Dungeon Master Forum

I just upgraded from onboard sound to an Asus Xonar D1 sound card. Works great for all other apps and games, but now DSB is doing very odd things.

Some sounds don't seem to finish playing, they get truncated. Door sounds barely start and I just hear a very short "blup". Other sounds don't play at all, such as the weapon swipe sounds. Music that I setup to play on my title screen does still play though.

Is it going to be possible to troubleshoot and fix this or am I now screwed for sound support in DSB? I have read that the Xonar drivers can be a bit flaky...

It might be possible to troubleshoot and fix this, but it's also likely the problem is lower down than DSB, probably having something to do with your sound card's drivers and/or FMOD. There still may be a workaround, though.

Here's my first random shot in the dark: DSB uses sound files extracted directly from DM. These are very low quality 6khz 8-bit sounds. I've had a few minor problems with FMOD and DM's default sounds before. It's possible your sound card's drivers may not even include proper support for these sorts of sounds anymore because pretty much nobody uses them, or something like that.

A test would be to replace a DM sound with a better quality sound file and see if anything changes.
http://www.ojnk.net/dm/dsb/swish.wav
Here's the standard sword swish sound resampled to 11025hz and 16 bits.
All you have to do is place the file right into the dungeon's directory (i.e., save it as test_dungeon/swish.wav and DSB will load it instead of the standard swish when you run the test dungeon)

Let me know if this changes anything.

That file seemed better. However, I found an even better solution: If I turn off a DSP effect known as GX something-or-other in Xonar control panel, all the sounds play correctly.