Only for clarification - are you really running DOSBox, or are you actually trying to play through XP/Vista DOS window? Because there shouldn't be any sound playing through your MT-32, it's all emulated and will be played through whatever soundcard is your primary sound device.

Post your system specs and DOSBox version.

Btw, DSavant works fine for me, DOSBox v0.72, default settings, under Windows XP and Vista.

Because there shouldn't be any sound playing through your MT-32, it's all emulated and will be played through whatever soundcard is your primary sound device.

Dosbox doesn't come with a built-in MIDI synth (except for those MT-32 emulator builds). If you have a real MT-32, you can have it play back music from games emulated in Dosbox (by setting your host OS to transmit MIDI data to the MIDI out port to which the MT-32 is connected instead of the sound card's synth).

@ ripa
O.K., thanks for correcting me.

@MikeSol
Sorry.
Have you tried Dsavant without MT-32 (i.e. does the bug occur when you play music and SXF via DOSBox's internal Soundblaster emulation)? As I said, it works fine here 😕

Thanks for the responses.

I am using DosBox 0.72 -- I have a real Roland MT-32, CM-64, SC-55 and SCC-1. All of these devices work fine through DosBox. I would not use DosBox if they didn't.

I disabled Roland MT-32 support to see if that would make any difference. It didn't. I wouldn't expect it to. The music (through my MT-32) works fine. The sound effects (through DosBox's emulated SB\adlib) does not.

If you check the game list section of this website under Wizardry 7, you will see at least one person having the same trouble I am. I can live with the popping noise if I have to as it isn't that bad but if anyone has another suggestion I will give it a try.

XelaSarg, are you sure the game is working correctly? I only ask because I thought it did at first. When I first started up the game with Soundblaster selected for effects, everything appeared to be working until I realized the effects didnt sound quite right. When I chose internal speaker instead, the effects sounded different (they sounded correct now) but there was also a popping noise.

If you have the game installed and ready to go in DosBox, would you be willing to switch your effects to Internal Speaker temporarily and let me know what you hear in game? Do the sound effects sound different? Do you hear a popping noise now?

popping sound is probably the turning off of the pc speaker emulation.

Seems like my feeble attempts to help are suffering from heavy influence of Murphy's law here.

I've just tried PC speaker sound, and it does indeed sound different. Even though Soundblaster is supported, it's obviously a 'fake' option, and you still get only Adlib sound.

Can you believe that I've never noticed this since I bought the game 15 years ago!? I've always used SB sound. 😜

Still I'm not sure if the popping noise (yes, now I've noticed that, too) is really a bug in DOSBox. The PC speaker" sound engine" (well...) seems to be closely related with if not identical to the one used in Wizardry VI, and I think the speaker effects there sounded like that on my old 286. Of course I can very easily be mistaken here.

Only thing I can think of would be someone trying this on a real DOS machine.

My bad, I guess. 😦

Thank you for trying. I didn't notice either at first how different the effects sounded when I had the sounblaster option selected.

I just tried the game on a real DOS computer. When I choose soundblaster or adlib I hear, what I believe to be, the correct sound effects. The same effects I hear when I choose internal speaker in DosBox, but without the popping noise. I tried the internal speaker option on my real DOS computer but the effects coming through the actual internal speaker are very low. I can barely hear them unfortunately. But anyway, this is clearly an issue with DosBox as the soundlbaster\adlib option works correctly on my real DOS computer.

I don't know what it is I am hearing when I choose the soundblaster or adlib option in DosBox but it does not sound as good as the internal speaker option. *Maybe* its playing FM synthesized effects instead of digitized effects. Either that or DosBox is really messing up the sound effects when you choose adlib or soundblaster. Anyway, I'd rather have the good effects with the popping noise then the bad effects without the popping noise. 😜

Finally, whoever said the popping noise is caused by the internal speaker being turned on and off is correct. It is being switched on and off every single time an effect is played. There were talks (apparently) to leave the internal speaker on in the next version of DosBox.

Thanks again for running the test Xelasarg!

For sound effects, Wiz7 plays digitized sounds by rapidly throttling the OPL chip or PC speaker in ways that neither was intended to be used. DOSBox doesn't seem to be able to handle the way it throttles the OPL chip, but it's playable in PC speaker mode (albeit with pops as described). They did the same thing in Wiz6 pretty much (as Xelasarg mentioned).

The music in Wiz7 is handled entirely separate from the sound effects; there are separate selections in-game for sound and music hardware.

Thank you for the information Hunter. There is more discussion about this popping issue with the internal speaker emulation in the DosBox General section.

Tested with 0.73 under Windows 7 x64 RC1 and the popping sounds before and after the PC speaker effects in Wiz7 are still present.

Just tried it myself, and it seemed fine. Can you post an output sample (from 0.73)?

Here's a recording from 0.73. Note that it's a .flac file that I've renamed to .mp3 so that I can upload it as an attachment.

My previous post only refers to the very first sound in the game. After playing through some more, I have encountered the same issue that you're having. The clicking sounds appear to be caused by the way DOSBox emulates the PC speaker, and not from speaker deactivation.

It seems weird that a game would have different options for AdLib and Sound Blaster and still only use OPL2 for sound effects, even when the Sound Blaster's digital audio capabilities are present.

That's because they used the same sound engine from Wiz6. It was designed around pushing samples to the PC speaker one at a time, and they figured out how to throttle the OPL chip in the same manner for Wiz7 (and possibly later builds of Wiz6) because it was easier to adapt their crude sound engine to do that than to adapt it to use the DMA-based (i.e., pushing blocks of samples to the card instead of one sample at a time) sound capabilities of the Sound Blaster. Neither piece of hardware was designed to be used that way, so the compatibility issues in DOSBox don't surprise me.