This makes it impossible to play many old games, if they don't run under Win95. This is especially true for parts 7 and 7.5 of the Ultima Series by Origin. The only way to get them working on current hardware is under some kind of emulation.
The Bochs emulator, which emulates a complete PC with CPU and all important peripherals, is able to run Ultima 7, but previously, no sound was possible because sound hardware support was missing.
So, I've taking upon myself the task of adding this sound support to the Bochs emulator. This will basically be equivalent to making the source code of Ultima 7 available, in so far as future playability is concerned. As long as Bochs runs on future hardware, Ultima 7 will as well. And since the source code to Bochs is available, this should not be a fundamental problem. Except maybe that nobody will do it, but it will be possible.
With this emulator, all accesses to the hardware can be intercepted and re-routed to a more sophisticated driver provided by the operating system, so that Bochs can provide sound support independent of the OS or platform it is running on.
(Go back to the Bochs Sound Support page.)