First post, by Rekrul
I've played through the entire game of Tomb Raider using DOSBox, but I was using speakers at the time. I recently bought a cheap pair of headphones (which seem to work great) and while testing them, I decided to see how some games sounded with the headphones rather than the speakers.
For some reason, the sound effects in Tomb Raider were louder than normal and I noticed something I'd never noticed while playing with speakers; All of the sound effects have a sort of scratchy/static-y sound to them. Like there's a small burst of static at the same time as the sound effect is being played. For example, when Lara runs, I can hear her footsteps, but each step also has a bit of static, like she's running on Rice Crispies. To make sure that it wasn't just the headphones, I tried playing it with the speakers turned way up and the static is there too. The headphones just made it more onvious.
I tried switching the game between Soundblaster, Soundblaster Pro, and Soundblaster 16/AWE in the setup, but they all had it.
I've tried with both the official DOSBox 0.74 (software mode) and the 2014 Daum SVN version (Glide mode) and they both sounded the same. No other game, DOS or Windows, does this.
My computer has on-board Realtek Audio rather than a dedicated sound card.
When searching for this problem online, I found a few references to it, but nothing concrete. I did see a comment from one person who said when played on properly configured real hardware, the sound is flawless. One person though that it was the fault of the glide wrapper (obviously not if it happens in software mode) while another thought the VDMSound settings needed to be adjusted.
Do the Tomb Raider sound effects always sound scratchy in DOSBox when you turn up the volume? Is there some setting in the CONF file that could eliminate this?
