ripsaw8080 wrote:

According to Mobygames, the game supports SBPro, which came out in 1991. If you can't disable the QSound processing directly as an option, what about configuring both the game and DOSBox for SBPro?

If you read carefully. in the rearbox put: "Sounblaster Pro 16, Awe32" not "Sounblaster Pro, 16, Awe32". and you cant disable any qsound, there is no option for do this.

wd, there is any option that Creative give us any documentation about ASP/DSP processing on sb16/awe32 or it's copyrighted?

Other games like Terra Nova used QSound without requiring a QSound chip to be present.

SoundBlaster Pro 16... like some hybrid of a Pro and 16? Maybe they just forgot a comma. Never heard that particular naming of an SB card, but I'm not a historian of everything Creative produced. Putting aside what the box says, how about posting screenshots of the sound setup in the game?

Maybe they meant that sb16 was a professional soundcard 😉

sorry, you are in right way ripsaw8080. in the setup you can choose sounblaster pro. the problem must be in cdrom unit. In the readme file explain how fix the voice problem changing mapping=0 to mapping=1 but the problem still persist. Dosbox cant do this "especial" audio extraction, i think.

cdda is very easy, start playing, stop playing.
Try to rip the tracks and have a look at them in some wave editor, maybe there
is something interesting (only one channel used or whatever).

wd wrote:

cdda is very easy, start playing, stop playing.
Try to rip the tracks and have a look at them in some wave editor, maybe there
is something interesting (only one channel used or whatever).

I've ripped the tracks too. they have a special architecture. stereo but in each channel have the diferent dialogues of the game.if you play normaly sounds like in game issue, the voices of each channel mixed and you cant understand nothing.
I think that the software (game) try to do this for a dialogue:

Question: read the track 03 right channel 1:03:00 to 1:09:00
Answer: read the track 03 left channel 0:50:00 to 1:01:00

but something fails and read the 2 channels at time and here is when the problem starts. the voices of two channels are mixed. in one speaker you listen the correct dialogue but the other is telling another or fragment of another.

What name recieve this class of extraction?

How are using the CD? BIN/CUE mounted inside DOSBox with "imgmount"? Mounted outside DOSBox with Daemon Tools or something similar? Original CD in CD drive?

I think a bit of info can be deduced. If that QSound stuff would only work with certain Soundblaster cards (those with a DSP), and the audio data is important for playing the game, then the game would be unplayable for, for example, owners of a SB Pro. My guess is that QSound is only a way to maybe "enhance" the game by giving special stereo effects (possibly only on certain types of SB cards). As the game supports SB Pro, it should be playable on that card.

If the devs really think about emulating that QSound stuff (i doubt there are many DOS games using this "standard", so it may not be worth it), maybe some info can be obtained by looking at MAME. Some CPS games are using QSound.

I don't think it is related to qsound/asp at all, but might just be a problem
that the mixer of the emulated soundblaster has no effect on the cd audio.

Yep, QSound was a bit of a red herring. The stereo audio tracks are being used to hold mono audio on the separate channels, thus doubling capacity, but the channels have to be selectively muted when playing the tracks.

The game's installer asks a series of questions about if you can hear the left channel, or the right channel, or both channels together. I thought at first that it might be using the SB mixer to mute the left or the right channel, but I see none of that happening. Debug output from DOSBox shows that the problem is most likely due to a couple of unsupported IOCTL functions:

1INT 2F 1510 BX= 0000 CX=0003
2Driver Function 03
3IOCTL INPUT Subfunction 04
4Unsupported IOCTL INPUT Subfunction 04
5Status : 0103

IOCTL INPUT function 04 "audio channel info", details here.

1INT 2F 1510 BX= 0000 CX=0003
2Driver Function 0C
3Audio Channel Control used. Not handled. Faking succes!
4Status : 0100

IOCTL OUTPUT function 03 "control audio channel", details here.

Iirc SDL does not have audio volume control capabilities, so this is out of question.

Seems like it could be handled for images, where the audio samples are processed by code. The CDAUDIO volume control in the DOSBox mixer only works for images, so it seems that inconsistent support for features isn't always out of the question because of SDL limitations. 😉

ioctl/dae should also be able to handle it (similar to what would be needed for cd images).

I've tried mounting image, original CD, daemon, with no luck, same problem.

I tried also deactivating external mixer control but dont work, the problem persist.

So the problem must be in mixer or ioctl instructions?

It is not implemented. Neither the mixer nor the ioctl cdda functions have
access to the cd audio due to its limited interface (and it is NOT possible
to implement that for all cases).

resuming.....

there is no solution at the moment to fix the problem...

I looked at the data the game is using for the output function, and it is almost certainly the cause of the problem. However, the input function is important to the game for its decision on what to use for the output programming. For example, to play just the right channel, it is made to be the input for both the right and left channel outputs. This "remapping" of input to output channels is the mechanism the game is utilizing. The volume control aspect of the functions does not appear to be used by the game.

There may have existed some uncertainty as to which channel was which, possibly due to CDROM driver or hardware issues, so the game's install program asks its questions to try to determine correct mapping (which relates to the game settings for mapping=0/1).

With volume control i meant any sort of control over the volume/panning
of the output compared to non-controllable audio playing.

How odd....

i continue trying.....

I have tested the psx game, if you put the game in the playstation runs well but if you use a emulator in the pc appears the same problem of voices. ??¿¿

more....

i have tested the game in virtualpc with pure dos + sound blaster drivers and have the same problem of voices.

Tested with authentic P233MMX, under DOS 6.22, Sound blaster AWE64, CD unit Compaq Lite On v4.03 or 403
BLASTER=220 I5 H1 D5 P330 E620 T6
MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E MODE:0
Motherboard Plug & Play
Configured with Ceative "CTCM".

with this old pc and this configuration the game runs perfectly.

guess there's still no workaround/ fix for this issue yet? any chance there will be? i remembering coming across this problem back in '06 and giving up after many weeks of trying to resolve...i even exchanged emails with the owner of the game company, unfortunately he was not able to get a hold of the lead programmer to see if there was anything that could be done about it.