Although this is not a game, it was crucial to my childhood education. Using an old dos computer, I needed the virtual sound blaster drivers to play games from the Learning Company such as Spellbound and the Master of Mischief. It was also required to play games from Sierra such as The Incredible Machine. Spellbound required the use of the driver to send spoken text to my old radio connected to the output of the computer. Although I was young at the time, I suspect that the gaming software required actual sound blaster cards, designed by Creative Labs, but these drivers allowed the emulation of the sound drivers, so that the sound can be played on now sound blaster cards.
I remember setting the sampling rate, bit size, and mono or stereo emulation. To help me run my games, my dad created a boot disk for me that incorporated into the DOS boot-up process. The disk started up dos, asked me to select whether or not I wanted to enable the sound drivers and then loaded the drivers into memeory before starting up my game.
If I remember, the drivers were compatible with DOS and Windows 3.11. The drivers allowed me to play with Create Labs's music jukebox, which was able to record and playback CDs from my parents recently purchased cd player.
Currently, the evolution of the product can be found on virtual machines running windows 2003. The more recent product
simulates the sound driver on the windows server to allow music and limited games to run in a virtual machine. Although it was a pain, I was able to get some of my old games, such as Gorilla Wars written in QBasic to run on the virtual server complete with sound on the virtual system.
