December 14, 2009

stuttering music in dosbox

If you have a slower computer (although i'm extremely reluctant to call my P4@2.8GHz "slower", it's a fact that my work computer with a Core2 just feels that much snappier) and want to play DOS games in dosbox, you might experience this:

The overall game performance is good, your CPU is not even fully taxed, sounds generally work as expected - all nice and fun, except for the MIDI music. Which crackles and skips and stutters and is generally unpleasant enough that you want to turn it off.

Fear not, for i have found a cure!

Open your dosbox.conf (you don't have one? head over to google and find yourself a nice set of instructions on how to create it and where to place it), locate the [mixer] section and increase the prebuffer value. I set mine to 50 (default seems to be 10) and the music is smooth like a cleanly polished watermelon. Or something.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

My friend, you are wonderful. Thank you.

Anonymous said...

Solved problem with sound in Dosbox 0.74 for Ubuntu 11.10

Anonymous said...

Solved my problem on win7 HP 64bit (as of 2013)

Anonymous said...

Thank you, I didn't think to look here. Perfect fix for my old beater running XP. Now I can enjoy the sounds of Lands of Lore again.

Anonymous said...

Fixed my problem with dosbox 0.73 :)