DOS Games Discussion

I assume some games, depending on how old and or the quality of the game, may or may not have any music or sounds. However I would assume Ancients (Which I downloaded from this site from the RPG section.) would have something. I know sound works with Alleycat, but I am not sure what is wrong with Ancients. The game plays fine enough, as far as I can tell, just no sound. Any help, preferably with good directions, to fix any problems would be great and very much appreciated. I have Windows 7 and downloaded the appropriate version of DOSBOX. Thank you.

I don't know Ancients, but is there a setsound/setup/config/install exe? Or an options menu? It's possible it has the wrong configuration by default, if it's a soundblaster game. Alleycat is just a pc speaker beeper game, so no config necessary.

And of course some games have no sound, but I assume that's not true with Ancients.

I searched in game for the options menu and what I found was not what I was looking for. Instead of running the game itself, which mine is "begin.exe", I should try to run another thing inside the folder from DOSBOX itself? Why would not all options be on the intial game screen or is this the way of DOS games or just DOSBOX in general? I never got to really mess with older games from the PCs. Also are all original DOS games Floppy Disks or is that something else entirely?

Dos games often had separate configuration programs - memory was a problem, so if they could move config out of the game that let them use more for the game.

And Dos was the wild, wild west - every game did things differently, though there were some standards later on when memory was larger and the industry grew more mature.

The only real way to know was to read the manual or install guide that came with the game - sometimes you can find them online or at replacementdocs.com. Otherwise you can look through the game files for bat, com, and exe files that have hopeful names like setsnd, config, install, setup, etc.

Is this Epic Megagames Ancients 1: Death Watch the game we're talking about?

And I'm not clear - does "I should try to run another thing inside the folder from DOSBOX itself" mean you're not running begin.exe from inside dosbox? Or you are asking if you should run something else inside dosbox as well as begin.exe? Basically, you run dosbox, it creates a dos emulator, and you run all the setup and games from inside the emulator.

Otherwise you're just using the built-in windows dos emulator, which isn't as good or flexible, but works for some games. One of the problems with the built in windows dos emulator is even if the game runs you usually can't use your sound card in the game...

That is an interesting story and worth researching. That is the game yes and I am using DOSBOX. However what I meant was, should I run another program from my game file folder. Can I run both the “begin.exe” and something else at the same time? Or do I have to run the other first and save the config? And if I am to save it, once I click save or apply, is that it or I have to config the code somehow? And I did not know that Microsoft had it's own built in emulator. Thanks.

It sounds like you are on the right path. I definitely mean, first you run the game's config, which saves a config file or alters the game exe (yikes!), and then you run the game itself. Usually you just run config the once, and from then on you can just run the game.

If I get a chance I'll try to see if I can do anything with the game in DosBox, unless you solve it first, of course!

The windows dos emulator isn't exactly the same kind of emulator as DOSBox or a virtual pc, but close enough. It's mostly there to let old command line utilities work alongside modern tools, so it doesn't really "emulate" hardware as much as it allows access to some older dos/windows APIs. That's why sound doesn't work - you can't get to the real hardware DOS style, it doesn't fake it, and the modern sound cards don't work like the old Dos ones, not really. Because they had to, it does have minimal video emulation/faking through to the real video card, so sometimes surprising things work.

Ok, still couldn't sleep so gave it a quick try. I too have no music/sound and see no setup programs. A quick look around and I see a youtube "few minutes walkthrough" that had no sound. A review I see says "only basic sound", not sure if that means "just when fighting" or means there should be unexciting sounds during the menu intro. Do you remember music from the past?

There's one other trick I haven't tried, which is changing DOSBox's sound settings to see if the game might need different defaults. I'll have to save that trick for later, if you want to give it a try it'd be altering the dosbox.conf file to set soundblaster to the "other" irq/dma settings. I think it defaults to 7, but 5 was common and worth trying. Or trying adlib card or some such.

Thanks for trying. I downloaded it from the site, so this is the first time I have ever tried the game, so I could not say if there was music or not. If your attempt works I of course would like to try it, but you would need to walk me through it since I am computer/DOSBOX illiterate.

It doesn't.