When firing lasers on the first mission they sound like a weak and brief "puff" sound, are they supposed to sound like that?

Edit: Dammit, forgot to mark this as question.

Is it a short, sort of metallic "puff"? If yes, that's how it's supposed to sound with the default settings. The Ferret (the fighter you fly in many of the early missions) has mass driver cannons. They're projectile weapons as opposed to energy weapons like lasers or particle cannons.

Yep, that's what it sounds like. I've never played WC2 before and I had read about sound problems with WC1 & 2 on the forums so I thought I would ask just to make sure. Thanks!

You can certainly try to improve the sound with BASSMIDI and some soundfonts.

There was a thread in General Discussion about it, but a search brings up nothing...

EDIT: Found it!

Except WC 1 + 2 don't use general midi. You are left with the old Mt-32 if you are looking for some improvement over the FM synthesis of the Sound Blaster. Either buy one or look into a dosbox build that includes munt the Mt-32 emulator. Such as Taewong's build if you are on windows or Boxer if you are on Mac.

Well, that's what the BASSMIDI stuff does, though you have to supply your own soundfonts. And while the ROMs for an MT-32 are slightly difficult to find, compared to the soundfonts for BASSMIDI.

At least you can set it in the .conf file for WC1/2. I'll have to install it and see if it works at all :)

Well unfortunately you cant just have a mt-32 soundfont. There are several reasons for this, but one key one was that Mt-32 was a different in that the game would actually load its own patches to the machine to play as sound effects. Hence the bell sounds when you shoot your guns as those are actual midi commands where the original effect should have been loaded in by the game. AFIK Munt is the only emulator capable of this.