I wasn't sure where to post this. I'm sort of having a problem with a specific game, but it seems to be more of a general problem. Anyway...

I have an installation of Redneck Rampage that is working fine with DOSBox 0.74. Just for the hell of it, I wanted to streamline this installation as much as possible, so I decided to switch to the Daum SVN version because it allows you to use MP3 files in place of the CD audio tracks. The official DOSBox only allows Ogg files, which are larger and for some reason, the music in RR plays too slowly when converted to Ogg, even though the files themselves sound fine.

So I downloaded the latest Daum SVN, placed it in the directory (self-contained installation), cut and pasted my custom config from the end of the original Conf file to the Daum Conf file, set it to use Fullscreen, etc, and saved it. The game was originally set to use a screen resolution of 1024x768, which is what my desktop is set to. When I run the game at this resolution, the sound on the opening movie stutters badly. The only way to make the sound not stutter is to set the game resolution to 640x400. Then it sounds perfect. Using 800x600 isn't horrible, but there's still noticeable stuttering.

The little I played of the first level, it seemed to work OK, but if it can't play the opening movie properly, it makes me nervous that it might have problems with other parts of the game.

I tried individually changing virtually every option in the Conf file that could affect performance, such as disabling Glide, setting cycles to max, increasing the sound buffer, changing output and scaling modes, etc. Nothing helped. I even tried running it using my original Conf file for DOSBox 0.74, but there was no change.

Then, just for fun, I decided to try older versions of Daum. There was an earlier one from 2015, but that one stutters too. The one before that is from the start of 2014 and that one seems to work perfectly. Game set to 1024x768, most options in the Conf set to default and the opening movie plays perfectly.

Obviously I can just use the older version or set the resolution lower, but I'm the curious type. I'm curious why the newer versions perform worse than the older version and if there's anything that can be changed to remedy that.

I'll admit that my system isn't state of the art any more, but a 2.4Ghz Core-2-Duo with 4GB of RAM, XP Pro, SP3 and a GT430 video card, should be able to handle it. It can with the older version and the official DOSBox version, but something in the latest Daum versions seems to have caused a big performance hit.

I'm wondering (hoping) that it's some new setting that I'm not aware of which is causing the sound to stutter.

Has anyone else experienced this, or have any suggestions for what to try?