best sound settings?

[audiodane]

Another question.. I tried to do some searching but "best sound settings" threw out "best" and "sound" because they were too common...

Anyhoo-- in my testing I have mixed up a lot of my resource.cfg settings. As a random example, KQ1 (SCI) has the following sound settings:

• Roland MT-32, ...
• Sound Blaster / Adlib Card (or compatibles)
• Sound Blaster Card
• IBM PC or Compatible Internal Speaker

So I don't have a Roland, but which of the two sound blasters do I choose? Are they equal when running in DOSBox, or does DOSBox do better in one mode versus another?

Another example, Space Quest 6 has the following for MUSIC (bolded are "checked" in the install app):

• Creative Labs AWE32
• Soundblaster / Adlib (or compatibles)
• Soundblaster / Adlib substitute
• Sound Blaster Pro
• Pro Audio Spectrum
• Microsoft Windows Sound System
• Roland MT-32, ...
• General MIDI Sound Driver

And the following for AUDIO (bolded are "checked" in the install app):

• Sound Blaster
• Pro Audio Spectrum 16
• Pro Audio Spectrum
• Microsoft Windows Sound System

And to add more confusion, the DOSBox "Sound" wiki page gives some of the following information (paraphrasing from this page):

• Sound Blaster (non-pro) supports 8bit, 44.1kHz, Mono
• Sound Blaster Pro supports 8bit, 44.1kHz, Stereo
• Sound Blaster 16 supports 16bit, 44.1kHz, Stereo
• DOSBox does not directly emulate Adlib, but supports Adlib extensions on SoundBlaster emulation.
• MIDI is passed to whatever MIDI device is installed (e.g. Windows default MIDI handler), and is therefore subject to whatever is installed on the system. (DOSBox does not emulate any particular MIDI system.)

So, SB16 would be 'best' (aside from an awesome midi device), SB Pro next, followed by generic SB. And apparently Adlib is a "gold standard" as well (like soundblaster?), but it's not "natively" supported by DOSBox excepting SB extensions, so would that make the SB/Adlib the preferred choice?

With multiple apparently distinct SoundBlaster settings (distinct enough to list them separately at least!) to choose from and also General MIDI ... what's recommended for the best sound?

Lastly-- AGI games don't seem to have a "resource.cfg" file... So I guess there's only the DOSBox "machine=tandy" setting that tells the game what it can do?


thanks,
..dane

[Collector]

The "Sound Blaster / Adlib Card (or compatibles)" setting in the original Sierra installer uses the ADL.DRV, in other words, just AdLib. The "Sound Blaster Card" setting uses SNDBLAST.DRV, which depending on the game might add a few additional sound effects for games that only have a Sound or Music (no separate selection of music and digital audio), but the music will still be the SB equivalent of AdLib, so will sound pretty much the same as using the ADL.DRV. With games that have separate music and digital audio drivers there is no real advantage to using the "Sound Blaster Card" setting over the Adlib.

What is checked in the installer depends on what hardware the installer detects. What is not checked is not detected. In some cases this hardware can be enabled/disabled in the dosbox.conf. Selecting MT-32 will sound like crap without an MT-32. to Anytime that an SCI game offers General MIDI for the music, it will usually be your best option, as you found on the wiki, is just passed to the host system's modern hardware and will sound better unless you really want that nostalgic AdLib sound.

The different SoundBlaster cards would be changed via the dosbox.conf under the [sblaster] section. If nothing is specified it will use the default, SB16.

If no machine type or something other than "tandy" is selected AGI games will use the one voice PC speaker for sound. When "tandy" is selected, AGI games will use the Tandy 3 voice plus noise channels.

[audiodane]

Thanks.. So I'll just stick with 1st choice - "General MIDI", 2nd choice - "Sound Blaster Card", whenever one or both of the above is offered given that I'm running DOSBox with a standard WinXP installation, right?

cheers,
..dane

[Collector]

The OS makes no difference. Any hardware devices that the original installers see are the DOSBox emulated hardware. The default SB in DOSBox is SB16. As long as you are looking into the different sound settings you may be interested in looking into Munt. I have a page here about it, but it is getting rather dated, now.

Munt

There have been some improvements since I recorded those samples, but the project has not had much activity for some time. Note that a real MT-32 does sound much better, but you may wish to explore it.

[audiodane]

The OS makes no difference. Any hardware devices that the original installers see are the DOSBox emulated hardware. The default SB in DOSBox is SB16. As long as you are looking into the different sound settings you may be interested in looking into Munt. I have a page here about it, but it is getting rather dated, now.

Munt

There have been some improvements since I recorded those samples, but the project has not had much activity for some time. Note that a real MT-32 does sound much better, but you may wish to explore it.

Thanks .. I found MUNT earlier today, actually. Read that it's pretty processor intensive though. I also read that they've picked back up the development effort but are currently having trouble getting it to build now that a particular support DLL is no longer a part of Windows moving forward..

So with all that learned, I have decided that I want to go with the most PORTABLE solution. I would like to have a USB drive with all this stuff on it (e.g. the screenshot I PM'd you earlier), so whether I'm at home or on work related travel I could pop in the USB stick and go to town with whichever game I wanted to play. I am beginning to wonder if even the "General MIDI" option might give problems on some systems since DOSBox doesn't directly emulate that (though I imagine it's pretty universal at this point considering that I'm at least already locking in to an Intel-based DOSBox helper app). I haven't experienced any MIDI problems since actually turning up that mixer channel ( ). Just wondering if it would be best to set everything to Soundblaster and be done with it..

FWIW, the above is why I was interested in your installers having a "zero-impact" installation option. Since they didn't (even though they are "minimal-impact"), I'm doing everything on a test computer and then stripping out the various parts I don't want and tweaking the dosbox.conf files to remove the [autoexec] functionality. I'm then creating .bat files in the games' root folder to invoke each game by calling DOSBox with the executable in the DOSBox parameter list. DOSBox will automatically mount and execute that way, and I don't need absolute paths anymore.

If you ever got a bee in your bonnet about it, such a portable installation would be a nice option. Folks could then just "install" everything to a USB stick and run with it. No matter to me, I've already done all the tweaking for my own installations to make them portable. Haven't TESTED that yet, but ...

cheers,
..dane