SBEMU Just Killed Your DOS Gaming PC 

Keeping and restoring vintage hardware should never go away, but hopefully this alternative will make the former more affordable.

DOSBox is out there since 2002. So... You could always play DOS Games on modern PC's. You can even route the MIDI Music to Windows and using COOLSOFT Midi Mapper and MIDI Synth to load SFZ Banks to improve Music quality.

This also potentially opens up windows 95 games as well since the sound portion is now covered with this project. If we could do the same for true color graphics and glide interpretation on either the CPU side or a basic driver layer for graphics card then that is almost every base covered for vintage PC gaming.

Honestly I don't see the appeal. In a world in which DOSBox exists and offers support for SB, SB32, AWE64, GUS,...., bothering to run it natively is just redundant.

Not clickbaity enough; try harder!

I love when a new open source project starts being used and promoted. But I'm having a hard time figuring out why this should be better than usin QEMU or DOSbox.

Came for the DOSBox vs native arguing in the comments. Wasn't disappointed. Or was.

All hardware will eventually die. How can with keep it alive? Via emulation, software and/or hardware. From the perspective of a hardware collector and preservationist, this is an awesome project that I hope everyone will take into consideration when getting into the hobby. Vintage PC parts are really expensive to get a hold of nowadays so innovations like this will keep the community alive decades from now, especially with SBEMU and many other software and hardware projects being open source!

This makes me want to try to set up a small USB flash drive with FreeDOS and SBEMU. The games I played barely depended on SoundBlaster capabilities but I can see this being more excitement than having a DOSbox fork running in a window which I can close all the time.

Keep up the great work, James! This could fix the shortage of both FPGAs and retro parts in the near future, and prevent people from having to drop a load of money on new equipment.

Can you do a video explaining why this is better than dosbox? I thought sound blaster was pretty well emulated

I wasn't aware that we had problems emulating SoundBlaster 16 audio in 2023, but finding out we did and that it's no longer an issue is awesome. Some of my fondest memories are rooted in SB16 and Pentium 1/2 era gaming...back when games were released in a completed state, and you didn't have to worry about patches and updates.

Apparently you actually boot the PC into a DOS and run the old games directly on the metal. It wasn't clear whether it was all running in a virtual machine (which of course it can as well). That's impressive.

Can it emulate the legendary awe 32? there are many games where the unique music available to that setting have been gatekept. For example magic carpet will never sound close to its ps1 counterpart unless heard on an awe 32.

A bit behind on this video, but I'll comment anyway. SBEMU is a DOS Gaming PC killer? So was VDMSound, DOSBox, WHDLoad and Bochs. I am sure I missed a few others, but point stands; when these tools released each claimed to end the retro PC idea, but those retro PCs are still being built and bought. For us that don't currently have the money though, or willing to be seen in your local thrift store, recycle center or dump; these tools are great. While attempting to get to the "bare metal" as closely as possible to play these old DOS gems is the best possible path for an enjoyable experience, SBEMU at least for me, is not my choice and doesn't have the feature set for my personal vast library of DOS games requires. I have managed to hold on to 99% of the DOS software I had growing up. My father was also an avid video game nerd and we both amassed a large library of games and his occupation the US Air Force afforded us the opportunity to even invest in some things the average gamer has. I also have a set library of installed games, ready to be used with DOSBox and its flavors. I am currently on DOSBox-ECE and so far, for me it, it is the best flavor I have used this far. I am on Arch Linux and couldn't be happier. I have watched from the VOGONS board and have had interest a slight bit in the SBEMU project. However, I don't think I will actually be using it. No Roland Sound Canvas support is a problem for me. I prefer the DOS environment DOSBox emulates to allow me to setup the MIDI and OPL of Rolland instead; All my MIDI is piped through it and sounds much better. No Gravis support. One day, while poking around a computer shop, the owner (whom I got to know as helped me, with my father tagging along, pick parts for my first computer that I would build on my own. 1992 and 10 years old was a good year for me) He had an extra Sound Canvas set he suggested I take home and try using. I already had a couple games that were designed with it in mind. I had it for a few weeks and was about to return it, but a series of unfortunate events for that owner forced him to close shop and we lost contact with him. So I kept it. For me, I don't think I will be using SBEMU as a daily driver any time soon. What I am excited about is that Sound Blaster emulation might be more efficient than what is in the DOSBOX main code that it borrowed from anyway. It has already made its way back into DOSBox Staging. In the end, what is going to win over a user's preference is the ease of setup and joy they get out of it. My computer is not 8 years old. I haven't kept up on the update path I was supposed to, half those 8 years has been spent in poor job prospects, pandemic, job loss and inflation. This next year however, I am building a new computer and might be switching to PCem to emulate hardware and get closer to a "real machine". Why am I doing this as I mentioned you can still get that old hardware? Space. I don't live in a large enough place yet. Also in Las Vegas, most of the retro hardware is gone and the dump doesn't allow people to sift through it.

This is a great advancement, but it won't kill the old DOS Gaming PC's. A lot of people like playing on original hardware, and not emulators. That said, there is only so much of the old hardware around, and it is increasingly becoming unreliable, and as you mentioned, very expensive. Thanks for the great video.

This is a good alternative to DOSBox and other similar emulators, but I hear some crackling and scratching happening in the sound, particularly in DOOM. I wonder what's causing that.

Good with alternatives, but I will stick with my dos rig.

IMHO retro gaming hardware is not just about the ability of running retro games. It's also the nostalgia, the memory lane of playing the old game on the old hardware. A time capsule if you will. Much like when you play on an original console and not an emulator. Like having audio from a SID chip instead of the software emulating the hardware of the SID chip. Having an old computer, the experience of old mechanical keyboards, the analog CRT charm, the noises an old computer makes, the smell of 3M floppy disk labels, it flies you (back) to a world of its own. No amount emulation or bridging the gaps between new systems and old software can substitute this, but this is just my two cents.

It's a cool project but I'll stick to DOSBOX given it has many other benefits such as MT-32 emulation if you use certain forks, shaders, savestates, etc. and of course you can multi task.

This absolutely does not make old hardware obsolete, for many reasons: 1. EFI systems may not be fully IBM compatible, which means bad news under DOS, Windows NT (2000, XP, 7, 10, 11, etc.) uses a virtual machine where the DOS program has no direct hardware access, EFI systems also do not support the floppy drive interface, and DOS is severely limited without a floppy drive or hardware floppy emulator. If you want a BIOS system, you're looking at a motherboard that is 10 years old or more. 2. For many people, historically accurate experiences are an end in themselves, including the experience of building and using the computer. Sure, I could use a floppy emulator in my Athlon, but I have real floppy drives in both 3.5" and 5.25". I could use a generic $10 SATA optical drive with an adapter, but I scored a very early DVD-ROM drive made for a beige Mac with an old-school ATAPI interface and a '90s aesthetic. I could use any random 4:3 LCD monitor with a VGA output, but I use a 21" Trinitron that weighs over 80 pounds. I could just have the Athlon and be done with it, but I'm also building a 200 MHz Pentium Pro machine. 3. Some games have specific hardware requirements other than a Sound Blaster, like a processor that runs in a certain range of acceptable speed (like Wing Commander and Descent), weird video modes, etc. SBEMU won't help you with these, you need a computer built to a specific set of specs (or DOSBox). 4. Driver software like Sound Blaster emulation cut into conventional memory in DOS, which is extremely precious--you get 640 kB, and some of that will be used by the system itself even with all the tricks for loading as much as possible "high". One of the rules for my Athlon build was that it had to have an ISA slot for its sound card for this reason. Some DOS games (especially around 1991-93 when budgets and scope started ballooning but DOS extenders were not yet popular) requited 600kB of conventional memory or even more! Sound Blaster emulation is a *notorious* memory hog and will make some games unplayable. 5. The primary users of this will likely be running old hardware anyway, it will just open up full DOS support to a larger range of old hardware--there were millions and millions of late '90s/early '00s consumer-grade PCs with nothing but motherboard AC97 for audio, and they can be turned into (limited) DOS rigs with SBEMU. It will let your great aunt's old eMachines run Doom (though it won't let it run Wing Commander, TIE Fighter, or Ultima VII). It isn't really worth much of anything on a modern EFI machine. 6. DOSBox already exists and runs old DOS titles *far* better than they could possibly run natively on modern hardware. You can create custom virtual machines to simulate very specific hardware configs required to optimally run finicky titles like Ultima VII and TIE Fighter. It runs under Linux and Mac, it corrects for aspect ratio on widescreen monitors and pixel-scales to an arbitrarily large resolution, it is much easier to configure than a real DOS machine. Yeah, it's cool, but it's not a revolution, and it's not a replacement for my Athlon, let alone a 386 or 486.

I grew up in the 90's and had a few consoles but my first love was the potential of pc gaming to the point of obsession. Problem was for many of these old games i didn't have the patience of an adult to take my time, now that i do i find myself really enjoying many old titles in both a sense of nostalgia and a new sense of adventure and purpose to complete these dusty indie titles (most of all when it's 1 am and everyone is asleep and its just me, the game and some crickets outside).

It doesn't obsolete older machines just yet since you need EMMX memory to make it work, which eliminates a ton of titles that can not work with this. But this does mean we now have a universal replacement for the kind of emulation that used to be exclusive to sound cards such as the Soundblaster Live or Audigy cards. Very neat :D Another question that comes to mind, is since Windows runs on top of DOS could this theoretically carry basic Sound Blaster 16 support to Windows 98? Because if that could be done, combined with the VBEMP driver you'd have basic visuals and basic sound.

That's a nice addition and good and useful work, but not a breakthrough. I have several retro systems and I love every aspect of them - rare and interesting hardware, real CRT, noise of harddrives and even floppies (even 5.25 inches), old case, old plastic speakers, everything cleaned and properly restored - that gives me that nostalgia feeling and experience I either had or had not. That's the point. Another option is proper emulation with different supported devices that cannot be obtained like GUS, Tandy and so on. SB/Adlib are pretty basic and standard. Third option is playing the remasters of late games. And this driver is just something in-between when you can use real DOS on real but modern PC instead of emulated DOS, having some advantages but with lots of limitations (DOSBox is more powerful) and much less real experience. Because the old game is not only sound but overall feeling.

Nice, this is fantastic news. Hopefully it'll work well with some of the older thin client boxes that are cheap to pick up.

I've got an old Pentium3 for DOS, but it's showing its age. A modern PC would still have the downside of not letting me have my floppy disk drives, but that's not an insurmountable obstacle once I back everything up. What I'm kinda curious about is how well SBEMU reacts with SLOWDOWN. I use SLOWDOWN for a small handful of very old games that would otherwise see the P3 as too fast, and for the most part it works well on bare hardware. I'm curious if SBEMU would have trouble mixing with it, considering it's a software solution.

Retro PCs won't die until there's a program to turn your monitor into a CRT.

I have tested this successfully on 2 laptops: - IBM Thinkpad G40 (Windows XP) - Lenovo B575e (Windows 8) It just worked using the same DOS bootable USB stick i made on both laptops.😁

Doom really is one of the best games of all time. Awesome sound and music too.

That's pretty cool actually! Thanks for sharing! But I hear a nasty high frequency noise on your recording - what's with that?

Oh wow just tried this on a core i7 laptop. Same method, freedos and now I have a bootable usb pen drive loaded with dos games and almost all of them have full dos sound.😮 Thanks for the video that's pretty incredible. I had no idea this existed

But what about controllers if our Modern Machine only has USB (which is highly likely)?

That didn’t sound right. The adlib sounds in the opening screen of Doom were all messed up and the sound during the game had all those crackles.

It sounds just like my childhood !!! Thankyou !!

This video makes me want to pull out my old Pentium III 600 desktop with SoundBlaster and one of the first G-force cards. Still have the huge 21" monitor, and SoundBlaster 4 speakers and base with surround sound. That thing just would never die. Still have a bunch of games still with the box they came in. I took care of my sh!t. lol

Nice summary of the software, James! But we retro gamers do this for the LOVE OF THE HARDWARE even more at times than just the games. Heck, a fun time is rebuilding a Windows 95 system in a Gateway 2000 Pentium Pro 200 MHz tower on a rainy Saturday.

Not sure; why not to use DosBox or build a virtual machine with Win9x / ME / XP on a Win7 PC (c:\users\\virtual machines) ?

Cool. When you play doom at the end with sound, where is the constant background crackle coming from? Is that SBEMU or just how it was recorded?

This is nice and every new solution is welcoming! But what are the advantages of SBEMU over DOSBOX? What added value does SBEMU has that DOSBOX doesn't already have? IMHO I would still prefer RetroPC over modern, because the feeling is just right. I know it's probably placebo, but I still like it and we live in a free society. You would still need retro PC though for running 16bit windows 3.1/95 programs, that can't be ran under modern 64 bit windows. Also, what about general MIDI? Is it supported?

Let's promote this for more geeks running dos games

Apart from DOOM and Duke Nukem, there is no sound anywhere. Wolfenstein 3d, Spear of Destiny, Flashback, Black Thorne, Warlords 2, Warcraft 2 - sound is not detected.

"ever-inflating prices" made my heart sink. I have plans to one day re-build my 1999-era PC and I never for a moment realised that parts likely become pricier every year as more of them break or get tossed out. I still have my Spectrum and two Amigas but I never thought to keep hold of old PC parts 😐

Whether this is new is debatable but it certainly hasn't been possible for years now. It can be done on XP thanks to VDMSound. And then Vista came along and suddenly it wasn't possible again. Of course that was running under Windows but there was still the ability to run the majority of DOS apps without emulation on XP at food framerates, just without sound; unless you used VDMSound. And of course we still had our CRTs back then.

I spent so many hours playing dos games, Dune 2 and anything battle of Arakis related is my jam. When you were playing C&C I had some good nostalgio with the "yessir, affirmative, youuuuu got it, boarding!"

Until all the wavetables are properly supported (like mpu401 mapping and sound font emulation for AWE) I don’t think there is a legitimate alternative to old PC hardware.

That C&C music sent shivers down my spine! Nostalgia overload.

Waiting for the first review of this. Would be interested to see how much memory the driver occupies since could be an issue for memory sensitive games.

God I love hearing that FM sound for the midi music instead of the crappy awe32 soundfonts we usually hear

I like the correct pixel aspect ratios!

What exactly is the breakthrough that was made? It would seem like emulating a sound card from the 90s would be trivial. Was it just not made before due to low demand of such emulation, or why?

How's the support for MIDI sound, I mean beyond the _basic_ sound blaster? In Windows 10 I use CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth with an AWE-32 soundfont. I can run it with with DOS Box it's like I'm playing Duke Nukem 3D with the soundcard I had in the '90s.

Finally a solution! I posted a video 2 years ago showing another way of getting sound in dos. But this way is so much easier and works flawlessly! Thanks for the video!

Will SBEMU work on the most common onboard sound card like Realtek High Definition Audio? In the past, MPXPlayer already allowed high quality wave playback on Realtek HD Audio.

There is also a project called the dISAppointment which allows you to access an ISA connection on modern devices by tapping off the TPM module connection that's usually present on motherboards these days.

I'm guessing this is more important for using a newer system that's not quite meant for DOS, but not really modern perse, like older dell optiplexes. On my main PC, I can just use PCem and emulate everything up to like a Pentium MMX 200 or so, and I output it to my CRT using a HDMI to VGA adapter. Not perfect, but it works pretty darn well.

Nice! This gives me some ideas for using a few PCs I have kicking around to natively run DOS games nicely, maybe for a LAN party 🤔

Does the chainsaw sound in Doom work properly with this? If you were “firing” the chainsaw while you pressed the end level button a cool chainsaw sound would play. It doesn’t work in any of the newer Doom versions I’ve tried over the years.

Now i have FreeDOS installed on my Acer Aspire One D270.Can i configuration the sbemu via Ubuntu livecd with sudo thunar (root) ?

Does this mean the Doom I have been hearing for 20 years on Dobox, all the source ports and the newest revision on Steam are just emulated sound?

Oh this is great! I hope Fast Tracker II works as well, that'd be mint!

What if you have Realtek audio chip, or an ASUS PCIx sound card? (Or better yet, an SB PCIe sound card.) My understanding is that the Intel audio chipset exposes the old IRQ that the ISA bus has access to, so that is why it works so well on modern PCs.

Ive been using DOSbox since 2002, so i dont know what you mean by you needed this program or you used to track down old hardware. I even built my own DOSbox frontend and uploaded hundreds of pre-configured DOS games to torrent sites around 2008. The CVS version of DOSbox around that time already had D3D and Glide support fully implemented. Not sure why youd need anything else.

The sound in Doom had a serious crackling sound in the background. This isn’t supposed to be there. The audio quality is not up to the quality of normal DOS. 🤔

How is this different from DosBox?

Am I missing something here? This sounds cool but sound already works through DosBox.

Why is the audio crackling in Doom? Is there any way to use the USB or wireless Xbox or PlayStation controller?

I didn't know that it was just "sound" that was holding people back and keeping the retro community alive. I know for myself and most people I talk too we prefer original equipment just because there is no real one and done piece of software (of which there are many) to run all of your dos games and other software on your modern pc. More of the game just wont boot or run vs the sound.

is there an SBEMU equivalent for graphics? if i run colonel's bequest or any other cga/ega (and in rare case, VGA like mega man), the graphics don't work. cga/ega don't show anything on screen, just the prompt from where the game was executed, but i hear the music in the background, so the game is running. in megaman, i get garbage on screen, even on VGA, however, quest for glory 3 in VGA works just fine through and through. windows 3.x works, but the graphics are wonky. apparently every video card and GPU is capable of base VGA, but a bug is what's causing this issue and manufacturers simply did nothing to fix it because there was no real need for it.

Er, wasn't there a program called dosbox which does wonders for old dos games?

Only question, does this work in NTVDM? Sort of interesting that I came from the PCIE-PCI adaptor video - because one of the reasons I would want such an adaptor is because the main thing missing from DOS or NTVDM in a modern system was Sound Blaster support. I still couldn't use NTVDM now anyway due to the deletion of some graphics palettes from the modern graphics adaptors (EGA at least) but ya know, whatever.

No time, does it emulate other stuff? Like specific Adlib cards, or SB cards? Roland stuff, or even Ultrasound or Yamaha XG stuff?

So what makes this any different to DOSBox or VDMSound, amongst many others?

Cool, but from the review it's not clear why I should use this rather than DosBox which also emulates sound cards. What are the advantages? Also, if the game supports midi I'm able to hook up my Roland SC-55 to DosBOX. Can you do this here as well? I guess that would have to be a freedos feature maybe.. not sure 😊

The only PC I have that I would want to run DOS on may have ground looping issues with its audio codec, and also currently lacks a CPU cooler. I have two tablets and a thinkpad and all make better Linux machines. I thank you for your commitment to this cause.

I just tried this, and it blows my mind. It works. It just works.

I wonder if it supports the Roland MPU401...? Was a MIDI Device for gaming back in the day...

Finally I can pull out that Pentium 4 notebook again, where I installed MS-DOS on 5 years, ago 😄

May I ask if SBEMU works on the HP T5710 thin client? Thank you

Awesome breakthrough for sure! But I prefer to use a old PC. Nothing beats the nostalgic feel of actual use of a old PC.

can you or someone please provide exact step by step process how to setup the bootable usb stick with Freedos and system config files? or ideally upload the whole setup in zipped package so can be downloaded and extracted and its good to go ? I assume you put DOS games on the same USB stick? as if the PC has Windows XP it would be running NTFS file system which the DOS system from the USB stick wont be able to see. thanks in advance.

Wasn't SBEMU the sound blaster emulation program of the original Gravis Ultrasound back in the early 90s? The one that needed EMS and therefore was not really "that" compatible with a some games? (not that native Ultrasound support didn't sound better by a long shot anyways - 8bit mono or in the case of the SB16 16bit 2channel vs. 16 bit 32 channel stereo)

What about GM, MT23 / CM32L, GUS and Tandy sound (using cards like Orpheus II and Tandy Nano inside something like a Pentium 233 MMX system), Voodoo (2) support, speed sensitive games and so on? FreeDOS also has compatibility problems of its own (already tried it for DOS games). About speed sensitive games, I used different slowdown programs under real MS-DOS and they all had their issues. I still have to use these for some games as my 233MMX can only be slowed down to 386 DX-25 levels (using SetMul and Phil's 136 in 1 guide). DOSBox cycle settings are also problematic. I like using Ultima 7 Part 1 as a test and having played it back in the day, it never felt right under DOSBox. In the end all solutions have their downsides and I find old hardware with ISA and PCI slots to be the most versitile hardware solution. It also depends on how much you are really into these old games besides DOOM and similar meme games. DOSBox would be a replacement if the speed and other potential issues can be solved. I actually run it on a laptop with VGA out, hooking it up to my CRT Monitor and forcing 320x200@140Hz so it displays real 320x200 instead of using doublescan, something I can't do on my DOS PC.

Very nice, sounds CRISP.

Cool, but how is it any different from DOSBox? Sound Blaster emulation has been baked into that for years now.

always very excited about advancements in emulation.

Dumb question, I have audio coming out of my HDMI cable from my Nvidia graphics card. Would SBEMU work? (I assume not given description says Intel chipset needed). If not I hope that becomes available.

But does it emulate the MPU-401 MIDI interface? And what about Gravis Ultrasound?

Rogue Spear sounded phenomenal on the SoundBlaster card.

Well, Dosbox and 86Box exist. Dosbox can play almost any game with sound, Dosbox-X can do even more, and 86Box is like building an old pc in software, difficult but compatibility is great, plus good emulation of tons of video and sound cards. The need of a real old pc for solely gaming with sound has died years ago. Only obscure and Japanese stuff aren’t emulated well enough. And the reason for a physical old pc is to be able to touch it and push in a diskette or something. This video is wrong on many levels.

Not sure how is this game changer. We had something similar back in days of win NT/2k/xp - VDMsound. I still prefer pcEM and DOSBox for DOS emulation with second one being used through LaunchBox.

Honestly, getting the old hardware running is the fun. Playing the games is actually boring.

How does this beat DOSBox(-X) in terms of playing emulated games? With DOSBox, you have all the rendering stuff you need for graphics, excellent SB support; and in X, really solid MT32 support with the ability to install sound fonts. I’m not really sure the problem this is trying to solve is a genuine one. For that matter, VMWare & Qemu both handle soundblaster well.

Seems like you somehow got mouse support working for C&C? I haven't been able to get FreeDOS to detect a mouse, presumably because I don't have any PS/2 mice on hand. SBEMU also doesn't cover PC Speaker emulation, so all that leaves me with is an _extremely_ specific subset of games that this works with. Can't deny it's an impressive milestone, though.

Why are people downvoting this video?

Been a long time since I heard Sound Blaster. I remember buying a card at my local computer fair with my bro, good times.

Wow, that really sounds correct!! I just thought games weren't quite as good we remembered

does it support direct hardware calls to Voodoo 2 or just 3dfx driver support? asking for EF2000 support lol.

are there any CPU killers for DOS win 3.x? we still have the issue of games running too fast :(

cool indeed, but can it read microphone inputs or line in or is it just output only?

What's with all the crackle on the DOOM audio? That didn't sound "high quality".