Sound and Hidden Legacy Support?

[princethrash]

Hey guys, I'm confused. 

Loaded MS-DOS on my Acer Aspire One (AOA150).  It works just dandy.  I loaded mouse.com. and my touchpad worked.  But here's the confusing part:

I plugged in a USB mouse, and it worked.  No USB DOS drivers at all.  I checked the BIOS for Legacy Support, and there was none.  But, if a USB mouse works without a DOS USB driver, doesn't this automatically mean that there is legacy support in the BIOS?  Does this mean that my BIOS has legacy support, but it is on by default and hidden?

My second question:
Now that the mouse works in DOS, I'd like to tackle, or at least explore, the much harder issue of getting sound to work.  Using the program lspci from linux, I found that my onboard audio is "N10/ICH7 Intel (rev. 2)".  At least, I hope this is accurate.  Is there a driver that can make this work in DOS?   And if my BIOS has legacy support, but it's hidden and undisclosed (weird), I assume that sound would/could already be working with no driver at all?

Any help is most appreciated, and if you get sound working on my DOS netbook, I will let you have three of my five daughters (or credit you in a little multiboot DOS guide I'll write up -- your pick).

[BC_Programmer]

Hey guys, I'm confused. 

Loaded MS-DOS on my Acer Aspire One (AOA150).  It works just dandy.  I loaded mouse.com. and my touchpad worked.  But here's the confusing part:

I plugged in a USB mouse, and it worked.  No USB DOS drivers at all.  I checked the BIOS for Legacy Support, and there was none.  But, if a USB mouse works without a DOS USB driver, doesn't this automatically mean that there is legacy support in the BIOS?  Does this mean that my BIOS has legacy support, but it is on by default and hidden?

Yes. It does. Mouse.com only works with Serial and PS/2 mice. Therefore the USB mice is acting as one of the two; almost certainly PS/2.

Now that the mouse works in DOS, I'd like to tackle, or at least explore, the much harder issue of getting sound to work.  Using the program lspci from linux, I found that my onboard audio is "N10/ICH7 Intel (rev. 2)".  At least, I hope this is accurate.  Is there a driver that can make this work in DOS?   And if my BIOS has legacy support, but it's hidden and undisclosed (weird), I assume that sound would/could already be working with no driver at all?

Any help is most appreciated, and if you get sound working on my DOS netbook, I will let you have three of my five daughters (or credit you in a little multiboot DOS guide I'll write up -- your pick).

"N10/ICH7 Intel (rev. 2)" is the IDE/SATA controller....

Chances are, with a netbook, or really any laptop, is that it uses Host-based processing, for example, it may claim to have say a "realtek high definition audio controller" or something to that effect, but what this generally means is that the "controller" defers all the actual processing of the sound to the CPU. (I'm not sure if they've changed this). This is largely redundant- you would almost certainly need the sound device to emulate a Sound Blaster in order to use it. DOS does not and has never had native sound support; generally you would buy a sound card back in the good old days and it would come with a driver disk, and then you'd change config.sys to load the driver with very specific settings (and you would need to flip about jumpers and whatnot on the actual card to match the settings you choose in config.sys, and hope it doesn't conflict with something).

the drivers, however, were wholly unneeded a lot of the time. First off- DOS never emits sound through the sound card, and programs that did use the sound card would look for a certain environment variable, the "BLASTER" variable. this commonly set like this in autoexec.bat or config.sys:

Code: [Select]

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6

This tells the game/program where to look for a sound card. IN fact I cannot think of a single game that needed you to load the included "drivers" disk, aside from the fact that it added this environment variable for you. Basically, I'd throw something like that into autoexec.bat and run a game/program that uses audio. Nothing included with DOS uses the sound card AFAIK.

[princethrash]

BC,

So I guess the question is, can this netbook's hardware emulate a SB?

I was playing with autoexec.bat SET BLASTER before posting, and I also tried your line, matching my programs configurations to the line (hex, dma, irq), but it still isn't working.  I'm not new to these things, I have adjusted jumpers on modems back in DOS and Win95 days, and have editted config/autoexec many-a-time.

I think I need to identify the audio hardware before I can really diagnose the issue, do I not?  So I can find out if it emulates an SB?  I am unsure how to do this.  I used DOS for years, and I am aware that drivers were not needed, the reason I mention drivers now is because, I assume, only some boards emulate SB (aka, DOS compatible) and others might need some "help".

As I said, I used lspci in linux and the only line with the word "audio" in it did indeed describe this as n10/ich7.  Are you sure these designations refer only to IDE/SATA, and not something more general?