I've seen a soundcard emulator for Win3.x, does anyone know of one for Win9x? It played the sound(s) using the P.C. onboard speaker. Failing this, can anyone recomend a cheep-n-cheerful ISA soundcard? The computer it is going into is a 486DX2 with 24MByte ram. TIA, CS Miller

That reminds me of old DOS games, which produced sound by pounding the little system speaker with the required beeps-per-second. Modern Windows systems will not allow you to get that close to the hardware to properly control the sounds in real time. Even the DOS box is a 'virtual' environment. Try running that old 3.1 program, possibly in boot-DOS (not DOS window). It might work good enough. In a strange way, cheap sound cards are the same thing as the sound emulator - they require the CPU to do most of the processing. The standard for ISA sound are the Creative SoundBlaster cards (16, 32, 32 AWE, 64, 64 GOLD). Grab one while there are some on the shelves, they are basically discontinued. They should be very cheap now. I got an AWE 64 GOLD, retail box with microphone, for $40 at auction. Look around.

Actually there is a little installero let you use the PC Speaker has a soundcard. Not sure how your supposed to use it but here ya go: Download Now

I have this utility, i use it on my 486 laptop, its pretty neat tho it hammers the processer and the sound isnt great , but for win 3.x its fine, it doesnt say if it will work on win95 but i`m willing to zip it up and send it to you for you to try its only 13kb anyway. I have only used it for the win3.x sounds tho, dont expect cd quality from it ;) Woof

Thank you, LeeNick123! It works fine. If any one else if thinking of using this, then I have a few tips. It requires its speed and volume to be calibrated, but the "Test" button was grayed. So time a real sound card playing back a known sound. Then test the time that the emulator takes, playing back the known sound, and adjust it till the time is right. Next, the volume needs to be set, at the default it was distorting badly, but you could still hear it attempting to play back. BTW, The only way I could get at the settings menu was to reinstall (and reboot, natch), but it remebered its setting from previous attempts. The exe. in the link is a self-extracting DOS archive, which creates a .INF .DRV .OEM and a few text files. It is a Win3.1x driver, but seems quite happy under Win9x, the only problem was that the Windows install process (Sound/games card, Have Disk) couldn't find the .DRV during the install, but the dialog offers the directory its in !?!. Thanks CS Miller chrstphr - .DRVs and .VxDs can directly access the hardware on your machine, and by-pass all the standard security on MSWindows, not that that is hard....