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First post, by MrD

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I'm trying to play the Nesquik game 'Tricky Quiky Games' in Dosbox, but I cannot get sound to work. When the main menu appears, there should be background music, but all I hear is loud crackling.

I've set it to SoundBlaster sound, irq 7, dma 1, port 220.

I've tried Dosbox 0.74 and an svn staging version and Daum on both Debian and Windows 7 with no luck. Is there a specific version of Dosbox or configuration that would be more comptible with TQG?

Reply 1 of 9, by MrFlibble

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I remember being able to play with sound but now I reinstalled the game and get the same results as you. Very odd.

UPD: Try setting CPU core to normal instead of auto/dynamic. Worked for me. I think it's because of the RTM memory manager.

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 3 of 9, by MrFlibble

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I enabled the play-in-browser function for Tricky Quiky Games with music and sound working:
https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/tricky-quiky-games/

Also if you download the pre-installed version (quik-box.zip), it contains a BAT file which forces normal core upon startup to enable sound and music (and switches back to auto upon exit). You can simply drag-and-drop the BAT file over the DOSBox icon to play.

MrD wrote on 2020-07-25, 20:27:

What exactly is the 'RTM memory manager'?

You can see the RTM.EXE file in the QUICKY directory. A large portion of protected mode DOS games use the standard DOS/4GW 32-bit extender but some rely on other means (CWSDPMI for example), and RTM is one of the rarer options. I know for certain that CHASM will simply not work in DOSBox with dynamic core because of the same issue. Here the effects are less severe, but thankfully the performance tradeoff is almost unnoticeable.

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 4 of 9, by MrD

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I enabled the play-in-browser function for Tricky Quiky Games with music and sound working:

Very cool. 😀 Incidentally, TQG is also on playclassic.games, which has music and sound working. I spent a while trying to figure out what svn Dosbox they were using while trying to get sound working myself, but couldn't figure out a way to get it to tell me. I saved the game files that it downloads through the browser just in case their version of the game was different to yours, but it wasn't. 😀

Thanks also for the info on RTM, very interesting.

Reply 5 of 9, by MrFlibble

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It is my understanding that at least some browser implementations of DOSBox are configured not to use dynamic core, possibly for performance reasons. So TQG will work in the browser as intended without any tweaking.

As a matter of fact, I missed the entire problem myself too when I first played the game, because it was via Linux 64-bit build of DOSBox which would become unstable if the dynamic core was used, so I forced it to always use normal core in the conf file.

DOS Games Archive | Free open source games | RGB Classic Games

Reply 6 of 9, by jmarsh

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It's not the memory manager, it's because the shrd/shld instructions don't act exactly the same on modern CPUs as they did on older CPUs when the result is "undefined". Ripsaw found a similar problem with CHASM but affecting different instructions (mul/imul).

Reply 8 of 9, by jmarsh

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x86 MUL and IMUL flags affected?
The Perfect General I and DOSBox fail help

I don't think there's any other threads about this particular game, I just played with it a bit last night and narrowed the problem down to the shrd opcode (16-bit operands with shift >16).