Wing Commander on GOG seems to have significantly worse sound effects and music than I remember. My guess is that it hasn't been preconfigured to use Sound Blaster. Anyone know how to fix this?

Also the mouse controls are very sticky and sluggish. Changing mouse sensitivity via the graphic mode setup has no effect. WC2 does not have either of these issues.

It could be the cpu cycles are set too low in dosbox you can use ctrl+f12 to increase them and ctrl+f11 to decrease them.

You can alter the configuration for the game inside the game folder

C:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com\Wing Commander 1 and 2\WC (i'm using win7 so winxp would be just program files)

Then choose wc or wc2 folder & open the 'dosboxwc.conf' or 'dosboxwc2.conf' with notepad or wordpad. You can then alter many of the game setting including the sound options.

The problem is that the games are set to use the MT32. However, DOSBox doesn't emulate that (due to the ROMs being illegal to distribute.) So it thinks it's using the MT32, but all it gets is standard General MIDI. (WC uses a LOT of custom sounds that the MT32 had uploaded to it.)
Plus, the games don't come with their standard setup programs, so you can't change it to the Soundblaster sounds.

The only way i can see to change the settings for sound is to use the method i have mentioned above.

After much blind experimentation I found a solution to my own problem. I deleted the contents of WINGCMDR.CFG in the WC directory and replaced it with the contents of wc2.cfg from the WC2 directory. I don't technically know what this did or what the long term effects will be but all I know now is that the sound and the mouse are much better.

Nice, I just came here looking for a fix to this issue as well. That did the trick (at least judging from the intro).

Awesome replacing the cfg with the WC2 one did the trick, a few glitches here and there sound wise, but nothing serious so far.

seriously, i thought GoG checked for these kinds of openly obvious bugs and problems :/
or do they only check for launching to the menu now?

either way, i'm glad they finally got the WC games! even moreso that its the WC2 with the voice work.
now we need WC2's special ops mission packs :p

Thks a lot!!

Hey I did this fix just now, and the sound works fine but now my cursor is stuck at the bottom of the screen.

Any ideas?

Well spoken.
If they advert the next release of EA classics, and offering the one and only Wing Commander, how in hell can this slip through?
GOG did a bad job with this release. As much as i love the most releases here, i have to say, that they did a bad and sloppy job with this release.

Yep - that fixed it for me too. Now my weapons no longer sound like bells!

Where is the R in the WINGCOMDR.CFG? I'm seriously saddened that this wasn't ironed out before this was released.

In case you haven't found it yet, in the WC folder there are 2 config files. One is dosboxWC and the other is WINGCMDR. Open WINGCMDR, replace the r with a552 and save. Much thanks to herecomethe2000 for the fix.