I’ve been reinstalling some of my old childhood games for the nostalgia. Duke Nukem 3D, for instance. But what’s frustrating is that I can’t get the sound to work.
If I go into the configuration file and choose NONE for sound card and music card, the game starts up just fine. It looks great, but there’s no sound. But if I choose SOUND BLASTER in the setup file, when I try starting it up in DOSBOX (the DOS emulator I’m using, ) it says the game couldn’t load the sound file because of an "invalid or conflicting IRQ.)
I’m using a program called VDMSound which is supposed to emulate Sound Blaster. It’s not doing a very good job, I guess. When I go into the config file to tweak all the Sound Blaster settings (which version, which channel, which “voices,” which “interrupt” - it’s all Greek to me) I don’t know what to do to get it to work properly. Is there some sound blaster emulator that I can download that will do this properly?
PLEASE help! It’s driving me NUTS!
Does the setup program for Duke Nukem ask you to specify IRQ/Address/DMA settings, or does it try to detect them itself?
You may have to input them into the setup program (or it’s configuration file, I can’t remember) manually so that they match whatever settings you’ve got set in the DOS emulator.
Sorry, my DOSBox is an actual DOS box, and it’s not available right now. 
Man, I miss Duke Nukem.
OK, never mind, I figured this out on my own.
The trick was to get the Sound Blaster settings in the VDMSound emulator to match the Sound Blaster settings in the game config file itself.
I found that these specifications have worked perfectly (so far I’ve tried them on Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Rise of the Triad and Shadow Warrior.):
Go to Setup File
Go to Sound
Set the Sound Card to these Settings:
Sound Blaster 2.0
Address:0x220
Interrupt: 7
8 Bit DMA: 1
16 Bit DMA: 5
Advanced (?):
8 Voices
8 Bit Mixing
Stereo Sound
8 khz mixing rate
Note: For this to work, those also have to be the exact settings configured in the “Sound Blaster” tab of the VDMSound emulator.
I hope this information can be of use to others here. I love those old Win98 games, especially all the 3DRealms shooters.
Something you should try for Win 98 games is to create a shortcut to the game install file. Change the properties of the shortcut to run the installation file in Win 98 compatibility mode. I also keep my motherboard’s sound chip set in my BIOS to the Sound Blaster card’s default IRQ and address. This keeps other cards from using the IRQ and address the old programs expected to use for Sound Blaster.
Defaults are IRQ 5 and Address 220h
The DOSBox emulator has worked very well for me on Dos games. Try it.
I know you got this one working, but you may with to try the above in the future.
Those default settings were for the Sound Blaster 16 ISA card.