Maybe this has been asked and answered before, but I couldn't find it...
I've been having trouble with the sound being garbled with the original Duke Nukem, which has PC-speaker only sound, when running it on a Pentium 1 computer... I 've tried this with three different machines, two different P75s and a P133. While the game plays fine, the sound either cuts out completely or is weirdly garbled when the bouncing balls or flame jets are on screen. A lot of other sounds are off as well. The game works fine on my 486 Compaq LTE laptop and in doxbox on my modern computer. I played this game a lot back in the 90's and never remember having problems like this before. I've tried a couple dozen other PC-speaker only dos games on the pentiums and they work perfectly, this seems to only be an issue with Duke Nukem. Any ideas?
Maybe I'm confused, but the first Duke Nukem (1991) only has PC-speaker sound ... my sound card has a pc-speaker input connection, maybe connecting the pc-speaker output from the motherboard to that instead of the speaker would help?
I think I know the Duke Nukem games inside-out by now. Yes, Duke Nukem 1 only has pc speaker sound. But there's no way the pc speaker sound effects in Duke Nukem 1 (or Duke Nukem II, for that matter) can have any CPU speed sensitivity at all. AdLib and SoundBlaster code can be speed sensitive because these require some delay (in a range of microseconds) to detect and/or use them, and the code responsible for the delay may or may not work, depending on the CPU speed. The pc speaker doesn't need any of this, and since the game uses timed interrupts to play the sound effects, updating the pc speaker about 145 times per second, CPU speed is never an issue.
The only reasons I can think of would be
- the speaker/buzzer in the system is failing
- another program in the background (a TSR or a virus) is also using the pc speaker
- there is electrical/acoustic interference in the system
Just check if any other games/programs using the pc speaker have similar issues. Try a game like Commander Keen or play some "music" in QBasic:
1PLAY "cdefgab>c"
One more thing I would like to mention is that the pc speaker can only play one sound at a time. Duke Nukem 1 assigns a priority to each sound, so sounds with a higher priority will interrupt/stop any sound with a lower priority. Since the sound for the flame jets is one long sound and the sound for the bouncing mine is a very short sound, the bounce sound can stop the flame sound (if it has a higher priority) and that's it. The game won't play the rest of the flame sound after the bounce sound is finished.
But this behavior is always the same, no matter what system you are running the game on. Since you said the game worked fine on your 486, this wouldn't explain what you were experiencing. But maybe it does and you were just not testing/remembering it correctly?
Yup, works fine on the 486... however, it just occurred to me while pondering your response that the only thing in common with the computers where it didn’t work was the disks I used to load it from. Sure enough, a couple of the files must have been corrupted, as some new disks worked perfectly. Ugh. Problem solved!
Just saw this thread, im having exactly the same issue!
Im suspecting corruption possibly too so am trying to find a different source for the game.
Im running on a 386 and episode 1 has no sound at all, but on episode its constantly on, glitchy as hell and a garbled squelch.
Not having issues with any other games so far.
The version 1.0 download has all the files laid bare in the zip archive, the 2.0 download contanis an installer for DOS. Pick whichever you like and install it on your 386. Give it a quck test run to make sure the files were extracted correctly. Once that's done, copy the files DUKE1.DN1 and DUKE1-B.DN1 (they contain the sound effects) over into the folder where you've got your episodes 2 and 3 and change the extension to .DN2 and .DN3, like this:
The sound files are completely identical across all three episodes of Duke Nukem 1, and they didn't change between v1.0 and v2.0, so that should fix it for you.
You can do the same for most of the graphics files (ANIM*.DN?, BACK*.DN?, BADGUY.DN?, BORDER.DN?, CREDITS.DN?, DROP*.DN?, DUKE.DN?, FONT*.DN?, MAN*.DN?, NUMBERS.DN?, OBJECT*.DN?, SOLID*.DN?) as well, should any of them be corrupted.
K1n9_Duk3wrote on 2020-08-08, 20:31:You can find the shareware versions of the games here: https://www.classicdosgames.com/game/Duke_Nukem.html […] Show full quote
The version 1.0 download has all the files laid bare in the zip archive, the 2.0 download contanis an installer for DOS. Pick whichever you like and install it on your 386. Give it a quck test run to make sure the files were extracted correctly. Once that's done, copy the files DUKE1.DN1 and DUKE1-B.DN1 (they contain the sound effects) over into the folder where you've got your episodes 2 and 3 and change the extension to .DN2 and .DN3, like this:
The sound files are completely identical across all three episodes of Duke Nukem 1, and they didn't change between v1.0 and v2.0, so that should fix it for you.
You can do the same for most of the graphics files (ANIM*.DN?, BACK*.DN?, BADGUY.DN?, BORDER.DN?, CREDITS.DN?, DROP*.DN?, DUKE.DN?, FONT*.DN?, MAN*.DN?, NUMBERS.DN?, OBJECT*.DN?, SOLID*.DN?) as well, should any of them be corrupted.
I have tried two different sources for the game, one was on a CD of mine a few years back I found which I know worked at the time.
Im burning these to a CD that im using on this computer, I wonder if its a problem with either the drive (its a DVD drive, but im using a multisession CD) or the disc itself.
Duke nukem 1 episode 1 has no sound, episode 2 is either garbled or makes a squealing sound the whole time, episode 3 seems OK.
Now i tried installing the shareware episode with its installer and its OK.
I wonder if its an issue with the Drive? I noticed last night that some files I copy over give a read error, but if i retry it goes through fine.
Ill try a floppy disc and see if it works.
