Newer Motherboards-MS-DOS Mode?

[Eck]

Hey,

I just fired up my old KT7A with the T-Bird 1.2 266 just to enjoy the pleasure of some nostalgic Ms-Dos Mode gaming (and the 98SESP2RC2 with 98SE2ME!).

Sure, I can use Dosbox and vdmsound on my Asus A7V880, but it's kind of cool to use my ol' Voodoo 5 5500 and 98.

Has anyone tried Ms-Dos Mode on modern boards? I mean, even 98's boot up screen warns that himem.sys cannot access A20. If I go to dos mode I get a tiny memory area for conventional memory and the SBLive dos driver loads, but doesn't fully. The Sbego test figures out what interrupts are being used as some weird numbers (even though the initial dos screen showed it loaded to 220-7-1-5). And the tests won't play sound. It's like what happens on boards without non-maskable interrupts.

I have one game that'll play anyway so apparently the settings are correct but most games won't find enough memory space or where the audio card is.

I tried a boot disk but that memory space problem and sound problem is exactly the same.

I mean, 98'll run fine on the board and so will the Dosbox program, but where's the fun? I want to use dos mode. I've read somewhere that newer boards use dos memory space for all the extra on-board goodies (LAN, Audio, etc).

What I'm asking is whether there are any BIOS settings to turn off that stuff so dos memory will work normally? I know I can turn off the on-board audio and LAN and just use PCI cards, but this doesn't change what goes on when booting to dos. What can change that?

I'd like to use my new expensive board, but still want some old legacy fun. Not possible?

[I_Broke_My_MHZ]

Wouldn't know, you would have best luck looking at the documentation of the mb. You could also run VMware, which has special emulated VM hardware to run your old DOS games.