I think it only uses the PC speaker, and increasing the sample rates can improve the quality of the sound. For example, I use conf settings of rate=48000 (mixer section) and pcrate=48000 (speaker section) with my Audigy 2 ZX. Generally speaking, a higher sample rate should sound better, but 48khz might be as ideal for you as it is for me. Not sure about the Audigy 4, but the older Audigys have their DSPs locked at 48khz and do horrible up/down-sampling in hardware to achieve that rate internally; so feeding them 48khz avoids the additional quantization noise caused by their poor sample rate conversion. I read that the X-FI cards now have good quality rate conversions done by the DSP, but again I'm not sure if the Audigy 4 has the same issue as the older models. If changing the speaker sample rates works out well, you might want to also increase the sample rates on the other sound devices as well.

Sorry, but this didnt work. 😢

I run this game with completely default settings in DOSBox 0.72 and it sounds fine. An easy way to be sure you're using all defaults is to run with no conf file. If your sound is still garbled with default settings, check and make sure you don't have high CPU utilization from some background app on your system. Lastly, you can try capturing a bit of what you're hearing with ctrl-F6 and attach that to a post; maybe it will give a clue to the problem.

OK. Here is a sound bite of Queen taking Knight.

Did some quick tests with the game.

Latest Gulizoka build with my own custom config (works fine with all games i'm playing usually): garbled sound, just like DOSman's example

Official 0.72 without a .conf (only mounting drives): garbled sound, maybe a bit different from the example

ripsaw8080, what do you mean by "completely default settings"? Are you sure you've used the official 0.72 for testing?

What's wrong with that sample? Sounds just fine.

The attached captures were made with official DOSBox 0.72 for Win32 using no conf file, meaning all default settings. I did a bit of the opening music, and also a Queen capturing a Knight (changed the board to set that up quickly). Although the PCM sfx isn't great quality, it's typical for speaker, and what I captured doesn't seem garbled to me.

I'm also attaching a screenshot of the title screen to compare and make sure we're all talking about the same game. This is the version that Interplay has available for download on their site.

The recording of the original poster is from the ega-version of the game.

Yepp, the version i've tested is less colourful (EGA) & says "Copyright 1988" in the title screen. wd, do you know the original game? Did it really sound that bad? I've never played any of the early BC's.

It sounds like i remember it (pcspeaker only).

Well, thanks for clearing this up guys. Shame, I was expecting bone crushing sfx like one review claimed, though they were talking about the PC version. Anyway, I now play the NES version on my DS.