DosBox's PC speaker is terrible \ VOGONS

DosBox's PC speaker is terrible

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First post, by hwh

Posted on 2013-01-31, 08:55

hwh Offline

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Yeah...I'm not feeling the PC speaker on Dosbox. It screeches strangely. In fact, since it's an electromechanical device, I don't quite see how it can be emulated at all (besides using its resources).

The PC speaker has limited tones obviously, but it doesn't screech. I'm not really sure what the sampling rate means for it...

I almost prefer to use my modern motherboard's miniaturized version (which does the correct notes, but the wrong volume and the tone is...well, it's just a terrible speaker). But, Dosbox can't use it AFAIK.

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Reply 1 of 6, by Joey_sw

Posted on 2013-01-31, 09:06

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speaking of speaker,
did anyone managed to get the MP3PC.EXE from http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm to works on DosBox?
Its claim it can play MP3 using PC speaker but i never able to make it works.

-fffuuu

Reply 2 of 6, by ripsaw8080

Posted on 2013-01-31, 10:17

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Increasing the speaker rate (and mixer rate to match) may improve the sound quality. I have both set to 48000, and it sounds fairly good on my soundcard in most cases. Please name any specific games that sound bad.

There are some uses of the speaker for digitized sound that aren't fully supported in official source (yet), but there is an unofficial patch that has improved support.

@Joey_sw: MP3PC is working for me in 0.74 with default settings, but it seems to be picky about the MP3 files it will play. I've had the most success with CBR 44.1kHz, but haven't really pinned down its limitations.
edit: seems it has a problem with some ID3 tags. I'm not sure what specifically it doesn't like, because some files with tags play OK, but I'm able to get all previously non-playing files to work by removing their tags.

Reply 3 of 6, by hwh

Posted on 2013-02-01, 02:10

hwh Offline

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That's just it, it doesn't sound good no matter what. It's just off.

There was a driver for Win 3.1 to play digitized sound with a PC speaker. I guess that covers WAV.

Reply 4 of 6, by leileilol

Posted on 2013-02-01, 02:17

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You could try the ykhwong build to hear if that suits your tastes better. It contains the aforementioned improved pc speaker patch

long live PCem

Reply 5 of 6, by Joey_sw

Posted on 2013-02-01, 03:43

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ripsaw8080 wrote:
@Joey_sw: MP3PC is working for me in 0.74 with default settings, but it seems to be picky about the MP3 files it will play. I've had the most success with CBR 44.1kHz, but haven't really pinned down its limitations.
edit: seems it has a problem with some ID3 tags. I'm not sure what specifically it doesn't like, because some files with tags play OK, but I'm able to get all previously non-playing files to work by removing their tags.

Thanks for your information, with it i also managed to get the MP3PC to play the MP3 files that previously not working.

It seem the MP3PC doesn't like the newer ID3v2 tags,
by removing it (ID3v1 tag was intact) the MP3PC works for most MP3 i've.

-fffuuu

Reply 6 of 6, by JosteinTopland

Posted on 2021-09-04, 10:58

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How to improve the PC speaker sound in DOSBox.
1) Get DOSBox ECE (aka the improved DOSBox)
2) Open the conf file, typically under c:\Users\Myself\AppData\Local\DOSBox\dosbox-ECE.conf
3) set [mixer] rate to 48000
4) set [mixer] blocksize to 2048
5) set [speaker] pcrate to 48000

The above is typically the preferred setup for a moden PC in terms of audio settings.

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