Could try slapping an SB16 ISA in there and see if audio quality improves...which I'm sure it will. 😀

Can't... no free ports. Short of replacing my sound card or buying new hardware, any other suggestions?

For slow music: try to use MIDI whenevr possible. If it sounds wrong then you probably have a bad soundfont installed on the card, or you didn't do the proper midi-mapping (see item 8 in teh FAQ). If it's slow with MIDI then open up a .mid file (in Windows\Media) in Media Player and watch your CPU while it playes (close any DOS windows so that you're only seeing MediaPlayer's contribution). If the CPU is OK (<10%) then you should be OK with most games. If the game doesn't support MIDI then you're stuck with AdLib (somewhat CPU inensive, though not *that* intensive). You can trade qualiy for speed in the sample rate for AdLib (try 11kHz or even 8kHz, but you'll probably hate it). Also try SPEEDSET (see this forum) -- what games in aprticualr are you having problems with?

V.

Right now I'm mainly trying to get Dune 2 working, but I have other DOS games as well. They don't seem to run when told to run under MT-32 (they say "initializing the MT-32" and then come up with an insufficient memory error).

Where is this speedset post you mentioned? I'm not sure I found the right thread that you're talking about... Where do you get speedset? (I'm a newbie, sorry if I'm asking stupid questions.)

Also, I tried using the other mapping, but I suppose that won't do anything since I can't get the MIDI to work in DOS and am therefore stuck with using Adlib/SB music. Is there any mapping, drivers, or whatever way to get Adlib/SB music to play properly instead of with these weird instruments with this particular sound card? Thanks in advance.

Dune2 worked just fine for me on a 120MHz Pentium quite a while ago with VDMSound: AdLib sound (at 11kHz) and speech/digital sound effects. Are you using "Run with VDMS"? Dune should not complain about memory when choosing MIDI music, though "Run with VDMS" will definitely help with most memory issues...

V.

SPEEDSET and other useful utilities can be found in the "static" Deep Thought section of the forum.

Speedset speeds up the game but makes some music (like the opening Westwood music) completely disappear and others play extremely softly, unfortunately.

vladr wrote:

Dune2 worked just fine for me on a 120MHz Pentium quite a while ago with VDMSound: AdLib sound (at 11kHz) and speech/digital sound effects. Are you using "Run with VDMS"? Dune should not complain about memory when choosing MIDI music, though "Run with VDMS" will definitely help with most memory issues...

V.

I'm using "Run with VDMS" (as opposed to what)? I've tried both Run With VDMS directly and by creating .vlp files with the Launchpad, but both times I always get out of memory errors whenever I tell Dune 2's setup to use the MT-32. Since Speedset gets rid of some music, it's not really a perfect solution to speeding up the Adlib/SB music either. (I've tried 11kHz and even dropped it to 8kHz without any improvement.) How did you get it to play on a Pentium 120?

The only time it was slow on my 120MHz was when the "credits" counter was rolling really fast with AdLib sound (was OK with MIDI). I guess it's just a question of what version of the game you have and/or any EMS issues you may have on your system (I always had EMS available on my system; your Windows and/or BIOS may prohibit you from having EMS, hence a memory error). Get the Dune2 patch from Westwood which, among other things, will let you use MIDI music and digital sound effects. If all fails use Dosbox from http://dosbox.cjb.net/ -- it works well with Dune2, may not necessarily work so well with others (although it's getting there), though you won't know until you've tried it.

V.

DosBox works a little better at emulating the music I think (at least the "Westwood" fanfare plays properly) but is still just as jerky. In DosBox's fairness, it said in the docs that you would probably need at least a PII-400 in order to properly play 286 games. I still wish I knew how you got Dune 2 working at full speed with VDMS on a PI-120... you didn't do anything special with it? Was it XP or NT or 2000?

DosBox uses the same FM/AdLib code as VDMSound IIRC (well, probably and older version, I'd have to check in the DosBox CVS tree). Both VDMSound and DosBox use MAME's OPL2 emulation for FM/AdLib. I attached an AdLib update which fixed what was probably the last bug in the OPL2 emulation, though it won't fix your speed problems. I was running NT4 on the 120MHz machine, BTW. Try the update from Westwood, who knows what it may fix?

That Adlib patch actually helped a lot in getting the music to sound better (not perfect, but considerably better than it was before). I got MIDI to run under DOSbox I think, but since it sounded terrible 😀 and the speed was no better, I gave it up. Well, I still don't know why the sound is running slowly, maybe my sound card is just slow, but at least it sounds better. (How come that updated DLL is not in the VDMS package that I downloaded, just out of curiosity?)

Oh, I have all the Westwood patches by the way (actually, I had them a long time ago, from my days on a DOS box with Netscape 2.0 and a 14.4 modem). I double-checked, and all my Westwood games are up to date, so it's not that.