Using oemsetup.inf Files with Multimedia Drivers

The driver’s installation medium must include an oemsetup.inf file. A general discussion of oemsetup.inf files is provided in the Programmer’s Guide. When you use the Multimedia applet in the Control Panel to install a multimedia driver, the Multimedia applet reads the oemsetup.inf file in order to determine which driver files to install. To understand how oemsetup.inf files must be constructed for multimedia drivers, look at the following example:

[Source Media Descriptions]
    1  = "Sound Blaster Driver"  , TAGFILE = disk1

[Installable.Drivers]
soundblaster = 1:sndblst.dll, "wave,MIDI,aux,mixer", "Creative Labs Sound Blaster 1.X, Pro, 16" ,,,

[soundblaster]
1:sndblst.sys

The [Source Media Descriptions] section identifies the load medium, as described in the Programmer’s Guide.

Next is the [Installable.Drivers] section, which is required for multimedia drivers installed using the Multimedia Applet. Each line under this section is a driver profile. Each driver profile describes a user-mode driver. A driver profile consists of six fields, separated by commas. The first three fields are:

  1. Source medium and user-mode driver filename

  2. List of supported device types, also known as aliases

  3. Driver description

In the example, the “1:sndblst.dll” field indicates that the driver’s file name is sndblst.dll, located on source medium 1. This file will be copied to the system’s \system32 subdirectory.

The next field lists all of the device types (aliases) supported by the driver. The Multimedia applet creates a registry entry for each device type. It would create the following entries for the example .inf file:

wave : REG_SZ : sndblst.dll
MIDI : REG_SZ : sndblst.dll
aux : REG_SZ : sndblst.dll
mixer : REG_SZ : sndblst.dll

If the alias already exists in the registry path, a number is appended to the alias string. The entries are placed in the registry path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE \Microsoft \Windows NT \CurrentVersion \Drivers32.

The third field is the driver’s description, which is the description that is displayed by the Multimedia Applet. The remaining fields are not used.

The [soundblaster] section name matches the name given to the profile entry. This section lists additional files that need to be copied. Include your kernel-mode driver in this section. The Multimedia Applet copies files with an extension of .sys into the \system32\drivers subdirectory, and copies all other files into the \system32 subdirectory.

After the files have been copied, the Multimedia applet sends DRV_LOAD, DRV_ENABLE, DRV_OPEN, DRV_INSTALL, DRV_QUERYCONFIGURE, DRV_CONFIGURE, DRV_CLOSE, DRV_DISABLE, and DRV_FREE messages to the user-mode driver, in that order.

Sample oemsetup.inf files are included with the source code provided with this DDK.