Hi,

I have trouble with some older games getting the sound to run smoothly on Dosbox 0.74. In my experience smooth sound is never quite easy in Dosbox but often managable, but here I tried about everything, fiddling around with the pre-buffer, blocksize and cycles settings, but no luck

Weirdly, if I find a configuration setting that seems to work after a while, next time I reboot my PC or restart my Dosbox frontend (or just the shortcut for the game without the frontend), the problems
seem to come back, sometimes even worse: The new configuration that finally seemed perfect before seems total crap now. HIgh blocksize, High prebuffer, low blocksize, low prebuffer, faster machine, slower machine, no combination seems to remain to make the sound run smoothly.

I observed that the stuttering of the sound seems to prevalently occur whenever the game wants new sounds to play and load into the ram. So the beginning is often bad and then I can for example run around in already known areas of the game and it works quite fine for some minutes but if I enter a new room, a new speech sample is loaded, the stuttering comes back.

This doesn't mean game-breaking sound problems in all cases, more like one or several micro-dropouts and hiccups some wouldn't bother with, but I'm a bit sensitive with sound.

Two examples of games that are very affected by this seem to be "Darkseed 1" (HD-installed CD/Speech version) and "Biing!" (hd-installed Floppy version). In Darkseed I never seem to be able to find a configuration that works permanently. Biing! is especially bad, because the game loads new sounds every time you move the pointer over a special action section of the game interface. At some high performance settings, it seems fine for a while, but it always comes back.

My laptop is a very mediocre machine, but AFAIK it should be able to run this stuff on Dosbox without further problems: Asus X551ca, Intel HD 4000, i3-3217U 2core @1,80 ghz., Realtek HD audio