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First post, by gulif

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I'm having trouble with Theme Hospital running under Dosbox: there is no sound and on my girlfriend's PC the game also runs very slow, on my PC the gamespeed is ok, but both PC's have no sound.

I've been unable to find a proper working solution for these problems on google so I'm asking here.

P.S. do not bother to give a "solution" unless you have tried it out personally to confirm it actually works: I've wasted too much time on generic forum answers already (either people mindlessly copying stuff from other forums without having tried the solution themselves or people giving/copying solutions that apply to games under Dosbox in general and not to Theme Hospital specifically).

Last edited by gulif on 2011-04-02, 17:45. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 7, by Teppic

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There's a subfolder called sound in the hospital folder. Run setsound.exe to configure the sound.

No idea why it runs slow. Slow computer?

My AdLib recordings

Reply 2 of 7, by Aideka

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Works fine here, hard to help you really if you don´t tell us anything about your config for dosbox and game. Also pc specs would be good to have for determening why it runs so slow. One problem iI myself noticed with Theme Hospital is that I couldn´t get the general midi option working for music, I just selected sound blaster 16 and the FM music works.

EDIT: Running it myself with Athlon 64 3500+, 3gb ram and Radeon x800 pro, no speed problems here

EDIT2: Not sure if all versions of the game came with windows version on the cd too, mine did and it works perfectly even in Windows 7, you might try it too.

8zszli-6.png

Reply 3 of 7, by gulif

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My PC has an i7 920, my girlfriend's has a Core 2 E2200 (I'm pretty sure only the CPU counts since a 1997 2D game wouldn't exactly be taxing modern GPUs), we both use Windows 7.

There is a windows version on the cd and it kinda works under Windows 7 using Win 95 compatibility but colors are ugly, the mouse often lags and the game crashes every 15 minutes or so. So Windows is a no no.

I've tried the soundtest.exe with some of the most likely to work settings, so far none of them work and there are so many possible combinations that I'm not just gonna try all of them either.

I've gotten the game to work perfectly (except music) through Wine on linux, but that's besides the point because my girlfriend doesn't have linux.

Config for Dosbox is default.

Reply 4 of 7, by Aideka

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Hmm... I reset dosbox config to default just for testing purposes, mounted the cd and installed. The setup program on the root of the cd drive was giving me some problems, so i did cd dossetup, and ran setup.exe from there. Choose your language from the menu and then go to select sound card on menu, on select sfx card i picked Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 or AWE 32 and let it autoconfig it. On select music card I picked Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 and let it autoconfig it too. ONLY AFTER THIS IS DONE select install, when ready run hospital.exe, and it should work

8zszli-6.png

Reply 5 of 7, by Teppic

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I assume you already installed the game within DOSBox?

Run setsound from within DOSBox. Use both Sound Blaster 16 for MIDI and Digital audio driver. Choose "attempt to configure sound driver automatically". You should get a message saying "Device detected successfully". Exit setsound with the "done" option. You should have sound now.

Edit: a bit late :)

My AdLib recordings

Reply 6 of 7, by gulif

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@Aideka

Your solution works on my PC, thanks.

@Teppic

Combined with Aideka's solution your solution solved the problems on my girlfriend's PC (apparently the game runs slow when setsound.exe is not configured right), thanks to you as well.

The music sounds a bit different from that on Windows 7 (more of a high pitch), but the voices and sound effects are still the same so I'll take what I can get.

Reply 7 of 7, by eL_PuSHeR

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[Thread moved to DOSBox Games/Apps. Section]