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Win9x audio is poor in dosbox

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First post, by 95girl

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I had gus emulation on and windows 95 startup sound cuts off. Gravis driver didn't fix this either.

Not even running daum version of dosbox.

What can I do? I wanted to run win3.1 version of lionking which has midi audio,and I wanna use dosbox because of upscalers.

Weird thing is midi audio plays outside of game but cracks when I run the game itself.

I used dosbox 0.74-2 on a laptop. One scary thing that happened is that I heard a bleep after modifying something in the conf file... it looked the motherboard's sound!! :c

Reply 1 of 6, by Dominus

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Windows 95 is not supported at all. Use Windows 3.1x in DOSBox to play Windows 3.1x games 😉
There is a guide in my signature...

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
60 seconds guide to DOSBox
DOSBox SVN snapshot for macOS (10.4-11.x ppc/intel 32/64bit) notarized for gatekeeper

Reply 3 of 6, by Jo22

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Not only for 95. Never got GUS emulation to work properly in 3.1 either. 😢
- A few years ago, I tried GUS emulation when I thinkered with MOD4WIN and a few Games in DOSBox.
Not sure what I did wrong, though. That being said, I also had issues with SB16 playback in 16-Bit resolution.
Anyway, never mind. New SVN versions of DOSBox may have fixed that. Have to retry some time.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 5 of 6, by TheGreatCodeholio

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Yeah, I noticed DOSBox SVN has problems with Windows 3.1 and sound playback through Gravis Ultrasound.

As far as I can tell, stock wave playback through the GUS drivers rely on setting a loop point where, instead of looping back, the card fires an interrupt and continues playing. The Windows 3.1 driver relies on that to double-buffer WAV audio from the application. DOSBox SVN doesn't emulate that properly, so (at least in my experience) the best you get is 1 second of audio and then it cuts off.

I did however fix that mis-emulation in DOSBox-X. The last time I tested it, WAVE audio playback worked fine once I figured out what the Windows 3.1 GUS driver was trying to do with the hardware. You might have better luck with Windows 3.1/95/98/ME emulation in DOSBox-X.

DOSBox-X project: more emulation better accuracy.
DOSLIB and DOSLIB2: Learn how to tinker and hack hardware and software from DOS.

Reply 6 of 6, by TheGreatCodeholio

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However you might get better quality out of the game if you use the Sound Blaster 16 drivers for Windows 3.1, then configure Windows 3.1 to send the MIDI out to the UART and external port instead of the FM synthesizer. Then configure DOSBox / DOSBox-X to emulate a MPU-401 and send the MIDI on to whatever MIDI synth your OS provides.

DOSBox-X project: more emulation better accuracy.
DOSLIB and DOSLIB2: Learn how to tinker and hack hardware and software from DOS.

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