In response to innumerable help requests with insufficient information, I've created this list of guidelines to ease the process of tracking down and resolving problems.

The following are things that should be in your help request:

• Motherboard
• Processor type and speed
• Amount and type of RAM
• Video board w/ RAM amount and type
• Sound board
• Operating system
• Game name (and version, if applicable)
• Description of problem (be detailed: saying "it's jerky" doesn't help, saying "the player sprites seem to be jerky when I'm pressing any of the arrow keys" does)
• Reproducibility of problem (always, only once, always but only on a specific level, etc.)
• Sound mode used
• Video mode (Software, OpenGL, Direct3D, or Glide, and resolution)
• Version of emulator (for VDMSound, probably 2.0.4 or 2.1.0; for DOSBox, 0.58+)
• Steps already attempted to solve the problem (please say you've read the README if you haven't, and READ IT IF YOU HAVEN'T!)

Updated 4 July 2005 by HunterZ (because it was using HTML tags, and support for them seems to be disabled, so it looked ugly)