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HX DOS Extender 2.17+ with modern sound card support (Announce)

posted by Wengier E-mail, 16.02.2016, 22:14
(edited by Wengier on 17.02.2016, 20:03)

As many of you already know, HX DOS Extender, the best DOS extender in the world with Win32 API support is no longer maintained by Japheth. One major issue that HX 2.17 (the last version by Japheth) exists is that it only supports a SBPro/SB16 sound card. More recently however, Ruslan Starodubov, the author of modern sound cards support for QuickView Pro 2.60 (DOS multimedia player), has decided to update HX 2.17 to support these modern sound cards such as AC97 and Intel HDA too. Yesterday (Feb 15, 2016) he released HX 2.17+, which currently features experimental support for Intel HDA sound cards (he will add support for AC97 etc later). The download page is at:

http://sound-dos.ucoz.ru/load/new_hxdos_extender_2_17/1-1-0-8

Please note that this is a very important milestone in the history of DOS, as the vast majority of DOS sound apps/games out there (except for certain programs such as QV 2.60, MPXPLAY and Hammer of Thyrion) currently don't support modern sound cards such as AC97/HDA directly, and there is no SB16 emulation driver available for these modern sound cards; however, since DOSBox (the best DOS emulator) provides good SB16 emulation and we are able to run DOSBox under HX DOS Extender, so if HX DOS Extender supports modern sound cards like HDA, then all DOS sound apps/games that work in DOSBox would be able to play sound through DOSBox's SB16 emulation of these sound cards under HX DOS Extender. This is functionally pretty much like a SB16 emulation driver for modern sound cards in real DOS. Once we are able to get sound cards like AC97/HDA to work reliably with HX, then the no sound issue with the majority of DOS sound apps/games on modern PCs will be completed resolved by the SB16 emulation of these sound cards within HX+DOSBox in real DOS. So please don't hesitate to test your HDA sound cards under HX 2.17+ now and report any issues encountered (you may try for example the TEST\PLAYWAVE program from HX 2.16/2.17 to see if it works on your system). In case you want to try a recent DOSBox build that run under HX, you can download the one built with MinGW below with long filename, mouse copy/paste and DBCS support (zipped with required DLLs):

http://bit.ly/1laDvGX

Download both HX and DOSBox, then make sure DOSLFN is loaded and run DOSBox with "dpmild32 -g dosbox.exe". In my experiences it currently works best with Japheth's HX 2.16, which is still accessible from the page below (please get both HXRT and HXGUI packages). When using with HX 2.17 or 2.17+, you might need to replace its VESA32.DLL file with the one from HX 2.16.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140904175113/http://www.japheth.de/HX.html

Wengier

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