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Troubleshooting Sound

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First post, by NoSoundUser

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Hello all,

I'm running Dosbox 0.63 on Fedora Core 3, and can't get sound in any program. I can do wav captures with ctrl-F6, and they sound fine (demonstrating that Dosbox is emulating the sound ok). I can't hear sound from Dosbox, though. Other programs like XMMS play sound fine.

Any hints or resources that might be useful to look at? I'm reasonably capable of figuring things out, but there seem to be a lot of components involved here and I'm not sure how to start narrowing things down.

If specifics are interesting, I started out with this error about not being able to open a sound device:

ALSA lib seq_hw.c:446:(snd_seq_hw_open) open /dev/snd/seq failed: No such file or directory
ALSA:Can't open sequencer
MIDI:Opened device:none

Per instructions in another forum post, I loaded the snd_seq modules, and the error changed to this:

ALSA:Can't subscribe to MIDI port (65:0)
MIDI:Opened device:oss

I then set device=oss in the configfile and Dosbox now starts with no errors. I am using Alsa for sound, but other apps use the OSS emulation without problems... so it seemed reasonable to try it. It's not working though, Dosbox is still silent.

Any ideas?
Mike

Reply 1 of 7, by Qbix

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if you have no error messages when you start dosbox up sound should be working.

You could try other sdl games (as we use that one for sound) to see if they work with your configuration.

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 2 of 7, by Guest

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The following SDL games work with sound on my system, the first two claim on the project page to use SDL_mixer:

Neverball (http://icculus.org/neverball/)
Solarwolf (http://www.pygame.org/shredwheat/solarwolf/)
Maelstrom (http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/Maelstrom/)

Is it possible to get verbose output out of either dosbox or SDL that might help me troubleshoot?

Mike

Reply 4 of 7, by Guest

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> well we don't use sdl_mixer. we use plain sdl.
Umm... good for you?

It looks like my soundcard doesn't support hardware mixing, and there was a rogue app hogging the output. The issue was intermittent and could be reproduced on other apps once I pinned it down, but initially appeared the first time I used dosbox.

Ironically, the errors I saw initially had nothing to do with my problem. I think they are related to midi passthrough, which I don't use. To my knowledge, dosbox doesn't issue any warning or error when the alsa output is locked by another app.

Dosemu has a document that helped me get my head wrapped around the language and concepts involved with this issue:
https://k6.xs4all.nl/packages/dosemu/sound-usage.txt

Once I realized that mixing was the problem, I started playing with the dbus plugin for alsa, which is cute but kind of a pain:
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=AlsaSharing
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=DMixPlugin
http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php?page=Dmix+K … and+dirty+HOWTO

Mike

Reply 6 of 7, by Snover

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Hey, perhaps you should register, so you can edit your posts instead of needing to make another post to correct your self? As I've said before I only send out 3 or 4 V!A.GR4 spam a week, so it's worth your while 😉

Yes, it’s my fault.

Reply 7 of 7, by jal

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Snover wrote:

Hey, perhaps you should register, so you can edit your posts instead of needing to make another post to correct your self? As I've said before I only send out 3 or 4 V!A.GR4 spam a week, so it's worth your while 😉

Ah, so it's you clutterling up my mailbox! I bet you sell these cheap r0lexes too, don't you?

😀

JAL

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