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Questions about Sound in DOSBox

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First post, by Sharidin

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Hello everyone! I've started using DOSBox since the last few months since I wanted to relive the thrilling good old games (kind of bored with the new 3D gfx and surround sounds ^^) and I was using the official edition for quite some time with great success with the games I owned.

Then I saw a screenshot somewhere with enhanced graphics and started searching for that. After a lot of time I managed to get Direct3D working with the HQ2x shader and it's just great.

Then I thought, what about sound? But I can't find anything solid about that anywhere. I'm trying to figure out now, which is the best to choose for Digital and which for MIDI. I want to know what is the best quality for each (for example, is it SB16? GUS? for digitial? GUS, General MIDI/MPU-401, MT32 for MIDI?). It would be great if you guys could help me figure out which would be the top quality for the games.

Also if you can help me get GUS working it'd be great too. I got the ready folders for GUS, unrared, renamed to ULTRASND and pointed conf file to those, and I tried both with or without patches versions. When I play Albion for example each time it is about to swap a song (like getting in combat) the game crashes. Or in Daggerfall / Arena it doesn't detect the MIDI no matter what I do, and the digital sound plays as if it is... corrupted. I've played around with the sample rate, prebuffer, load size but nothing helps, at least with the settings I have tried. It still sounds as if it has... noise in it or gets distorted every couple of seconds.

I don't have any external MIDI devices and I'm using Windows 7 x64. CPU is Dual Core 2.66Mhz and I got 4GB RAM and an ATI 3870 512RAM. Sound is onboard HD Audio from Realtek. Gulikoza's build for Direct3D, and tried both latest official and Gulikoza for the sounds.

Please, if anyone can help me get the best sound on DOSBox and enjoy the games to their fullest now I'd be very grateful! (used to have 14" monitor, 486DX@66Mhz with 8MB RAM and crappy as can be ESS card)

Reply 1 of 1, by Zup

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...

I think that most players will like the sound they had when they're young, so they choose the sound card they (or their friends) had.

About digital sound: I don't think that there is too much difference between sound cards. I think that 16 bit sound cards (GUS, SB16) will sound better than 8 bits cards (SB, SB Pro)... if the game supports them. Note that a SB16 will work in 8 bits mode, so you may choose SB Pro or SB if your game doesn't support them.

Also, GUS could mix samples in hardware, so in real hardware some games could take advantage of that and play FX with less CPU load. I don't think that any game did that, mainly because those mixing capability was used in music.

About music: I think that MT32 is the best option, mainly because some games used the extended capabilities of the synth. Next, it would be external MIDI (with other synthetizers) or SB16 with a MIDI daughterboard.

If you plan to use MT32 emulation, you will need those MT32 ROMs, whose distribution is denied. For MIDI emulation, you will more likely need fluidsynth or timidity, with a good soundfont (I would recommend the Titanic Soundfont, but it's very BIG).

Speaking of internal cards, the best option would be a GUS (if supported) that was the only card supported in DOSBox capable of sampling.

The next options would be FM synthesis. SB16 was the best (OPL3), followed by SB Pro (dual OPL2) and SB (OPL2). Note that, in some cases, FM synth was greatly programmed (the "meows" in Knights of Xentar were impressive).

The worst option for both music and sound is, obviously, the PC Speaker (followed by some LPT DACs).

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