First post, by 007Bistromath
For as long as I've been using DOSBox, sound has been the place where things most often go wrong. Nearly everytime I try a game, I have to learn some odd process of doing this, that, or the other with various files and settings which often doesn't even exist at most of the places the game is available or talked about. That's just with the games. With DOSBox, it's much worse. The settings I can find in the config amount to, as far as I know what to do with them, "what kind of Soundblaster do you want?" It shouldn't be possible to screw it up when there's only one setting to change, but everytime I get a new version of DOSBox or, god forbid, upgrade my actual rig, things work a little bit worse than they did last time I tried. And so I came here. And got no information. There are no newbie guides about sound settings, nothing about sound in any faqs or wikis that I can find, hardly even any talk about sound in the app/game forum for anything I'm hunting, discussion seems to boil down to "does it work or not?" I'm starting to worry that either I am the only one using DOSBox who has a problem with sound, or that the community has thrown up their hands and decided to play everything without it.
The last time I went on a DOSBox bender, I eventually got most of the stuff I wanted working correctly. Some things I had to give up on entirely, but I scarcely remember because the other stuff worked, and that's what I remember. As usual, I left it alone for a while, and now I'm trying to come back. Problem: I have since upgraded my system. In fact, I think I was still on XP last time, and now I'm on Vista, so I should've expected problems, ultimately. But it annoys me that information seems so scarce. On this attempt, I've tried two games so far.
Spellcraft: Aspects of Valor winds up with no sound at all. The thing doesn't have settings to play with that I can find, so I can't do anything about it. I had this game back in the day when I actually had a computer old enough for it, so I know I must have tried the thing before, and yet I have no memory of ever actually playing it, so I strongly suspect that this game has never worked right on DOSBox. I have no way of knowing one way or the other though, since I think I'm the first person to even mention the game on this forum.
Death Gate is the one that really bothers me, that made me start sniffing around here, because I know it should work. I got it to work on my last rig fine. And it almost works here. But the specific way it does not work loses much of what made the game excellent. The game has been mentioned by somebody on this forum, but they flat out gave up, deciding that the sound was junk anyway. (This is patently untrue. Death Gate had wonderful voice acting, and this is the main thing I'm missing.) Now, here's the weird part. The game's settings are easy to modify. It's got SB16 right there in the menu, and that's what DOSBox says it has. Should work fine. When that doesn't work, I switch to SBPro2, which fails in the same way. Now, the game runs fine, but I only have music. Not just that either: the music is full of crackles and pops and stutters that I'm certain weren't there before. No sound effects, no voice. I go to the in-game menu, and it turns out that the sound effects and voice are off, and completely unable to be turned on. Now, this could be due to something to do with needing a CD. I dimly remember having to fool with that last time. It doesn't matter though, because I can no longer find that information in any case. More importantly something still has to be wrong with my settings and/or DOSBox, because the CD problem doesn't explain the crackly music. Something isn't working right.
In keeping with the guidelines, here are my specs.
Running DOSBox 0.73 on Vista SP2
Motherboard: MSI P45 Platinum
Proc: 3GHz Core 2 Duo
RAM: 4GB Corsair DDR2 800
Video: GeForce 8800 GTS w/ 640MB GDDR3
Sound: SB X-Fi Titanium PCI-E
