Author Topic: MS-DOS Lemmings Saga & Raspberry Pi  (Read 4045 times)

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Offline Ron_Stard

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MS-DOS Lemmings Saga & Raspberry Pi
« on: October 14, 2019, 04:25:48 PM »
Hello everyone!

I am trying to play the Lemmings Saga (demos included) in the Raspberry Pi, via DOSBox (in RetroPie). But despite they are playable, I am unable to hear the music in all the games previous to Lemmings 2, which gives me no problems at all. The DOSBox-SDL fork throw me the same issues.

Oddly enough, when I run DOSBox via Raspbian, with the same dosbox.conf file, the sound and music play as expected. Any of you have the Pi and the same problem?

Offline ccexplore

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Re: MS-DOS Lemmings Saga & Raspberry Pi
« Reply #1 on: October 14, 2019, 07:30:05 PM »
Hmm, first time we've even heard anyone here trying to run DOSBox on Raspberry Pi, IIRC.  Based on what you've said it sounds like a DOSBox emulation bug specific to that hardware/platform/port.  It makes sense that there would be a difference between Lemmings 2 and pre-Lemmings 2, as the pre-Lemmings 2 DOS games only uses the OPL2 FM synthesis features for sound and music, whereas Lemmings 2 uses other, more advanced SoundBlaster features for sound and music IIRC, at least on the default settings.  It makes sense that there could be emulation bugs affecting one but not the other.

One thing worth mentioning is that even on DOSBox on PCs, IIRC at least on some versions (not sure about current versions), setting the CPU Cycle setting too high or to "max" could interfere with the game's sound hardware detection programming resulting in no sound.  I don't think that's the problem here though since you said the same dosbox.conf file doesn't repro the problem depending on the setup.  Nevertheless, if your configuration has CPU Cycle set to a high value, maybe try lowering it and see if it might help.  On PCs I think the default is something like 3000 or 6000, which is quite low but the game still runs fine even on such a setting.  On PCs you can go quite a bit higher than that default without hitting the sound problem.

Offline Ron_Stard

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Re: MS-DOS Lemmings Saga & Raspberry Pi
« Reply #2 on: October 16, 2019, 02:18:17 PM »
Hey, that worked! Before launching Covox Lemmings (as an example), I reduce dramatically the CPU cycles via Ctrl+F11. When it was fully loaded in memory, the FX/♬ option showed up without problems. Then I sped up the cycles and everything sounded and run like a charm!

Same for the rest pre-Lemmings 2 games. It must be a bug, as you mentioned.