mdfrankaudio wrote:

In games like Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry, the quality just plain sucks no matter what I do, unless that's how the game is supposed to be (which doesn't seem like it from clips on YouTube, though those could be emulated). It COULD just be a Epic Megagames issue.

That's how it is. When it comes to sound blasters, it's all software-rendered and then pushed directly to the card. No hardware mixing is involved and the quality is usually strict and low to be target appropriate on as many computer specs (read - 386SX 16MHz and up) as possible. Videos online are usually in DOSbox (which don't have the filter of the real SB cards).

Halloween Harry has absolutely trashy sound samples for the music to begin with.

There is the possibility of replacing the samples with high quality equivalents if you can source them properly. Unfortunately I have very little MOD's that have samples similar to the ones in Halloween Harry....

Good to know about Halloween Harry, guess it's just an Epic Megagames problem then of their games not retaining the sound quality settings that I originally selected in their setup options... if anyone knows a solution for that I'm all ears.

DracoNihil wrote:

Unfortunately I have very little MOD's that have samples similar to the ones in Halloween Harry....

You can start with DELTARM1.MOD

mdfrankaudio wrote:

The sound quality of sample-based (tracker) music on my Sound Blaster 16 CT2290 leaves a lot to be desired in DOS. […]
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The sound quality of sample-based (tracker) music on my Sound Blaster 16 CT2290 leaves a lot to be desired in DOS.

See this audio clip I recorded from my Sound Blaster's line out jack for examples: https://instaud.io/21JL

For Jazz Jackrabbit (the first half of the clip), the audio quality is terrible under "Pentium" settings in the game folder's setup.exe options. **However, for some very strange reason if I run the SB16's diagnose.exe and go through the motions of that, the quality is fine again until I close and reopen the game.**
I tried multiple combinations in the Jazz setup options, and they all result in the same situation.

I would just settle for running diagnose.exe every time before starting a game as a strange work-around, but however with some games like Epic Pinball (the latter half of the clip I linked to), the quality changes seemingly at random when selecting different pinball tables and going back to the main menu etc., probably because the game uses multiple EXE files for the different pinball tables.

In games like Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry, the quality just plain sucks no matter what I do, unless that's how the game is supposed to be (which doesn't seem like it from clips on YouTube, though those could be emulated). It COULD just be a Epic Megagames issue.

Sound effects on games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D sound fine.

Anyone have any ideas? In case it's relevant, my machine is using a Socket 7 motherboard (Asus P5A-B) and the Award BIOS. For drivers I believe I'm using the ones from Phil's Computer Lab's "4-in-1 machine" resources. Changing the CPU speed through setmul, disabling/enabling cache, etc. doesn't change anything either. Thanks for the help.

What soundcard options do you have in Jazz Jackrabit?
Does it support an SB16 natively? or are you selecting something like SBPro ?

I have noticed that when an SB16 is running in SBPro stereo mode (22kHz sampling rate), the variable lowpass filter is turned off. You won't get stereo sound, but instead get plenty of aliasing (as you would on the SBPro).
If however, the SB16 is initialized in any other mode, say, 22kHz mono such as in SoundBlaster (non-pro), the filter is applied.
It could be that the game screws up the initialization occasionally.