The Coktel Vision CD games often have problems in DOSBox and the NTVDM. The did not even like running in Win 9x. Currently, the best solution is to play the games with ScummVM with the audio CD tracks ripped to your HDD. I would recommend a subversion build at the bottom of the download page on www.scummvm.org

Hmm... like I said, I'm not using a CD version (I don't even own one), I'm using a floppy disk version of the game. You were probably confused by my use of the word "speech" there, but when I said speech I meant those speech-like sounds the Goblins emit when speaking in the original floppy Gob games. 😉

ScummVM is able to play my version of Goblins 3 fine except that at the moment it has those sprite order glitches that detract from the experience, such as the Blount's head getting painted behind a part of the ship on the first level... (just tried the latest SVN, and it still has these problems).

I'm playing Gob3 in DosBox at the moment, it plays very well if you don't count the sound lag glitch. The sound lag glitch makes some of the funnier moments less funny because of the lack of sound. 🙁 I still hope that there's some workaround for this little problem.

I have the floppy version of Goblin's Quest 3 and I don't encounter any delay in the sound effects. It is version 1.00 (c)SIERRA 1994, according to the version menu choice under the floppy disk icon. Using normal core at various cycles, I don't get any unusual sound operation unless I push the cycles too high or too low; but then the sound breaks up, it doesn't lag behind the animation.

Your system specs seem more than adequate, so I could only guess that maybe it's a configuration issue. Try deleting the CAT.INF and MDO.CFG files, which are the configuration data files; and when you run GOB3.EXE it should take you through the setup screen because those files are missing... or you can just run SETUP.EXE directly. I am using the SB16 emulation with IRQ 7, DMA 1 and the setup program indicates that it is using a Soundblaster with those settings (advanced configuration sub-screen). Probably not important, but I also have GUS emulation turned off because I prefer not to create potential problems from having multiple sound cards in the environment.

It could also be related to your sound hardware/drivers and the OS you're using. I'm using an Audigy 2 ZS under XP, and I haven't needed to tweak the default blocksize=2048, prebuffer=10 mixer settings in the DOSBox conf file, but maybe playing with those might help in your case.

(excellent post ripsaw8080)

Thanks a lot for your help, it turned out to be some sort of configuration issue. Deleting MDO.CFG and reconfiguring the game helped. It seems like the game had some problems with the sound card's IRQ configuration or something. Now it all works perfecty! 😁

Just for the record, I traced the root of the problem and it turned out to be a problem with two sound cards being enabled at the same time (SB16 at IRQ 7 and GUS at IRQ 5). I was unaware that the default configuration has two sound cards enabled btw. So, the problem is: if both SB16 and GUS are turned on at the same time and you run Gob 3 for the first time, it mistakenly configures itself as Sound Blaster at IRQ=5 DMA=1 (which is obviously wrong due to the fact that the SB card is at irq 7, and GUS takes irq 5). Also, Gob 3 doesn't allow you to set the irq/dma parameters manually (at least I didn't find such an ability), so the sound gets partially ruined.

Disabling GUS support in dosbox.conf and resetting the Gob3 configuration by deleting MDO.CFG and reconfiguring fixes the problem (the game correctly detects Sound Blaster at IRQ=7 DMA=1)

Auto detections should be capable of detecting the correct irq setting,
simplest case is to evaluate the BLASTER env string, better (but also
more dangerous by times) are detection routines that play short samples
and catch the IRQ that is fired.

If you delete that .cfg file again and re-run the game (installation??) while
both sb16 and gus are enabled in dosbox.conf, does it create that .cfg
file with bad parameters again?

I tried deleting the config file and redoing the configuration with both cards active, and it didn't misconfigure the IRQ or DMA, so I'm not sure about the conclusion that multiple cards was the problem.

However, I think I can safely say the setup program is using the BLASTER environment variable for the settings because the program goes with whatever I manually change that variable to regardless of the settings in DOSBox. With DOSBox configured to use IRQ 7, I changed the BLASTER variable to IRQ 5 and configured the game with that; and misconfigured in this fashion the sound effects are indeed a bit delayed. Not sure how you got the bad IRQ in the first place, though.

Maybe the game was preconfigured for sb16 with irq5. Should not happen
with a regular installation, but who knows...

Hmm, just retried it and it autodetected everything correctly. That's really weird... :\ I don't know what went wrong initially. Could it be that I somehow configured it to use IRQ 5 back in the day when I first tried to launch it on DosBox 0.65?.. I recall switching IRQs over back then, so theoretically I could have set irq to 5, then installed Gob 3 and played it, and then went back to irq 7 (default) when I reinstalled DosBox. I haven't reinstalled Goblins 3 from scratch since then. Reinstalling Gob 3 from scratch, as well as deleting MDO.CFG and autodetecting the settings both seem to work correctly now. Anyway, if I'll figure something out I'll definitely tell you about it.

it to use IRQ 5 back in the day

Yes, that's what i meant. Standard setting for sb16 was irq5 in most cases,
but dosbox uses irq7 for consistency.