TASEmulators
[DOS] CD music is not played during the gameplay
Summary
BizHawk's DOS core doesn't play CD music, if a game uses CD as an external storage for non-mandatory resources.
Tested games:
- Shadow Warrior
- Chasm: The Rift
Repro
- Launch DOS (DOSBox-X) core using a game distributed on a CD ROM
- In the menu bar, select "DOS"
- Perform the following adjustments:
- Configuration Preset: [1999] IBM Thinkpad 240
- Mount Writable Hard Disk Drive: 241 Mb (FAT16) or higher, to have enough space.
- Sound Blaster Model: Sound Blaster 16 (optionally). "Auto" results in the same outcome.
- Reset the core or re-launch Bizhawk and select a DOS game (repeat point 1)
- Install any of the provided games (shown on videos below)
- Launch the game. 6.1. In case of Chasm, type "chasm" to launch the game. 6.2. In case of Shadow Warrior, type "setup" and choose Sound Blaster as its Sound FX chip for the game. After you save the settings, a config file necessary to start the game is generated. Then type "sw" to launch the game
- Take a closer look at the audio being played.
Recording a video using BizHawk A/V Writer doesn't help. Changing Sound Blaster IRQ option in DOS settings doesn't help.
Expected
Once the game starts, the music is played alongside voice lines and sound effects.
Actual
Once the game starts, the music isn't played.
Host env.
- BizHawk 2.10.1 dev build at 236ff74b2b1f717338e6827fa55b71fdd6b9e84a; Win10 Pro 22H2; AMD/Nvidia
Comparison screen recordings
The following recordings sequentially record the process of installing and launching each of the mentioned games on DOSBox-X (2025-02-01 release) and BizHawk. DOSBox-X doesn't have these issues.
Shadow Warrior Chasm: The Rift Warning: Shadow Warrior plays very loud music in DOSBox-X. Please, keep the volume low around 1:15! I left the timecode in the video.
Here is its configuration file. I tweaked the CPU and memory, but Sound Blaster settings remained unchanged. Although, with the default settings, there was no issue as well. dosbox-x-2025-Feb-01-conf.zip
Another game has the same issue: The Secret of Monkey Island, reported by Emil_Borg here. The issue might relate to games with Red Book audio
I'll just add that a quick way to test is to mount a Dos CD with audio and type cdplay to bring up the dosbox built in cd player. It appears that all tracks are seen but the commands to play and skip tracks are not going anywhere at the moment.
