Sound Blaster 16 emulation for DOS 6.22
Reversing this WYSE machine BIOS I have learned that this CS5536 chipset together with the VSA software can emulate a Sound Blaster 16. By default the BIOS exposes the audio AC97 device directly to the OS on the PCI bus. But there are settings to be made for the BIOS to hide this AC97 and emulate a Sound Blaster 16. This will be great, because all the DOS games and software are compatible to SB16 by default, and there are already made drivers for SB16 for the MS-DOS. This way it might be possible to have real sound on the DOS. At some time there was an XpressAUDIO ROM, provided by the AMD, that had made this emulation possible. XpressAudio is actually a VSM (Virtual Support Module) that was not included in this VSA ROM of this WYSE BIOS. For short, the VSA ROM is loaded by the BIOS at system power up. The VSA is searching for all included VSMs and is copying them to separate segments in higher memory (CPU i...