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?