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No digital sound in "Magic Carpet" unless...

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First post, by pennstat

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...I choose only SoundBlaster and SoundBlaster FM. (I accidentally posted this in the VDMSound forum 😊 , so I'll report it here where it belongs.)

If I choose anything other than SoundBlaster and SoundBlaster FM - it doesn't matter what, apparently - the digital audio goes away. I even bumped up DOSBox's memory to 32 MB with no difference, so apparently there is a problem with SB detection in anything other than true, original SB emulation. Even SB with general MIDI fails.

It's just not the same without directional audio and general MIDI. It just doesn't feel right. Oh, well.

I tried a few different combinations and came up with the following. Hopefully, this will help the developers to find what might be the problem. I doubt that MC is the only game that suffers from this.

Original SoundBlaster and SoundBlaster FM - no problem.
SoundBlaster Pro and SoundBlaster FM - no digial audio.
SoundBlaster 16 and original SoundBlaster FM - no digial audio.
SoundBlaster 16 and general MIDI - no digital audio.
Original SoundBlaster and general MIDI - no digital audio.
SoundBlaster Compatible and general MIDI - no digital audio.

I originally thought that it was an 8-bit/16-bit issue, but apparently not since even the SoundBlaster Pro (8-bit) doesn't work either.

Unfortunately, the game doesn't support Gravis UltraSound or else I would have tried that. It does support Pro Audio Spectrum, but obviously DOSBox doesn't specifically support that.

I also ran into a problem where the game dropped to the DOS prompt when selecting the spell list, but not every time. There was nothing consistent about it. It just seems to drop when it feels like it.

"Magic Carpet" IMHO was a revolutionary game. Great atmosphere; great design; 100% truly deformable terrain; and the two TRUE 3D options (not the pseudo-3D that has been accepted by the gaming community as 3D) were a scream to play! This game is one reason why I kept an old 233 MHz Pentium around for a long time.

I know that it's unrealistic to expect the developers to spent time to try to diagnose one game, but I hope that this can be resolved in the near future. This game is so much fun and there are others who have problems with SoundBlaster 16 audio. So, fixing it on this might resolve those other issues as well.

If there is any kind of register logging that I can do to help to diagnose possible problems, just let me know. I'm not a programmer (unless you're talking UNIX shell scripts 😁 ) so I can't actually get into the code to do anything.

System specs are 1.4 GHz Athlon running Windows 2000 w/ 512 MB RAM. DOSBox is v0.63.

Reply 1 of 3, by Qbix

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did you try messing around with the cycles.
some games have trouble detecting adlib when the cycles are too high.
That doesn't do a thing a bout digital sound though.
In current cvs some irq scheduling code has been changed. It fixed a numerious small soundbugs (most related to mt32 midi capabilities) and some other things.)

as the soundblaster is by default on irq 7 (it might benefitial to try the cvs)
you could also try setting the irq of the soundblaster to 5.

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 2 of 3, by pennstat

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as the soundblaster is by default on irq 7 (it might benefitial to try the cvs) you could also try setting the irq of the soundblaster to 5.

Fortunately, I'm not the average Joe User 😎 , so that was one of the first things that I tried. I also tried adjusting DOSBox' RAM settings as well to no avail. I'm a bit worried that it might be the game itself. Even going back to Usenet messages as old as 1996, I saw messages from people who had problems when using SoundBlaster 16, but that doesn't explain the conflict between even the regular SoundBlaster and general MIDI.

I'll try to download the newest CVS built from cvscompile.aep-emu.de later. Their site is down right now for maintenance in the datacenter, supposedly.

Oh, by the way, your statement on the status page that DOSbox only supports 2-button joysticks at this time is not correct. I was using my 7-button Wingman Digital 3D Extreme without any problems during the brief times that Magic Carpet was running - but I covered that in another thread. 😀

DOSBox is a fantastic achievement as far as I'm concerned! Congrats on doing what you've done so far! Too bad that it's only us "old timers" who can really appreciate how brilliant some of those old games are, even in (or perhaps because of) their simplicity.

Reply 3 of 3, by kypec

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Well, I have tried the settings which pennstat suggested as working for him.
I also tried the latest DOSBox CVS build (2005-Mar-06).
However, I still couldn't hear any sound FX although music plays fine.
I've tested it on both Win98SE / WinXP (none SP).

BTW it's quite easy to check sound/music in this game even without the
speakers connected.
F1 toggles Sound FX On/Off . When it's not available (which is my case) you simply can't see anything displayed in the messages area - located just next to the small map in the main screen.
F2 toggles Music On/Off. This I can control whenever FM synthesis was configured during game setup.

Pleeeeeeease try to fix this sound bug <- Magic Carpet is the only game I kept
since ancient DOS times because of its uniqueness. I wonder every now and then whether there's going to be released some modern clone of it (Win+3D graphics DirectX/OpenGL) ever...
🙁

My HW platform = P4 @ 2,4GHz, 512MB RAM, on-board audio Realtek ALC850, VGA nVidia FX5700LE

Have a nice day full of games 😀

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