advice wanted for sound in dos games

[Father Beast]

ok, I am running win98, and have this generic sound card- an ALS 4000.

I have no sound in any dos games whatsoever.

I'm starting to think that part of my problem is getting the cheap card. but I'm worried that getting any new card these days would be pointless for getting sound to work in dos games. there seems to be this attitude that only the new games are worth running.

so, what do you guys suggest? is there sound cards for sale now that support sound for dos games?

i'm just glad i'm not running winxp. then it would be really difficult.

[PCRefugee]

Here's a couple of things to ponder over: You say it's a generic sound card - do you have the drivers properly installed(quite often nowadays there are 2 sets of drivers - one for win and the other for DOS).
Have you tried creating a boot disk? It's much easier to fiddle about with the settings in Autoexec.bat and config.sys in this fashion.
One final note: I've come across games that just won't initiate sound because I can't free up enough core memory and this might be the problem you are encountering.
Looking back, DOS was an absolute nightmare.You'd spend hours getting a game to run only to find that, once you'd played the game, it was utter crap. The best I can say is good luck

[DrSpike]

Getting stuff to work in the old days was hell. You need to modify your autoexec.bat to automatically run the DOS drivers for any hardware.........even the mouse at times!

[Father Beast]

ok, there are two kinds of dos games (for this discussion). one kind you have to choose the sound card, irq, and dma from a setup program. the other kind automatically gives you whatever sound the program thinks is appropriate.

neither give me any sound. the ones that choose for themselves activate the pc speaker. the ones I have to configure (eg. Master of Magic and Duke3D) refuse to run unless I choose either no sound or pc speaker.

part of the problem is the almost nonexistent documentation. no readme files on the disk. no dos set of drivers. just a choice between the win9x driver or the winME driver.

there is irq listed for the soundcard in the system properties, but configuring games to that does nothing.

[JohnT]

You know, FB: I like your avatar. BatB is one of my fave movies.

I don't have any suggestions for DOS sound, though. I remember having about 50+- Autoexec.bat and Config.sys configurations, one for each game. I would have a little batch program for each of my games so that to load the proper .bat/.sys settings I would type in something like:

autociv1

Which was my batch command for the following:

Copy autoexec.civ autoexec.bat
Copy config.civ config.sys

... then reboot the computer and start playing. Yup, I had to do this for EVERY game, but it was easier than editing the files for every game.

AutoMoo, AutoXcom, AutoCity (Sim City 1), etc etc... Ahhh, those were the days.

[DrSpike]

Hehe, lets not get too nostalgic. Those days sucked donkey balls..........though of course once everything was working it was magic.

And you learnt a lot from just trying to play games. These days it often seems to me people are spoilt a little by complete ease of use, and sometimes can't do the simplest of tasks.

As for getting these games to run now, I can add nothing to what I said earlier FB. I do suggest though that you post this in the OT, where some people post that might be able to help further.

[Traianvs]

get an old soundcard, when i bought my live i couldn't play the duke with sound anymore, so you might as well not play it cos sound was very important...


maybe some fanatics have modded duke nukem3d so you can play it with the more recent soundcards i've no idea..

[Father Beast]

OK, I went and reinstalled the old soundcard. Boy am I glad I didn't throw that away!!!

Now I can play dos games again. my daughter loves me because skyroads works again, and I was getting really tired of playing Master Of Magic with no sound.

Funny, monkey island 2 plays with sound just fine, but the Secret of Monkey Island still has no sound.....

[Standup]

I also found for a lot of old Windows games i had to add the SB16 emulator drivers. These came on the CD for my Audigy buy weren't installed as a default. Seemed to solve a lot of audio problems for games in the 3-5 years old catagory.

[Maquiladora]

Actually i have exactly the same card as you (ALS4000) and win98 and i installed the DOS drivers that came on the cd with it and havent had any trouble so far.

[Thrawn05]

I do wish for the return for the goly days of DOS. Back when programmers DIDN'T bloat code.

Win98SE is a good DOS OS, but if you have some older DOS games (such as the various LucasArt games like IJ, Fate of Atlantis or Sam n' Max), Win95 is a better option.

One thing I recommend and what I did for old DOS games, is find an old computer. Here is some system specs to look for:

CPU: P75Mhz - P100Mhz
RAM: 8MB - 16MB
Video: 2MB - 8MB
HD: 500MB - 1GB
CD: 4x - 12x Read
OS: Windows 3.1 or Windows for Workgroups 3.11
Sound: Sound Blaster Compatible

I got a P90MHz with 16MB of RAM and a 2MB video and Win3.11 for only $20. I had to reformatt the HD and reload a lot of stuff, and find an old sound card, but it works fine and I play all of my old DOS games on it. It even came with a THREE button mouse and a keyboard with function keys on the left! God, I love the old noisy keyboards.

WinXP is not very DOS game friendly, although most of them work well. My laptop can play all of my DOS games (WinXP, BTW, both are Pro), but no sound (on board SC, somthing called Sigma Sound or somthing).

Of all of the games, LucasArts games installed the best. The sound card detector was the best IMHO. Most other games you had to provide the IRQ and such manualy... and even then you're lucky if the stearo is right (left on right and right on left junk). I had a lot of probs with Redneck Rampage with flipped audio. Even today I have probs with the newer games.

If anyone knows of a program that flips the audio and runs in the background please tell me. I tried making one myself but I ran into a lot of probs. Don't know why, and really don't care anymore.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Thrawn05
I do wish for the return for the goly days of DOS. Back when programmers DIDN'T bloat code.

Let's not get too nostalgic. Things may not be perfect today but there are far fewer problems for the average user to solve.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by DrSpike


Let's not get too nostalgic. Things may not be perfect today but there are far fewer problems for the average user to solve.

I respectfully disagree. More and more games today cause more and more problems. I blam compsci teachers for this, and I can tell you way.

When I first took compsci, everything I knew about c++, keeping the code tight, clean, and pithy was thrown out. My teacher didn't want that... why? "Because with computer speeds and memory space you don't need to do that anymore." And the first few programs I made he failed me on, because they were "too small" even thought they did EXACTLY what I needed them to do.

There seems to be a shift in mentality. CPU and HD and RAM have increased so that previous programs can run faster, NOT so someone can slak off and leave code bloated, which is the current mentality.

This constrast in ideas has gotten me into tons of trouble, yes I got the programs or parts of codes I assigned to done in time, but it just wasn't big enough.

I do use comments, and each program I make comes with a cpp file attached that is nothing but a commented FAQ. I use complete english sentences and even a step by step process for each function/class. So you can't say no one can read my code.

For example (and this very simple). I take alook at the what the program is suppose to do. And lets say we need a varable for this program (int_var (contrived, but for this example it works). I know that this variable will only need to go from 0 to 10. So, that means it doesn't need negatives, so it becomes an unsigned int. Now this doesn't reduced memory, but it prevents the program giving the user a number that can't be (fail safe).

Now we see that this variable can't be no higher then 10, so we can shorten this even further by useing a short int. Thus this variable would looked like:

unsigned short int int_var;

Anothing example is with strings, if you only need ONE string, why not save space and forget about and just use a char array (as long as you think you need. Names could go up to 255, countries could be 512). Presto, saved more space.

Unforunatly, these types of examples are what got me in hot water many times. And it saddens me that this has happened. I bet most of these programs that need 800MHz CPUs and 128MB of Ram just to start it could only use half that much if coded right.

Now I'm not saying EVERY program is like that, but I do know that a few could be done better. And example is with Morrowind, the file sizes are in the MBs, which is understandable for this complex of a game, but the fact no attempt was made to do some sort of compression is very bad.... some compression is better then none.

[DrSpike]

I sympathise with your points......hehe.......I had an Amiga, for which code was necessarily very tight.

But your point shouldn't lead to disagreement with my quoted statement. Code may be bloated, but I fail to see how the days of manual IRQ's, autoexec.bat, no p&p etc can be considered less problematic for the average than the situation as it stands today.

It is easy to be nostalgic.......remember the problems as well as the stuff that was better.

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by DrSpike
I sympathise with your points......hehe.......I had an Amiga, for which code was necessarily very tight.

But your point shouldn't lead to disagreement with my quoted statement. Code may be bloated, but I fail to see how the days of manual IRQ's, autoexec.bat, no p&p etc can be considered less problematic for the average than the situation as it stands today.

It is easy to be nostalgic.......remember the problems as well as the stuff that was better.

Thank God someone else feels the same way.

I guess I was just lucky. I loved DOS more then a GUI. I have a DOS prompt that loads up on startup and I pretty much work through that.

Screw Word, DOS EDIT is better!


EDIT:
C:\DOS
C:\DOS\RUN
RUN\DOS\RUN