Sound Problem With Dosbox

[melthas]

I'm currently using Dosbox 0.65 with D-Fend v2. There's no problem with graphics and playing the game but sounds are always cranky. It happens in almost every game (for ex. Dune2, Anvil of Dawn). I had the sound emulation settings under D-Fend and setup the game according to it. My PC is a P3-700 with 128RAM. Is it something about hardware or is it about the configuration? Is it possible that it can occur from lack of memory?

[The Fifth Horseman]

It's your hardware. DosBox requires a large slew of raw CPU power, unfortunately.

Better try using Abandonia Boot Disk or VDMSound.

[melthas]

I see but i'm unloading any other program using cpu and memory except DosBOX. My cpu usage seems to be around %5 in task manager. Is there a way to fine-tune DosBOX rather than using VDMSound or boot-disk? For example I'm setting the DOS memory to 63 MB. Could decreasing this or changing another option help? Shall i change the soundblaster emulation options?

[Data]

try prebuffer and blocksize parameters.

[melthas]

Block size 2048 and prebuffer was 10. I decreased the blocksize to 512, the sound was not so good but the lag significantly decreased. Then i tried 1024 but it wasn't useful. I didn't change the prebuffer because i have no idea about this parameter. Please suggest me a value for both of it. I will give it a try and if it doesn't work i won't strive anymore. :wallbash:

[Data]

4096 and 30

[The Fifth Horseman]

I see but i'm unloading any other program using cpu and memory except DosBOX. My cpu usage seems to be around %5 in task manager. Is there a way to fine-tune DosBOX rather than using VDMSound or boot-disk? For example I'm setting the DOS memory to 63 MB. Could decreasing this or changing another option help? Shall i change the soundblaster emulation options?[/b]
Increase the cycles until you reach 95-100% CPU usage.
That can make a huge difference.

Other then that,
Set the memory to 24, no point in going higher then that.
You might want to change the soundcard emulation to SBPRO2.
These won't make any difference to the sound problem (at least, I don't think they will), but are IMO the best settings here.

[melthas]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(the_fifth_horseman @ Jul 13 2006, 09:54 AM) 243065</div>
I see but i'm unloading any other program using cpu and memory except DosBOX. My cpu usage seems to be around %5 in task manager. Is there a way to fine-tune DosBOX rather than using VDMSound or boot-disk? For example I'm setting the DOS memory to 63 MB. Could decreasing this or changing another option help? Shall i change the soundblaster emulation options?[/b]
Increase the cycles until you reach 95-100% CPU usage.
That can make a huge difference.

Other then that,
Set the memory to 24, no point in going higher then that.
You might want to change the soundcard emulation to SBPRO2.
These won't make any difference to the sound problem (at least, I don't think they will), but are IMO the best settings here.
[/b]

First of all i set the memory to 32 and then changed the sound card emulation to SBPRO2.
I ran the game in windowed mode while i checked the cpu usage from the task manager and i found out that even a little bit more than 6000 was too much for me (never thought this would happen) and decreased it to something around 5000. Perfect solution, no sound lag and games working much faster! :ok:

Thanks for the help fifth horseman...

[The Fifth Horseman]

Note - in windowed mode, DosBox will consume more resources. Leave the status monitor on but minimized, switch to DosBox and set it to fullscreen and check how many cycles you can set there.

Also, you might want to experiment with Dynamic Core. Previous versions of DosBox had been very unstable under it, but 0.65 has had it far improved.

Dynamic Core can allow even twice the usual amount of cycles - try it.

[melthas]

It's been a while but I wanted to share some information I found out while playing Dune 2. The game works super fast and perfect with music but without digital sound effects. Dune 2 requires EMS (1 MB as much as I can remember) for digital sound effects. When you activate EMS and use digital sound effects, the game slows down considerably and sound lag occurs. I guess EMS highly effects the performance, at least on my PC...

[The Fifth Horseman]

Strange, I didn't experience any such results.