I'm getting no sound whatsoever. The sound in-game is turned on, but nothing plays in the speakers.

I can find no sound config utility anywhere in-game. Anyone have any ideas?

Sound works (though it displays in CGA) on vanilla dosbox. I'll tinker around with the dosbox config on this one.

Still annoying that I have to, but I guess I can't expect such an aged game to play flawlessly on modern systems.

Alright cool.

Thanks for making me look at this logically instead of just flailing and waiting for someone else to post a fix. And I call myself a programmer!

Anyway basically it came default set up to use a roland MT-32 for some reason. Changed the second to last line of the dosbox populous conf file to populous Vga Sound Blaster 16, works like a charm.

The music is screechy but it's an old dos game. To be expected. Thanks.

Thanks this worked for me too.

Of course after a few moments I turned the music back off. (Ouch!)

As a kid I had the Super Nintendo version. Click the link for a YouTube clip. Quite a difference eh? The graphics were a step up, and the music still sounds nice. I'm not sure how much difference there is between the PC and SNES versions as far as features and strategies are concerned. The buttons on the UI look the same.

populous Vga Sound Blaster 16 solved nothing for me. I just got evil PC Speaker tune on title screen. Game itself is totaly silent. Why more care is not invested to make right dosbox conf for game?

i think right line is "populous Vga Adlib Sound" i got adlib music but game itself is still silent. I have FX selected.

This is correct. Actually "populous Vga Adlib" is enough. Unlike the Amiga version (with the heartbeat) the PC version is very quiet. But if you have music, there should be fitting sound effects für earthquakes and people falling into swamps - a lot better than the default Roland setting, where the music is nicer but the sound effects are just various bleeps from the instrument library.

Also I recommend setting the scaler to hq3x - gives the game a nice cartoonish look.

Previous post :"Changed the second to last line of the dosbox populous conf file to populous Vga Sound Blaster 16".


Forgive me, I am new to GoG and DOSBOX - where do you find this conf file to edit ? I'm using Windows 7 (and still missing that cool heartbeat from my Amiga days ...)

Mark Barker

if only the PC version had the same amiga sound quality- heartbeat, and general sound effects were great, with music also...

I had the same problem on Mac OS (can't help with Windows 7, sorry). You need to change the line
"populous Vga Roland MT-32" to "populous Vga Adlib" in the file
Populous.app/Content/Resources/Populous.boxer/C.harddisk/SINGLE.BAT

Unfortunately, even the Adlib sound effects are nowhere near the Atari ST sound I remember from Populous.

Thanks for the response! Unfortunately it occurs to me that this thread may not have made much sense to me as I was thinking specifically of Populous 2 and forgot this forum was for the series as whole. I get the sound effects and everything, but no music in 2, which may be attributable to the same issue as the OP was having, but I'm not so sure.