Unofficial Tex Murphy

Hi there. It has been a while since last time. Actually I was off Tex's world. After finishing Martian, I did not play UAKM but made an attempt reading the novelization first. The book is great but it tired me a bit so I resumed my play.

I am happy to say that I finished UAKM again after more than 10 years. Of course, now it's much different: back then I was not mature enough to understand most of the scenario, plus I had not played MS or MM. Now I can tell that UAKM is a significant step in Tex's universe.

Right now I am playing Pandora Directive.

Now there is something strange about it. I am playing of course, with the help of Dosbox. However while all my games (including UAKM) have a normal sound, in Pandora the speech and digital sounds are too low. So low that they are almost lost in the midi music.

Of course I could lower the music volume, but still, it is too low for me to enjoy.

It's not a matter of my windows volume control. If I quit Pandora and run UAKM, the sound is normal. If I return to Pandora, the speech will be low.

I'm not up much on Dosbox, never got into configuring it and all, so I can't really help you with that, but if money isn't really a major issue for you, I might suggest just buying it from GOG at $9.99 or when there is a sale at $5.99... It comes with Dosbox already configured properly and everything...

Could be that the Port your computer tried to put the sound is already taken by something, if that kind of stuff still matters in Dosbox... I remember regular DOS always having to make sure this port was clear or that port...

There are a few around the boards that know a good deal about Dosbox, hopefully one of them will step in here and be able to tell you what's what...

Does 'sound' like some sort of conflict where the digital sound is concerned.

You could I suppose try changing the IRQ used by the Sound Blaster from 7 to 5, or to 7 from 5 (both were commonly used by the actual cards). To do this look in the Dosbox config and change the line
irq=

Make sure sbtype=sb16, dma=1 and hdma=5. Then run the ingame config utility and make sure the sound card is set to Sound Blaster 16, and the IRQ and DMA settings match what you have in the config.

Of course, the fact it is playing *some* digital sound already makes me think this may not work, but, well, it might be worth a try.

just turn the midi off as in the past when you adjust the sound levels in tex ini file turning the midi down also turns the speech down.