The Toshiba Libretto 50CT came with windows 95 when it was brand new but it’s far more useful to me as a DOS computer since I’m interested in playing with hex files under DOS as well as running retro games.  There have been a couple of challenges along the way since it wasn’t designed to be used with DOS.  One problem with the Libretto is that it does not have a hardware volume control.  It’s a very small computer so presumably Toshiba wanted to cut every piece of non-essential hardware possible.  I’m thankful that the sound works at all but it has been running at full blast up until now.

The Libretto uses an OPL3 sound chip but luckily that is Sound Blaster compatible.  I found a great archive of DOS sound programs.  Oddly, right at the very top of the list, I found the exact program that I needed called BCCVOL.  I downloaded the program to my Libretto and after unzipping it, typed:

bccvol ?

This gave me something like:

Master volume level = 9

Wave volume level = 9

Synthesizer volume level = 9

CD volume level = 1

Line volume level = 1

To cut a long story short, I put a line like this in my autoexec.bat and now when the computer starts up, it puts the sound at a comfortable volume of 4:

C:\utils\bccvol m4

I don’t believe the program is a TSR so I don’t think running it uses any memory.  I think the program simply toggles the proper registers and then exits so there should be no conflicts caused by using this program.  This will probably also work for most any other laptop computer without a hardware volume control on which you are trying to run DOS.

Share


If you like the content on this site, please support it by using this link to order from Amazon. You know you were going to go there and buy stuff anyhow so why not help me pay the hosting bill.