Avenger wrote on 2021-05-25, 12:20:
Wengier wrote on 2021-05-21, 12:11:
It has already been confirmed that the so-called “incompatibility” is caused by a mismatch of the Sound Blaster IRQ (5 vs 7), as setting that correctly would immediately fix the issue for the mentioned game in DOSBox-X. While it is true that DOS gaming is indeed not the sole focus of DOSBox-X, this certainly does not mean that it has broken compatibility with DOS games in general. In many or most cases it may just be caused by minor setting issue(s) like SB IRQ mismatch.
This is a half truth. The problem lies in that DOSBox-X sets a default IRQ in the config file for unknown reasons so even if the game's music setup menu confirms that the card has been found and tests okay, once the game is booted on many occasions there is still no music. Then you have other settings in the config file that do the opposite of what they actually claim to which adds further confusion when combing through a list of over a hundred settings.
I get wanting to defend the fork you work on but if you're going to do so be honest about it. The guy who runs the github for the project even confirmed that the code severely needs a cleanup. As I've said before, there are many nice additional features but in adding most of the others that are entirely useless to games, you've also added more work to configure games to run properly as opposed to vanilla DOSBox which is not expected from anyone making the switch.
It is generally agreed that if there is a IRQ mismatch then things may break at any time. They may work sometimes, but something is definitely wrong with such a setup and can misfunction at any time (including in real DOS). So why not set up the SB IRQ correctly in this case then? DOSBox-X uses IRQ 7 as the default IRQ even for SB16 only because it tried to follow the default IRQ of vanilla DOSBox for compatibility purposes with DOS games, otherwise it will definitely use IRQ 5 instead of IRQ 7 for SB16, as IRQ 5 is the real default IRQ on actual SB16 sound cards.
Well, perhaps I was indeed "defending" the fork, but I was defending it only because what YOU said was half-truth, and I have already been honest about it of course. Very simple, just set the correct IRQ in the game setup (or config file), and that's it. Why is it so hard to do this? The maintainer as you said did mention that the code did a cleanup, but he was primarily talking about something else (such as separation of PC-98 and non-PC98 related code to make the code even cleaner) and it has nothing to do with the SB IRQ stuff. The IRQ will continue to remain so solely for the purpose of DOSBox compatibility whether the code is cleaned up or not. Nothing will be changed regarding this.