SaikyoKi wrote:

For instance, Crystal Dream 1's music doesn't play at all unless I set the sound device to PC Speaker (which obviously doesn't do the music any justice).

In the 90's i've never gotten Crystal Dream's sound to work on my SB's either, could be the demo itself beng damn buggy

Lunatic:
With core=normal (dynamic takes way too much CPU) I'll get soundblaster sound though I'm not sure if it's supposed to sound that way.

No, it's not supposed to sound that way. I guess I just have to wait for the SB emulation to get redone. Thanks for trying though. :)

leileilol wrote:

In the 90's i've never gotten Crystal Dream's sound to work on my SB's either, could be the demo itself beng damn buggy

Never had a problem with Crystal Dreams in the least. I used to show it in PC shops and at Computer Shows (exhibitions) on all SB cards and even Galaxies and PAS (8 and 16). Not sure what your issues were with it.

is there any way i can request the team to update the SB emulation, or would i be considered a jerk if i did? i appreciate all that they do and i dont want to seem like i don't, lol.

My results with DOSBox (bog standard 0.72, default configfile):

The sound in Crystal Dream works, but only for about a second. It seems as if the MOD player routine fills the buffer, starts playing, and then something goes wrong.
On my real 486 this demo shows the same behaviour, so I think that's a bug in the demo's MOD player routine and has nothing to do with DOSBox.
It is possible to get working sound by choosing the LPT DAC, but the output sounds rather strange (much worse than a real DAC, even a simple resistor-based one).

Lunatic works out of the box, with both SB and DAC, however the sound is similarly distorted, like the DAC output from Crystal Dream.

dh4rm4 wrote:

Never had a problem with Crystal Dreams in the least.

Crystal Dream or Crystal Dream II?

SaikyoKi wrote:

is there any way i can request the team to update the SB emulation, or would i be considered a jerk if i did? i appreciate all that they do and i dont want to seem like i don't, 🤣.

I understand your position, but it may not be wise to blame the DOSBox emulation first.
PC demos from that era often have sound problems, especially the music playing routines were rather optimised for fast performance, not compatibility or sound quality.

Well DOSBox actually is to blame 😉

The sound is distorted because the demo(s? only had a closer look at crystal dreams) sets up DMA transfer for two bytes (!!) only + autoinit and writes the new data in the system timer ISR with sample frequency to those two bytes. DOSBox fetches data only every millisecond and thus loses most of the data.
I don't know if it's worth to change that for those mad demos...

The issue with sound stopping after a second is related to the emulated soundblaster status register which has something that appers to be a hack.
I changed it without knowing exactly how it really behaves and now sound is continuous.