sound issues with 2006 Collection

[Cras]

I have had this collection for several years now, but never really tried to play them because I ran into some performance issues and I still had my old i386 that I still can play my old games on.

But this past week I came across the box, and thought, "Space Quest games would really be fun to play on my laptop as I ride the train."

I figured a newer version of DOSBox would have been released and serched to find where I could download them. In my serches I came across this website, and really appreciate the work that is being done to help us pc gamers relieve those great moments of our childhoods, playing those old classic adventure games that nobody seems to want to make anymore.

I applied your patch, and started to run SQ1 VGA, but I see it defaulted to using MIDI sound rather than the old SB sounds I remember. I missed the door sound fx, the "12 Mintues to Detonation" speech. So I dug around the files and found the Resource.CFG file, switched it to Soundblaster, and now I get those old style sounds that I know and love, but it takes a pounding on performance, which is where I get puzzled.
I have a laptop, bought it six months ago, running Win 7 x64, have a Core i7, 4 GB DDR3 ram, so I find it hard to believe that it is my system that is unable to emulate the 16 bit Dos environment. So I looked at the DOSBox config file and saw the values.

So now to my question, if you all are still with me, has anyone else seen the Soundblaster performance issues (sounds crackles and it just seems like the game is having a slow time getting through the opening credits), and has anyone have .cfg recommendations to better utilize my CPUs power to run DOSBox as its best and not run into performance issues?

Scott

[Collector]

Drop this in the game's folder and run it. Post back with the results.

DiagnosticTool.exe

(205.62 KiB) Downloaded 281 times

[Cras]

Here you go. Thanks for the response.

[Collector]

I've had a look at your log and see nothing that indicates a problem. It looks like the only changes you've made are the audio driver in the RESOURCE.CFG and changing the core to dynamic. I have tried changing soundDrv to SNDBLAST.DRV and had none of the performance hits or problems that you mention. SB music is generally poor, but that is the nature of it. I have GM selected as default for the soundDrv since the SB MIDI is so bad and outside of a couple of sound effects, digital audio is almost not used. One possible option is to try Munt and choose "Roland MT-32 with CMS SoundBlaster" for the soundDrv, but I don't know if they made a 64-bit driver for it.

I just redid the patch for the 2006 collection. Try downloading it again and apply it to a clean reinstall of the collection. If this does not help you can try experimenting with [mixer], [sblaster] settings for sound issues and core and cycles settings for performance issues. Just keep in mind that increasing cycles much higher than around 10000 can introduce the timer bugs so prevalent in the SCI VGA games. Also, setting cycles too high can cause the sound to start stuttering.

[Cras]

Thanks for the response, I am convinced now it is just my laptop having trouble keeping up.

I downloaded it fresh on my tower which I use for HD Video editing and playing Microsoft Flight Simulator X, it is a i7 Extreme 975 clocked up to 4GHz, with 12 GB Ram, and a GTX 285, and it ran SQ1 with SB with no problems whatsoever.

Thanks for helping out man. I really appreciate the work you are doing.

Scott

[MusicallyInspired]

One question, the soundtrack for SQ1VGA is MT-32 only. How did you manage to get it to work with General MIDI? Did you include the fanmade GM.DRV driver for SCI0 games? I'd think that would be of lower quality than the Sound Blaster driver seeing that it doesn't play all the right instruments and it won't play the digital sound effects.

[Collector]

There is an official GM patch/driver from Sierra for SQ1VGA. Look at the bottom of this page for GENMIDI.ZIP. The driver has GM patches for EcoQuest 1, Hoyle 3, LSL1VGA, LSL5, Conquest of the Longbow, SQ1VGA, SQ4 and Mixed Up Fairy Tales.

[MusicallyInspired]

Ahhh yes. Still, it's no replacement for something that supports the regular instruments properly. But anyone can always change it, I guess. I just don't think it's the best possible setting for SCI10 games.