Changelog
All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.
The format is based on Keep a Changelog,
and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.
1.0.0-beta.6rc - 2026-05-16
✨ New Features
11f952d- integrate TSF from https://github.com/Cacodemon345/VSBHDASF with adjustments; /VMPU and /VMSF options added, if soundfont file path is relative, it is relative to the SBEMU.EXE (commit by @crazii)
🐛 Bug Fixes
3de27bd- fix problems on TSR communication for string options, fix TSF handling on soundfont option change. (commit by @crazii)ef7bf21- bugfix for DPMI_LStr*cmp (commit by @crazii)
⚡ Performance Improvements
♻️ Refactors
👷 Build System
📝 Documentation Changes
d4ac635- AddCONTRIBUTING.mdfile to project with guidelines for project contributors (commit by @volkertb)
🔧 Chores
🛸 Other Changes
ci: Enforce Conventional Commits in Pull Requests (commit by @volkertb)
e1692b8- fix missing linux drivers in makefile.dos
Linux drivers are missing in dos makefile. Please note, that native DOS could not create recursive directories with md, thus output directories have to be created manually. (commit by @ElTentakel)
fix missing linux drivers in makefile.dos (commit by @volkertb)
bbd67a3- Update build-release-artifacts.sh (commit by @crazii)6432df9- Update build-release-artifacts.sh
update to freedos1.4 (commit by @crazii)
User instructions
Available files
If you wish to use SBEMU and its dependencies in an existing DOS installation, you'll find the necessary
files in SBEMU.zip.
Alternatively, The USB image can be written to a USB drive or SD card using a tool like balenaEtcher.
The advantage of using Etcher is that you don't have to decompress the You can run the image in a VM with QEMU as follows:
If you wish to test Intel HDA compatibility instead of ICHx AC'97 compatibility, replace If you prefer to use another hypervisor, such as VirtualBox or VMware, you may have to convert the raw image to a supported VM image format first:
NOTE: Although VMs can sometimes be useful during development, testing and debugging, you should not rely on those for actual hardware compatibility testing, since the sound cards that the hypervisors emulate are themselves merely approximations of actual hardware, and will not behave like the real thing in every single corner case. There are multiple convenient distributions out there that contain DOS games that can be distributed freely and legally. Here are a few links to such distributions:
SBEMU-FD13-USB.img.xz provides SBEMU and is dependencies preconfigured inside a compressed
bootable FreeDOS image that you can write to a USB flash drive or an SD card.
Preparing a bootable USB drive
Preparing a bootable USB drive
.xz archive first.
It will decompress such files automatically, before writing the image to the target drive.
Booting the USB image in a virtual machine
Booting the USB image in a virtual machine
unxz SBEMU-FD13-USB.img.xz
qemu-system-i386 -drive file=SBEMU-FD13-USB.img,format=raw -device AC97
AC97 with intel-hda in the last command above.
On Linux, you can include the parameter --enable-kvm to run the VM with hardware-assisted virtualization.
unxz SBEMU-FD13-USB.img.xz
qemu-img convert -f raw -O vmdk SBEMU-FD13-USB.img SBEMU-FD13-USB.vmdk
Basically, you shouldn't test emulators on other emulators.
Where can I get some DOS games to test with?
Where can I get some DOS games to test with?
Specifically freeware, shareware, open source and free demo versions.