First post, by anetanel
I'm running a 486 DX33 with a CT4170 (VIBRA16x PnP), and trying to get decent audio in The Lion King on DOS.
The card is configured with ADDR 220, IRQ 5, LOW-DMA 1 and HI-DMA 1.
The only (relevant) sound card option in the original INSTALL.EXE program is "Sound Blaster", which results in a rather poor quality mono sound.
I have another (cracked) version that allows selecting "Sound Blaster Pro" and "Sound Blaster 16", but selecting those results with no sound. I have no idea where I found this version. The installer even has several text based games in it... bizarre.
The weird thing is, that there is a demo version of the game, where although the setup program (SETSOUND.EXE in this case) does not give a SB16 option, it is possible to manually modify the LIONKING.CFG file to use SB16, and the sound quality of the demo is great and stereo! There is only 1 track though (LION1.AMF), that plays in the title as well as in the game itself.
I tried using the demo's CFG file in the full version, but it did not change anything.
Using Camoto Online I was able to extract the title music file (TITLE.AMF) from the full original version, renamed it and placed it in the demo version folder, and indeed the demo played the title music beautifully, in stereo.
Which means that the issue is not with the audio packed in the full version, but rather in the executable itself.
I tried several versions of the full game executable, but was not able to make it play audio in SB16 mode.
BTW, neither dosbox not PCem make any sound when running the demo version in SB16 mode. But when I changed the High DMA in dosbox to 1 from the default 5 to mach my actual hardware, it makes some terrible noises when playing the demo version. progress? 😜
The only thing I could find online is this dosbox-x github issue, that does not come to any useful conclusion.
Any ideas? 😀