Post DosBox.conf
Post system specs
What sound card and driver version?
What DosBox version?

ASUS P5B-V
Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 (overclocked to 3GHz)
Corsair DDR2 2*2GB 800MHz
Sparkle Nvidia Geforce 8600GT
Western Digital Raptor 150GB

Sound: Integrated on Board (
ADI® AD1988A 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC)
Driver version: 5.10.1.6110

Windows XP Home Edition SP2 32-bit
DOSBox 0.72

DosBox.conf attached. I also tried this with blocksize=16 and prebuffer=1, and the delay is the same.

Thanks.

Another thread about a similar problem: Goblins 3 sound lag problem

In short, a misconfigured SoundBlaster IRQ (e.g. game is configured for IRQ 5, but DOSBox is using IRQ 7) can cause sound lag, rather than the sound simply not working at all.

Thanks! Seeing that the sound basically worked, it never even occured to me to examine the games' sound settings. Constructor has apparently auto-detected the Gravius Ultrasound device. When I set it to SB the problem was significantly reduced (it doesn't matter which IRQ I choose for the SB, though). I suppose something similar happened in other games.

Since I still think there is a slight lag, I'd be happy to hear any additional suggestions (though it's satisfactory as it is). Thanks again!

You might also try simplifying the environment in DOSBox by disabling the Gravis device completely (gus=false in the conf file). And, if possible, try manual configuration of the SB instead of auto-detection... when you say it doesn't matter which IRQ you choose, there's no need to experiment there, really: if DOSBox is set to use IRQ 7 (default), then configure the game for IRQ 7. Also, make sure you're not running a batch file or something that changes the BLASTER environment variable to something other than what DOSBox sets it to, because games often go by that variable regardless of what's configured. Lastly, since you were tweaking the blocksize and prebuffer before, try setting them back to default now that the game is correctly configured.

ripsaw8080 wrote:

Lastly, since you were tweaking the blocksize and prebuffer before, try setting them back to default now that the game is correctly configured.

The opposite worked. Now that I'm using SB, these settings effect lag in the expected way. After reducing them to blocksize=128 and prebuffer=2, the sound quality is still good and there is no perceptible lag. Thanks for all your help!

Hmm, I haven't encountered a single game where I've had to change those settings away from default values; but I guess there might be any number of reasons why your system is more sensitive to them than mine.

This sensitivity is maybe caused by some background application.