, but it was totally worth it. Now, when I play those old DOS games, I get that authentic sound that I was looking for. Even the simple PC speaker sounds can be fun, but it is kind of too low for some games.

Wrapping Up

This whole thing was a fun little project. It’s pretty cool to be able to experience these old games the way they were meant to be heard. If you’re into retro gaming, I definitely recommend giving this a try. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole, but it’s a fun one to go down!

I am trying to build my dedicated PC with this old hardware and see how it goes.