Windows Speech Fix

[MrFlibble]

Those who have ever tried running Dune 2 from Windows are most likely familiar with this problem that digitized sounds and speech will seemingly randomly disappear and reappear as the game gets progressively unstable. Well, it turns out it's not due to a programming bug or faulty drivers, but some speech files for the in-game Mentat announcements are simply corrupt. Whenever such sound file is played, all further sound playback is halted until you go to the Mentat or options screen, but, more importantly, these files screw up memory, ultimately leading to crashed. There are only few of them for the Harkonnens and the Ordos, but a whole lot of frequently used files for the Atreides. Here's the list:

AATRE.VOC

AFREMEN.VOC

AHARK.VOC

AORDOS.VOC

ARADAR.VOC*

HSABOT.VOC

HWARNING.VOC

OFREMEN.VOC

OHARK.VOC

*This is most likely the real cause of the "radar bug" that was supposedly fixed in v1.07

Fortunately, the corrupt files weren't hard to fix, so I repackaged the PAK archives with speech sets for each House. This should remedy any problems with sound hat might arise when running Dune 2 under Windows. DOSBox users aren't likely to notice the difference, as for whatever reason the problem with speech files does not affect game performance at all when run in DOSBox.

Download Dune 2 Speech Fix from Nyerguds' Website

dune2_speech_fix.zip

[Nyerguds]

This actually FIXES it?

Oh my god, this is amazing! I thought it was just a bug in the "different sound devices" logic :D

(pity that the rise of 64-bit OSes will make it obsolete though, lol)

[MrFlibble]

This actually FIXES it?

I must say the guy who drew my attention to the issue (dunno why, but he doesn't want to use DOSBox) reported glitchy sound behaviour during large-scale battles with lots of messages coming in quickly. I'll look into that, but, at least, with the fix, it is certainly not related to corrupted sound files ;)

One thing to note is that in XP, the use of XMS is turned off for DOS programmes by default (at least, that's how it is on my PC). So you have to turn it on in DUNE2.EXE properties. You will notice that in all versions except the EU one (for obvious reasons), turning XMS on will show you the "Taking advantage of extended memory" message at the start of the game. So far, I've been testing sound in XP with XMS set to "Auto" (which supposedly allocates as much memory as needed on the fly), but perhaps using a fixed value will yield more stable performance results.

Also, note that sound effects that are always synthesized (credits meter ticking, sonic tank weapon, etc.) don' work with Sound Blaster in Windows, as it seems.

I thought it was just a bug in the "different sound devices" logic :D

Funny how the idea of screwed-up sound files hadn't occurred to me before, even though there is ample evidence to suggest a very high probability of this (e.g. the screwed-up - albeit in a different manner - sound effect files). I've never really bothered trying to run the game from Windows since I got hold of the very first copy of DOSBox - exactly for the reason of playing Dune 2 with sounds and music; before that, I ran into the radar freeze problem once, read about the radar bug in Windows and had to play without sounds or music.

[Nyerguds]

I can't seem to download the attachment :|

[edit]

Wait, is this included in the 1.07 fix now?

[MrFlibble]

I can't seem to download the attachment :|

The forum engine is acting up again, I guess. You can get the fix here anyway.

Wait, is this included in the 1.07 fix now?

I think I didn't include it after all, as it can also be used with other projects like Super Dune II Classic, but my memory on that is a bit fuzzy as I've been very very busy with other stuff.

[Nyerguds]

Nope, doesn't seem to contain it. Though the fact the speech fix can be used in other things too doesn't seem a reason NOT to include it in one unified fix pack :-

Anyway, I uploaded it here too now:

http://nyerguds.arsaneus-design.com/dune/dune2patch/

[MrFlibble]

Nice, thanks a lot! ^_^

My reasoning was that the fix isn't that necessary if you're playing through DOSBox, and if you want to use it for SD2 Classic only, then you don't have to download the entire 1.07 fix, making it an optional thing in either case. So even if it were included in the main 1.07 fix files, a separate package would still be a nice thing to have.

[MrFlibble]

Added the download link to your site to the first post :) Thanks again!