Shut the machine down into MS-DOS mode. Run the game, do you get to the screen that allows you choosing the sound options?

What machine is it?

As I said, when starting it in MS-DOS mode it doesn't get any further than the initial "please wait" screen, before any of the system specs things light up.

The machine is an HP Vectra VL Series 4.

EDIT: Also, I guess I should mention, if this makes a difference, that I am using the Activision version from Steam.

ocdmonkey wrote:

The machine is an HP Vectra VL Series 4.

It would be much more helpful if you could state what specific sound hardware that computer has. HP's website seems to be on the fritz at the moment.

EDIT: Also, I guess I should mention, if this makes a difference, that I am using the Activision version from Steam.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to see if the latest shareware version works any better?

I tried the shareware version and, same thing. Also, my sound card I believe is some Sound Blaster clone, but all the device manager says is "Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 or AWE-32".

Windows device manager says that? How odd.

What sort of DOS Sound Blaster drivers do you have?

I don't know. Honestly, I am not that good with these old operating systems yet and when I tried installing Win 3.1 on it I could not for the life of me figure out how to properly get the DOS drivers installed, so I have just been using what Win95 installed on its own. Still, it works just fine in every other game, so do you really think it would be to blame for Wolf3D not starting? Also, if you have any ideas why most sidescrollers (like Apogee's old games) have really jerky motion when going to the sides I would love to hear it. I have a Matrox graphics card in it.

EDIT: Ok, wow, evidently it is the sound card. Launching it with NOSB so that it doesn't look for Sound Blaster lets it launch even under windows. So... Now the question is why doesn't it like my card? Literally every other game (at least when running under Windows) has no problems with the card.

EDIT2: Looks like it might be a problem with the "IRQ" setting being higher than 7. Going to look into how to change that...

EDIT3: Haha! It was the interrupt request number! Now I'm back to where I was before, with "digitized sound effects" not working, but the rest working just fine.

What resources is it set to? You can check in device manager.

If you were able to change it through software, it's a Plug and Play card.

Address 220, interrupt 5 or 7 and DMA 1 are the defaults that most games look for. If you have a newer card there is also MIDI address 330 and a high DMA 5.

ocdmonkey wrote:

EDIT3: Haha! It was the interrupt request number! Now I'm back to where I was before, with "digitized sound effects" not working, but the rest working just fine.

What exactly did you change? Did you use the Wolfenstein setup somehow?

You should try using setblast.exe ; there's a copy here.
Re: get no sound in MS-dos, but get it in win98SE

ocdmonkey wrote:

if you have any ideas why most sidescrollers (like Apogee's old games) have really jerky motion when going to the sides I would love to hear it. I have a Matrox graphics card in it.

Matrox video cards have issues with side scroller games, in particular from Apogee (I used to have a Matrox Millennium II in my Socket 7 PC). There's usually a fix mentioned in the game's documentation, either a command line option or a setting in the options menu:

As for Wolf3D, does your initial game screen have the Sound Blaster option enabled?

If it doesn't then you have to provide more details about your PC's sound card and what resources it is using.

(And yes, these are screenshots from DOSBox, but should look about the same on a real PC).

I highly recommend "newwolf". Looks very nice and runs perfect with a voodoo card and a PII.

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

ocdmonkey wrote:

if you have any ideas why most sidescrollers (like Apogee's old games) have really jerky motion when going to the sides I would love to hear it. I have a Matrox graphics card in it.

Matrox video cards have issues with side scroller games, in particular from Apogee (I used to have a Matrox Millennium II in my Socket 7 PC). There's usually a fix mentioned in the game's documentation, either a command line option or a setting in the options menu:

Yah, I found a table confirming that it was the card here: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

Unfortunately, the fix included in Apogee's games does not work anywhere near perfectly. There is still a quite detectable amount of jitteryness, and in the case of Commander Keen there is barely any improvement (interestingly enough, it fixes the jitteryness on the upper half of the screen, but not the bottom). I tried a "Orchid Technology ProDesigner IIs" I have lying around, but I was having driver issues with it as the driver Windows installed (tseng labs et4000) didn't work with my DOS games (they were black & white) and trying to change the driver to "Orchid Technology ProDesigner II" (both these drivers are from the Win95 install disk, btw) caused everything to be black & white and I would get messages telling me there was a problem with the graphics card.

Unfortunately, since this computer doesn't have an AGP slot, these are the only two graphics cards I have that will work with it. If you have any clue why the ProDesigner doesn't work, I'm all ears.

Also, Wolf3d does detect Sound Blaster and uses it properly for everything except digitized sound. A few sounds do play, however, such as the knife effect.

Jorpho wrote:

What exactly did you change? Did you use the Wolfenstein setup somehow? […]
Show full quote

ocdmonkey wrote:

EDIT3: Haha! It was the interrupt request number! Now I'm back to where I was before, with "digitized sound effects" not working, but the rest working just fine.

What exactly did you change? Did you use the Wolfenstein setup somehow?

You should try using setblast.exe ; there's a copy here.
Re: get no sound in MS-dos, but get it in win98SE

I changed it through Window's device manager. I changed the IRQ from 10 to 5.

I freely admit that I am not particularly familiar with how the Wolfenstein sound setup works, but the vast majority of DOS games out there rely on the "BLASTER" environment variable. That is the purpose of setblast.exe . (It's not necessarily required for setting that environment variable, but it's a handy way of doing so.)

ocdmonkey wrote:

Wolf3d does detect Sound Blaster and uses it properly for everything except digitized sound. A few sounds do play, however, such as the knife effect.

OK, that's good. Now in the Options menu, select the Sound entry:

Make sure all 3 entries here have "Adlib/Sound Blaster" or "Sound Blaster" selected:

The second entry in particular is important - that's where digitized sound can be enabled or disabled (the knife sound is actually from the sound card's FM chip, which is already working). Sometimes when Wolf3D has problems detecting a sound card it will leave digitized sound disabled and has to be enabled manually.

I don't know much about the Orchid Technology ProDesigner IIs. Probably needs a DOS VESA driver to make it work in VGA mode?

JayCeeBee64 wrote:

OK, that's good. Now in the Options menu, select the Sound entry: […]
Show full quote

ocdmonkey wrote:

Wolf3d does detect Sound Blaster and uses it properly for everything except digitized sound. A few sounds do play, however, such as the knife effect.

OK, that's good. Now in the Options menu, select the Sound entry:

Make sure all 3 entries here have "Adlib/Sound Blaster" or "Sound Blaster" selected:

The second entry in particular is important - that's where digitized sound can be enabled or disabled (the knife sound is actually from the sound card's FM chip, which is already working). Sometimes when Wolf3D has problems detecting a sound card it will leave digitized sound disabled and has to be enabled manually.

I don't know much about the Orchid Technology ProDesigner IIs. Probably needs a DOS VESA driver to make it work in VGA mode?

I've tried to figure out how to use DOS drivers in the past, but as I said before I still have much to learn when it comes to using these old Operating Systems. Besides, I have no clue how I would go about installing DOS drivers under Windows.

As for the Wolf3D thing, I have all three to Sound Blaster, and still no digitized sound. I made a video where I try to show best what is going on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfJa6kZYf60

Time to open that case and take a photo of the card 😀

I must say, for a beginner, a Windows / DOS hybrid machine is not the easiest start. But you'll get there.

When you select "none" for digitized sounds there are really no digitized sounds either: the gunfire and other stuff is then generated through the FM chip (which is why it sounds poorer). So it seems the digitized part isn't working AT ALL. BTW what are your settings? You should try using port 220, IRQ 7, and DMA 1 (and disabling the LPT port in the BIOS), as this should be the most compatible setup.

ocdmonkey wrote:

I've tried to figure out how to use DOS drivers in the past, but as I said before I still have much to learn when it comes to using these old Operating Systems. Besides, I have no clue how I would go about installing DOS drivers under Windows.

Have you not tried running setblast.exe yet?

It may also be useful to tell us the contents of C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT and C:\CONFIG.SYS at this point. You can open these easily in Windows by going to Start->Run and typing SYSEDIT.

Hey! I got it working! The setblast.exe program kept telling me there was a problem with the DMA and/or IRQ even though the settings were correct, so I changed the DMA in Device Manager to 1 and the digitized sounds work perfectly now! Thank you all for your help!

philscomputerlab wrote:

I must say, for a beginner, a Windows / DOS hybrid machine is not the easiest start. But you'll get there.

Well, I picked it because it was actually turning out to be easier than the alternative. When I got the computer it already had Win95 on it, and after the hard drive died (right after I backed it up and got a CF to IDE card, thankfully) I tried making it a DOS/Win3.1 machine (since there are some Win16 games I play on it) but was having such a hard time with drivers (and weird text appearing in Soleau Software games) that I decided to scrap that idea until another day, since Windows 95 automatically installed all the drivers for me. I have another CF card, though, so I might try again on that.

Again, thank you all for your help, I've been wanting to play Wolf3d on this machine for quite a while.

philscomputerlab wrote:

What resources is it set to? You can check in device manager.

If you were able to change it through software, it's a Plug and Play card.

Address 220, interrupt 5 or 7 and DMA 1 are the defaults that most games look for. If you have a newer card there is also MIDI address 330 and a high DMA 5.

🤣 Glad it's working now