I played Wizardry 6 but found the popping audio to be really annoying. So I developed a fix for DosBox that removes it. Here's how you can do the same:

1. Locate your 'Wizardry 6' installation folder. It should contain two sub-folders: DOSBOX and Wizardry 6.
2. Rename the DOSBOX folder to DOSBOX_backup
3. Download my updated DOSBox from here: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/tools/dosbox/
4. Extract the DOSBOX folder from this download into the Wizardry 6 folder.
5. Open the "Wizardry 6" sub-folder, it's full of files for the game.
6. Locate the file 'dosboxWizardry6.conf' and open in a text editor (it's the 8Kb one)
7. Scroll down to the line that says 'pcspeaker=true', it's on about line 139
8. Below it add a new line that reads: wizpopfix=6
9. Save and close the file. Run Wizardry 6 from the usual shortcut and hopefully the sound is better.

Hope this helps!

You know you can just go into the options menu and turn the popping ambient noise off and leave the regular sound effects right?

Sorry if i wasn't clear but the issue I fixed was that I was getting popping in *all* sound effects -the ambient stuff, the 'ouch' when you bump a wall, all the combat sounds, the metal sounds on the title screen.

This fixes the problem so you dont have to turn anything off.

You are the man, the audio pops in Wiz 6 are considerably less with your svn build of Dosbox. I hope GOG decides to update Wiz 6 with your fix.

edit: One thing I've noticed is that your version of Dosbox keeps the mouse cursor to the right side of the window if you play with an unlocked cursor

Thanks! I'm more than happy for GOG to use my modification if they want. I've just posted the updated source code on my website so it should be very easy to apply just this audio fix to an update if they want to.

I'm not sure about the mouse cursor issue - none of my changes should affect that, but I also never use an unlocked cursor so it hasn't been something I've tested. If I get time I'll take a look.

Thanks for the fix, it made my sound effects much less annoying too. I haven't noticed any weirdness with the mouse cursor in Wizardry 6.

are you playing in windowed mode with an unlocked cursor(ctrl+f10)? I play that way as I use gridmapper to plot the dungeons.

I've figured out what the issue is with an unlocked cursor/windowed mode it's your "sensitivityaspect=" at 100 it keeps the cursor to the right, at -100 or 0 it keeps it at the left side.

I'm going to keep on digging to find an optimal setting

edit: I should say I had to add 'sensitivityaspect=' to dosboxwizardy6.conf for the changes to take effect.

I generally unlock it to map in Excel and then lock it back when I go back to the game. It snaps to whatever position my windows mouse is in when I click the game to lock the cursor again.

That's what I've been doing in the meantime, and granted it's not that big of an issue/bug it's just a minor annoyance.

Hi, I've fixed this bug, thanks for investigating it! - it was a stupid bug in how I'd coded up the sensitivity aspect. Very embarrassing!

Anyway - I've uploaded revision 4a to my site here: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/labs/#dosbox

I've tested it with fullscreen=false and autolock=false and the Wiz6 mouse cursor worked correctly as you move around the windows desktop and pass in and out of the DOSBox window - just like the official 0.74 does.

Think I'll take a look at gridmapper. Sounds very useful!

Sweet! Thanks for the fix. Here's a link to Gridmapper as most of the links found in the wild 404. http://www.superdan.net/software/gridmapper/index.html

Hey thanks for your modified Dosbox version. Someone on the Vogon forum made a modified Dosbox version in 2011 (originally to make it possible to hear the original PC speaker intro of Star Control 1) that cleared up some of the clicks & pops in W6, but your version sounds even better.

http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=23371&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=40

This is brilliant. How did you do this?

Thanks!

Since you asked, I actually used this as an excuse to dust off my blog so you can read a bit more about what I did here: http://www.davidwaltersdevelopment.com/blog/ :-)

The nice thing is that because GOG package all their games with individual dosbox installs I was able to deal with Wizardry 6 in isolation, identify how it used the PC speaker and correct for the specific problems I was seeing. It's great that you can capture audio in dosbox for study - without that it would have taken a lot longer to fix.

I'm not sure this fix will be any use for any other games and is probably not correct behaviour of the PC speaker in pure eumlation terms. But it sounds better which is more important IMO :-)

Thanks, I was having trouble finding a working link :-)