Hey everyone. Okay, I'm using a version of DOSBox compiled from the CVS on Friday, but this issue has been around for quite some time. I've been playing Wizardry 6: Bane of the Cosmic Forge a bit over the weekend, and it uses the PC speaker for playing low-quality digitized sound effects. Unfortunately, DOSBox's emulation of the PC speaker for these kinds of sounds has an issue that results in a lot of popping noises (mostly at the beginning and end of each sound). This also happens in Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (which is also supposed to support the Sound Blaster as an alternative, but DOSBox doesn't emulate the Sound Blaster well enough to run Wiz7 in SB mode).

I've already posted this to the bug tracker on Sourceforge, but I thought maybe it would help to start a discussion here and to provide you (the DOSBox team mostly) with a better idea of what I'm talking about. I've recorded the output of the game running in DOSBox and made both an MP3 and a screenshot from a wave editor (both attached to this post). You can clearly see and hear the weird popping.

My guess is that this might be an issue with the original sound data and not DOSBox, but that you don't hear the popping on a real PC speaker because real PC internal speakers suck. It would be nice to be able to compensate for this in DOSBox somehow - maybe have an alternate PC speaker emualtion mode that ramps, dampens or even eliminates these "pops" - I don't care as long as it stops the popping sounds from driving me insane while playing these games... 😵

It's probably not good for speakers/headphones to have to reproduce those clicking sounds either, which cause the speakers to slam much harder to a new position than is expected in normal operation.

I should also mention that I tried to take a look at the PC speaker emulation code a few months ago to see if I could work on it myself, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. There weren't any helpful comments or other documentation... 🙁