Try increasing the cycles setting. On my system the issue is avoided with cycles=max or sufficiently high fixed cycles.

Real mode games were less prevalent in the late 90's, and it's not a bad idea to preemptively increase cycles to something reasonable for PCs of that time, because the games often need it and cycles=auto doesn't automatically switch to max cycles in real mode.

ripsaw8080 wrote:

Try increasing the cycles setting. On my system the issue is avoided with cycles=max or sufficiently high fixed cycles.

In fact, cycles are already set to "max" because I noticed some slowdown with the 3000 cycles the "auto" setting deemed sufficient. I also tried several settings for core and cpu type. I tried the game on two different PCs as well, my netbook and my desktop.

Which are your settings for PC*Bert?

Default settings, except for changing cycles. The effect of max cycles can vary with host speed, so try various amount of fixed cycles, e.g. cycles=10000, cycles=15000, etc.

That didn't help either. I created a new config file in DOSBox (config -wc) and changed only the cycles. 10000, 15000, 50000, 150000, 250000... it doesn't matter, the sound still disappears and reaapears every now and then.

I've so far been unable to reproduce the situation where the sound cuts out on my system except with low cycles. This is using a Win32 build of current source and the official 0.74 Win32 build. Maybe others will report their experience with the game, and then perhaps some common factor can be identified.

Oh my god, this is so embarrassing... 😢

I found the solution to my problem: I changed the controls for Player 1 to Q,W,A,S. Nothing wrong with that, you'd think. The readme file doesn't mention it, but obviously "Q" already has a fixed function: It quiets the game! So, whenever I pressed "Q" the game went mute, whereas it unmuted whenever I pressed it again. Since I was pressing the button a lot, making Q*Bert go up left, sometimes the sound stayed muted, other times it didn't, depending how fast and often I pressed the button...

So, nothing wrong with the game, DOSBox or my config, it was just a hidden option! Please close this thread now, so that it may disappear in the deep, deep bowels of the forum, hopefully never to be found again! 😉

Heh, well, perhaps the part about increasing cycles will help someone reading the thread; because even if the sound doesn't cut out entirely, it's likely to be less than smooth with default cycles.