Hired Guns sound problems...
 

I was hoping somebody could help me fix what is hopefully a simple problem. I've been trying to run Hired Guns (a game I recall with tremendous fondness - how happy I was to find it here), and I've got the game up and running, but with no sound, much to my disappointment. The sound effects and music were some of the best bits; they created a wonderful atmosphere.

I have the game installed, and going into the SETUP program I've selected Sound Blaster for my sound, which seems to work on most of my other games. However when I come to run the game (which works fine in all other aspects), DOSBOX tells me the following:

Sound environment variable not set
- SOUND DISABLED
Press any key to continue

After that, the game will run, but just without sound, which is maddening. Can anybody help?

I should also point out that I'm not incredibly proficient with DOS either...

Ah yes, that.
From what I recall, you need to have a copy of sound blaster drivers from an external source and then run a command that sets an enviroment variable the game can read their location from. It's pretty simple, but far from obvious.
The config file and the drivers are on my home PC, though - which means the soonest I can bring you the exact solution is in 12 hours.

The drivers are in the attached archive. Unpack it to the directory you mount as your C drive in DOSBox.

Now, run the following command in the command line:
SET Sound=C:\SB\SB16

Then run the game.

Tell us what are you using, is it DOSBox or do you have DOS installed on an old computer?

DOSBox would do this for you. If you're using real DOS, I think what you need to enter is this (you can add it to AUTOEXEC.BAT):

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 T6

That is supposing your card is a 16-bits Sound Blaster ("T6") at address 0x220, with IRQ 5, DMA 1 and high DMA 5.

He clearly said he's using DOSBox. I encountered the issue a while back when I tried to run Hired Guns myself.

Oops you're right. :doh: I never saw that.

Genius! It worked like a charm. Thank you so much. Now this twisted ankle of mine is going to prove a blessing rather than a curse. Many hours of happy nostalgia coming up...

Hmm, actually the music seems different to how I remember... I played it on the Amiga back in the day, it seems the DOS version has slightly different, slightly less rich music. Still, fantastic to hear it again!

Now, does anybody know where to find the manuals for it? I remember the Amiga had four different books, only one of which actually had game-play related stuff in it. The rest was made up of world background and story-related stuff. Moby and replacementdocs seem to of let me down...

Hmm, belay that last message actually. It seems the sound works right up to the point a mission starts. Once the actual mission loads and the four character-view screens come up, all sound disappears. Are there any further suggestions?

I think I might have one of them... will have to check.

Just music or all sound gone? You are sure there's supposed to be music/sound during the gameplay, correct?

I'm not sure if there's necessarily meant to be music, but you should be able to hear basic sounds, like gun-fire, footsteps, and background ambient noise. I'm pretty sure the monsters made noises too. In fact if you look in the Music\SB folder for Hired Guns, we can see a load of media files in there.

As for the manuals, it would be fantastic to get hold of the information from them. That would make trying to remember how the controls and interface work much easier for starters. But I'm just as keen to try and re-read the background material too. If I remember rightly one book had the installation procedures and game controls, and the rest were all "in-character" books. One contained technical readouts on the equipment (which read as if it were an arms catalogue, rather than a game manual), another had detailed dossiers on each of the character backgrounds and a good deal of universe background, and one contained the background story. The latter was completely devoid of speechmarks, which made reading it a slightly tricky experience initially.

I'm surprised I can remember all this. I recall storing the manuals aside six or seven years ago when having a clear-out. I was so taken with them I was planning a tabletop RPG project and wanted to keep them for reference. I've no idea where they ended up though. Next time I'm back at my folks place (probably next year) I'll have a dig through my boxes in the attic.

I'm afraid the only manual I've got is the most basic one, with the interface stuff only (in attachment).

Now, about sound and music... when the cycles are high, the game starts playing the in-level tune, which abruptly stops as soon as the interface loads.

EDIT: I think I've found the answer. To play digitized sound, the game also needs ct-voice.drv and ctvdsk.drv, which are normally part of the Soundblaster driver package.
The game starts up with midi music whenever the SOUND variable is other than null, regardless if correct digitized sound drivers are present in the location pointed out by it - which meens I've been trying to use wrong ones the whole time... :doh:

I see. Is that something that needs changing in the DOSBOX.conf file? I'm afraid I'm not quite literate enough with the programming language to know how to fix that.

No, you need a set of Creative Labs' sound drivers. Then do the SET SOUND= thing to point the game to their location.

I downloaded those drivers from filewatcher.com and've had a play around with them, but still no joy.

I tried putting the two in their own directory and setting the sound there and that didn't work, then I tried putting them in the SB16 directory along with sb16.adc and setting to that, and there was no luck there either.

What am I doing wrong? Is there a complete and combined package of drivers I'm meant to be setting up or actually installing? Because I just found the ct-voice.drv and ctvdsk.drv and shoved them in a directory.

Wow, I'm getting the full nostalgia experience here, including being unable to get the damn thing to work. Now I think about it, I had this problem a lot with DOS. I guess I chose to forget that bit. :rolleyes:

http://www.oldgames.nu/forums/PC-Hired-Guns-t6233.html <= here is the bit about the drivers.

http://support.creative.com/Products...Sound+Blaster# <= here is the Creative Labs' driver page. Choose "other" and then the card model.

Still haven't managed to get it to work with sound, even though the drivers are installed and should in theory be fine. Grumble.

Neither can I. I'm thinking of following the advice in the oldgames thread and attepting the Amiga version. But I've tried Amiga emulation before, and found the ROMs too much of a headache.

Looks like this might be a project for another time.