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Old 05-17-2012, 12:12 PM   #8
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This is not just my opinion. It is also that of several musicians familiar with both. Accurate sound and high compatibility has been the two most important considerations of the main DOSBox dev. The beginning of the development of the accurate sound in DOSBox was aided by information provided by Vlad Romascanu, who was the developer of VDMSound, the fantastic sound emulator that most used in the early days of XP for sound emulation for DOS games. The OPL and AdLib emulation sound better, too. ScummVM now uses the AdLib code from DOSBox, but is somehow falls short.

The other thing is that it is far simpler to configure sound in DOSBox. Usually you have to do nothing to configure sound in DOSBox itself, but you do have to also configure the sound within the game's setup, too, but even that is usually straight forward. In other words, as long as you have configured the sound in the game itself, DOSBox sounds great out of the box.

The defaults for ScummVM often leave something to be desired. The audio setup in is spread across a number of locations within the ScummVM GUI and that is doubled by the fact that there are global audio settings AND individual game settings. With conflicting settings it is not always predictable about which overrides which. Correcting misconfigured sound in ScummVM can be a frustrating experience for those that are not familiar with what to look for. It can often be easier to either delete the scummvm.ini and start from scratch or manually edit the scummvm.ini file, which many will find as confusing as editing the dosbox.conf.

All of this is not to denigrate ScummVM. It is a tool that belongs in every retro gamer's toolbox and should at least be considered for any supported game, but it is not always the best or easiest tool to use. As far as sound goes, it does have one advantage over DOSBox. You can use combinations that are not normally possible, such as MT-32 sound with the Windows version of King's Quest VI.

In the case of SCI games (what this thread was about) DOSBox almost always gives you a more accurate rendering of both sound and graphics. For these games I only use ScummVM when there is some other compelling reason, such as to use the Windows version. Currently of the supported games only KQ6 has a more desirable Windows version over the DOS.
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