Are you trying to play Duke Nukem 3D in a Windows DOS box or pure DOS mode? Usually the Sound Blaster Live! (and other Sound Blaster PCI cards which use the Ensoniq AudioPCI derived DOS drivers) tend to only work reliably under a Windows 95/98 DOS Box.

May I also ask, are you using the General MIDI option for music, or are you using the Soundblaster 16 option for music? Using the General MIDI option for music will prevent the slowdown, as the OPL3 FM emulation quality on this card is not really accurate (but the quality is decent) and buggy.

Either has the issue, but I was being an idiot, I wasn't using General Midi and as soon as I switched it was just fine.

Might be a stupid question, but in every case is General Midi > Soundblaster?

sketchus wrote:

Might be a stupid question, but in every case is General Midi > Soundblaster?

No.
There are games with their music that have been written specifically for the synthesizer chip on the SB cards called an OPL/FM chip.
There are games that their music has been composed on a General Midi device, and only then transcribed to an OPL/FM chip music.
So it depends on the game and the year of its release.

Moreover, Adlib card is the OPL/FM chip without the sounds (PCM), only the music.
Adlib (OPL/FM) is an even older card than the first Sound Blaster, and doesn't support digital sounds, while the SB support both.
General Midi has sample based instruments and sounds much better than OPL/FM music, but it depends on the quality of the Midi synth.
The Roland SC-55 is the father of all General Midi modules/synths and most DOS era midi games have been written on it.
Even Windows midi sounds is just a greatly truncated version of the SC-55 samples licensed by Roland.

Just search youtube for "SC-55 'name-of-midi-game'" and you will hear what it should sound like.

Alrighty thanks for the information. Audio in the older dos games was something I never really understood so a lot of the information is certainly new to me. Is there a certain year you can point to where things tend to have been composed on one or the other?

I hope my card will be OK for what I want it for, I don't plan to play anything older than XWING.

As a rule of thumb, if a game has GM (General Midi) or Sound Canvas option in its setup, it is the primary way the developers composed its music on; other options are usually a conversion.
BUT, the FM version might sound more nostalgic to you because it is the only version you've heard back in the 90s.

MT-32 (1987) is sample based synth just like the SC-55 but predates the GM standard; it too sounds great.
MT-32 was 695$ in 1988 (1,436$ in 2017), so typically gamers had the Sound Blaster and its included OPL/FM.

Myself for example, I had absolutely no Idea about General Midi or SC-55 or MT-32 til Nov 2015 when I joined Vogons. 😀
I thought Midi was how it sounds in Windows.... I was wrong. 😎

General Midi was released in 1991.
Sound Blaster (PCM+FM) in 1989.
Adlib/FM in 1988.
MT-32 was released in 1987.

Usually MT-32 or GM/GS will sound much better than FM in the same game, but as I said, nostalgia is a big factor.

James-F wrote:

Usually MT-32 or GM/GS will sound much better than FM in the same game, but as I said, nostalgia is a big factor.

I'd challenge that.In Tyrian (or Tyrian 2000) the OPL3 synthesized music sounds a lot better than the MT-32 music in the same game. The MT-32's status as "The best music for DOS games" is really an overstatement.

Tyrian had MT-32 support? I know the music format had separate MT-32 and GM patches for each instrument, but I wasn't aware of any specific MT-32 support.

To OP:

Had the same issues with an SB PCI512 (similar to the Live! Value) and DOS emulation. It was never fully fixed to my knowledge. The SB16 emulation included in the Live! drivers is basically the same as the PCI512's and I've tried various driver repacks over the years. X-Wing and Duke3D both stand out in my mind as being the worst. I seem to remember it being the FM emulation at fault. But General MIDI over port 330 was OK. This was in both Win95 OSR2/2.5 and ME.

There is an Apogee distributed "PCI Sound" patch for Duke3D and other build engine games, but I think that only has to do with crashes on startup.

Duke Nukem 3D and other Build games had the same sound code, and that sound code used a fixed size static buffer for reverb processing (simple delay), and the speed at which this buffer filled up, and the point to which it filled up, depended on sample rate and sample depth. Guess what happens when this buffer got overrun when the adjacent memory is protected? Instant crash.

Among my old source level hacks of the day, I imported a better reverb engine that allocated memory dynamically for its buffers on startup, depending on the sample rate, and sounded a whole hell of a lot better. It probably got lost to the sands of time, but it's not that hard to replace the reverb effect in the original sound code.

Then again, I was also one of the proponents of using interpolated resampling, which muddied the sounds. Nowadays, I'd be more looking to see what could be done to re-author the sounds that are based on stock samples, and for the rest, train a neural network how to upscale audio data and simulate the lost information. It can be done with image data, why not with audio data?

olddos25 wrote:

James-F wrote:

Usually MT-32 or GM/GS will sound much better than FM in the same game, but as I said, nostalgia is a big factor.

I'd challenge that.In Tyrian (or Tyrian 2000) the OPL3 synthesized music sounds a lot better than the MT-32 music in the same game. The MT-32's status as "The best music for DOS games" is really an overstatement.

I would also add that I prefer the Adlib sounds in Double Dragon 3 Rosetta Stone. The Adlib sounds were much better composed in this game, IMHO.

But generally, I would still prefer MT-32 music in Dos games.

Unless one had the fortune of having MT-32 from Day 1 during DOS gaming, I would say OPL2/3 sounds did have a lasting impression on these non-MT32 gamers those days

With the availability of MUNT, the MT-32 emulator, I guess, everyone will be able to enjoy MT-32 music in DOS games, provided, they are able to get hold of the MT-32/CM-32L roms.