If you use Easy Dos Boot Disc Creator for playing DOS games (and most of the users do), you’ll have the problem of loading the right Soundcard and/or VESA driver.

As there are not really generic drivers for this components on the DOS market, you’ll probably have to install them on your own.

The Soundcard is the most difficult part. For DOS games, you normally need a Soundblaster (or at least AdLib) Soundcard to play it with sound (Soundblaster was slowly established as sound standard for DOS games)

If you have a fully compatible Sound Blaster Soundcard (only someones of the Creative Labs family are fully compatible!), you’ll probably don’t even need to install a Soundcard driver (e.g. if you own an SoundBlaster 16 or ViBRA). Just run the programs and have fun!

If you have a newer Plug’n Play Soundcard from other companies, you’ll need a special DOS driver to emulate your Soundcard (to make it look like it is a Soundblaster compatible sound card).

Normally, it’s just a small DOS program that has to be started before running DOS games with Soundblaster support. (Aztech call it AZTPNP.EXE while Terratec often called it DOS801.EXE etc.) Search for this file on your hard disc and your sound card driver discs as well as one the driver pages in the Internet (I really can’t tell you what it name is as there are hundred different for each sound card, ask your soundcard retailer, if you can’t find this program). If your soundcard company supports such a driver (not everyone does!) and you can find it, just run it before running the game. That’s it!

You can make life easier if you add the line of the command to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on your boot disc: Copy all driver files needed for the soundcard (it’s normaly one single executable file and one configuration file) onto the boot disc. Then open the file AUTOEXEC.BAT on your boot disc with the program “notepad” of Windows. Just add the line you would type in in DOS at the end of the file.

For example:

If you would start the program AZTPNP.EXE from C:\DRIVERS to make your PnP Card Soundblaster compatible, you would copy AZTPNP.EXE from C:\DRIVERS to drive A:. Then you would add the following line to AUTOEXEC.BAT:
AZTPNP.EXE
That’s it!

See also the section How do I install DOS drivers manually? of the Troubleshooting Guide!

If the dos game asks for special parameters (like IRQ, DMA) you should just watch what the dos program of your soundcard tells you. Normally, it shows you the right paramters of your sound card when you run it. Use these.

Sometimes, games need the so called BLASTER variables. The BLASTER variables tell the game, which parameters it should use. This is how you set the BLASTER variables manually. Type in (in DOS):
SET BLASTER=AXXX IY DZ
while XXX is the parameter of the E/A, Y the parameter of the IRQ and Z the parameter of the DMA channel. So, if your dos program tells you the following parameters (when starting it): “E/A=220, IRQ=5, DMA=1” then the right line would be:
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1
You can (and should) also add this file to your AUTOEXEC.BAT (see above - or let the Wizard do it!)

Note: In some cases you can find the right BLASTER variables and the right dos program of your soundcard already installed in your AUTOEXEC.BAT and/or CONFIG.SYS on Drive C: (look out for a program, that sounds like a sound program as well as a line with “BLASTER” in it - see Troubleshooting Guide for details on this). Use these drivers and settings and copy them to AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS on your boot disc!

See also the section How do I install DOS drivers manually? of the Troubleshooting Guide!

Note: You don’t need to include the sound driver into your AUTOEXEC.BAT file. However, if you run a game that can’t detect your card, you normally will need to run the dos driver program of your card always manually before you play the DOS game! Otherwise, it’s enough if the driver is loaded once in the AUTOEXEC.BAT configuration file.

Like with Soundblaster, it’s the same with the VESA drivers: When more and more high-res graphic games were developed, there had a standard to be created. In this case, the standard was VESA. If your game uses VESA modes (most high res games do), and your graphic card is not VESA compatible, you’ll have to load a dos VESA driver. This procedure is merely the same as the one explained above. You’ll only have to add the line for loading your DOS Vesa driver into your AUTOEXEC.BAT on disc manually: Ask your graphics card manufacturer where you can get a DOS Vesa driver for your graphic card. Copy this driver (it’s normaly a small .EXE file) to your boot disc, add a line to AUTOEXEC.BAT to run the device driver.

Alternatively you could just run the driver only before you really need it (e.g., before running a VESA DOS game). E.g. type in the following to start your game:

A:\VESADRIV        (program for your vesa device driver on your disc)
GAME.EXE             (the game executable)

That’s it.