Nope. Quake always tries to initialize the GUS first then the Sound Blaster. There's no parameter to change this.

wow, didn't expect that
thanks for the help , now I don't need to search more on this... nothing a batch file can't fix I suppose 😁

For reference here's all the sound-related parameters

-dsp # : Specify Sound Blaster DSP to try. 2, 3, 4 accepted (SB2.0, SBPro and SB16 respectively). Useful for reducing sound quality.
-sspeed ##### : Specify sampling rate, default 11025. (fyi: Quake has roughly four 22khz16bit sounds - lightning, rotfish and shub's ending groan). Also applies to GUS (in which it'll round down to the nearest supported rate by the GUS)
-nosound : turns off osund completely
-simsound : turns off sound output, but still processes the data in a fake dma buffer (useful for performance profilng and debugging sound issues)
-nocdaudio : turns off CD audio. Quake will bug you about using this if you don't have MSCDEX loaded anyway

My updated Quake DOS port allows this ability. You can use -nogus to skip the GUS detection routines.

http://dk.toastednet.org/QDOS

^ will give it a go, thanks for the heads up 😁
I wonder if it works faster than stock Q ...

keropi wrote:

^ will give it a go, thanks for the heads up 😁
I wonder if it works faster than stock Q ...

There's no visual enhancements so it should be about the same speed. It's compiled on the new DJGPP and GCC builds so in theory it should generate better code, but I never tested that out for sure. Runs great on target hardware of the era though.

just tested, I get a +0.4fps speed boost 🤣
it's really nice and feels the same just with some extra welcomed options , nice work!

A little note, the released 1.09 sources have a mistake with the view refdef adding a few pixels of border to the viewport so the fps boost might be due to that

leileilol wrote:

A little note, the released 1.09 sources have a mistake with the view refdef adding a few pixels of border to the viewport. so the fps boost might be due to that

where dat at?

keropi wrote:

Is there a command line option to force using SB and avoid messing with the GUS variable?

No, but you could open QUAKE.EXE with a hex editor and replace the strings ULTRASND and ULTRA16 with something else.

NewRisingSun wrote:

keropi wrote:

Is there a command line option to force using SB and avoid messing with the GUS variable?

No, but you could open QUAKE.EXE with a hex editor and replace the strings ULTRASND and ULTRA16 with something else.

didn't think of that 🤣
tbh it was for the best, I found about QDOS 😊