Sound Blaster 16: Difference between revisions

==QEMU support==

QEMU is one of the few hypervisors/emulators that support this sound card.

To run QEMU with Sound Blaster 16 emulation, use the <code>-soundhw sb16</code> option.

'''Warning''': recent versions of QEMU (>= 4.0) have a broken support for

this sound card. See bug: [https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1873769].

Briefly, when QEMU's GTK UI is used and audio is playing, you'll experience

the QEMU window freezing. In addition, there will be flickering in the audio

as well.

===Workarounds===

# Use an older version of QEMU. With QEMU 2.11 the problem simply does not exist.

# Use [https://virt-manager.org virt-manager] which connects to QEMU using Spice. The problem does not exist in this case because QEMU's GTK UI is not used. BUT, configuring QEMU to emulate Sound Blaster 16 through virt-manager requires some tricky settings:

## Add any sound card to the VM

## In virt-manager's Edit -> Preferences menu check the "Enable XML editing" box.

## Open VM's hardware and after selecting the sound card, click on the XML tab and replace its contents with:<source lang="xml"><sound model="sb16"/></source>

# Run the OS using QEMU's <code>-curses</code> option or use QEMU's <code>-kernel</code> and <code>-nographic</code> (serial console): in this case, there will be no "freeze", but there still be some flickering in the audio.