I had these problems and solved them by making an image and then mounting it in dosbox using the imgmount command. After that it no longer crashed when playing some cd tracks and the games play fine.

Type this in dosbox after you have created an image or add it to the autoexec section of the config file:

imgmount d [fullpathtoimagehere] -t iso

note: type the full path without the brackets

Thanks, I'll try that this evening.

I had this gliches with Shadow of the Comet too.

Does the DOSBox team is aware of this one? I didn't saw it in the "to-do list" post. They should try to correct it in the next version.

Thanks again.

The things you mentioned sound like CDROM access problems - maybe your CD ROM's access speed is just very low? Back when I was using an old backup drive when my DVD drive went bust, I had similar issues with some games. Of course making a CD image will solve the problem since an emulated image of a CD has instantanious access.

AITD1-3 work perfectly for me by the way - except for the first one, the disk version doesn't give music (probably because it's cracked - the CD version uses CD audio).

The nasty music crash happens exactly in aitd1 cd audio version. It's not only that but some tracks are also slowly accessed. And I doubt that it's only a cdrom access problem. Before I tried imgmount, I tried the aitd1 image I made on a virtual emulator program and running it in dosbox. It didn't yield good results either. Only the imgmount command did the magic trick. I don't know where the problem lies exactly but I'm not sure if it is just the dvd-rom drive. And for the other aitd games I kept using an image mounted with imgmount just for precaution and they worked flawlessly.

FWIW: AITD1 and 2 disk versions require cycles below +/- 5000 for fm music to play.

I tried them on a normal CD drive too and they gave me the same problem.

The thing is that every music is encoded in CD Audio (you can put the CDs in a normal CD player, skip track 1 and listen to them). The first one had only music encoded in CD Audio. The second (and third I think) had the voice clip in CD Audio as well. I also saw a couple of post complaining about CD audio compatibility. Maybe it is where the problem lies. But the fact that an image run flawlessly while the original CD crashes is beyond my comprehension.

By the way doomer, can you tell me what software I should use to make images of my CD. I would like it if it were free, but if you don't know, thanks anyway.

Isobuster is a very good free iso maker program (in addition to all its other features). It has a pro variant which is not free but its free version is more than enough to make cd images, including CDs which have audio tracks. Just select free functionality when you first install the program.

http://www.isobuster.com/isobusterdownload.php

Install it, insert your cd, run the program, select your drive, right click on 'cd' in the left frame, then select 'extract cd image->raw (.bin .iso). Wait, then it will offer the option to save a .cue file, do save one and the image is done. 😀

Thank you very much. I am downloading it.

I wonder if the DOSBox developpers know about this bug and if they plan to fix it (it is on more games than just Alone in the Dark).

Anyway, this dos emulator is really great. Keep up the good work.