This thread is for people who would like to participate in testing new DOSBox features which will improve its support for Blood.

This build of DOSBox solves the non-looping CD audio bug, and also enables CD audio volume control within the game's Options menu.

It also contains various other patches which are likely to be included in the next release of DOSBox, so if you encounter any problems that do not occur with version 0.74 (whether with Blood, or any other games you run in this version), the team would appreciate the feedback, which you can post here in this thread (but to keep the signal:noise ratio high for them, it's probably best to refrain from posting other comments here?)

Download the custom DOSBox build here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5118465/blood/dosbox.exe

To use this version, I suggest the following approach as the easiest method:

1) Download the new dosbox.exe and rename it dosbox_test.exe
2) Find your current installation of DOSBox 0.74 and copy the new dosbox_test.exe into that folder. If you are not currently running Blood under 0.74, then download and install DOSBox 0.74 first. (The key point is that you need the files SDL.dll and SDL_net.dll from 0.74).
3) Make a copy of the shortcut you use to run Blood. Rename it to something appropriate such as "Blood - DOSBox test build".
4) Right-click the new shortcut, choose Properties, and edit the Target field to change "DOSBox.exe" into "dosbox_test.exe". If you needed to install DOSBox 0.74 first, you will need to edit the full path to that executable to ensure that it points at the new file.
5) Double-click the new shortcut to start the game as usual.

You may like to also make copies of the other DOSBox shortcuts provided by GOG in the Start Menu ("Cryptic Passage" and "Setup") and test those as well.

(edit: Send me a private message if you need assistance with setting this up. I would also like to know if these instructions work under Vista and Win7, and if not, how to ammend them appropriately. Use private messaging for communicating this as well, and then I will update this post.)


Please note that when the CD audio loops in Blood, you will notice two things:

a) The NEXT track starts playing for a moment, then it stops, and the original track begins again.
b) Something flashes on the screen for a moment (but probably too quickly to read).

Neither of these are bugs.

Item (a) is a consequence of GOG extracting the CD audio files incorrectly

In short, nearly all of the CD audio tracks (which are encoded as .ogg files in the GOG version of the game) have incorrect start and end points, such that the first second or so of each track is actually at the end of the previous track.

(If you wish to complain about this, please do so via GOG's support facilities.)

Item (b) is simply Blood telling you that it is in the process of restarting that music track on the CD, which is a process that used to take a second or three to perform, depending on your CD drive. Because GOG's version stores the music on your hard-drive, the restart process is almost instantaneous, and so the message appears and disappears too quickly to read.

Here is a screenshot:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5118465/blood_restart.png

Well, that's everything for the moment. Thanks to all of the DOSBox team for being basically awesome, and an additional thanks to Qbix for being super helpful with all of this :)

p.s. For anyone wishing to compile this specific version of DOSBox themselves, or just examine the code, you can download the sources here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5118465/blood/dosbox-SVN.tar.gz

Thanks for the info!

I bought the game yesterday and noticed too that the CD audio volume control doesn't work.

I am building (now) my own Blood config, but i'am wondering why gog.com doesn't update the included dosbox version 0.73 to 0.74 !?

a) The NEXT track starts playing for a moment, then it stops, and the original track begins again.

This problem is still not fixed from gog.com !?

Hey!
Currently we're going to play the original BLOOD through YANG. Everything works well except the mounting of the CD-ROM. Although I've got the latest YANG version (0.90) and configured the Source Port options correct, my CD-ROM mount of Dosbox still doesn't work in MULTIPLAYER. I've tried several things over the "Singleplayer" option in YANG (Action -> Singleplayer). If you play the Game type at YANG in original "Single Player" the CD-ROM mount and music does work but if you switch to a "fake MP" like Cooperative, the CD doesn't mount (dosbox says "CD-ROM is not initialized" at the startup and midi music appears instead). It's strange. Dosbox uses the SAME configuration file but as soon as I just switch in YANG to a multiplayer option, the mount doesn't work anymore.. even checked it with my friend on a real multiplayer game. No luck.

Does anyone have a solution for this?

I tried to download the CD-loop DOSBox build but my Norton Anti-Virus sees it as a threat and removes the .exe file. Can you put in a zip file or do something about it?

Speaking of the next release of dosbox, is dosbox still being worked on? If so, has development been going on all this time since .74's release? Btw, I haven't tried out the build yet, but thank you for making this.

Yes, development is ongoing (the most recent commit to the code repository was just two days ago), and it has been worked on regularly since 0.74 (a quick glance at the logs shows that there is some activity pretty much every month that goes by). I presume that it's very much a spare-time project for all involved, though.

Does this only work for Blood or maybe Redneck Rampage also? Worth a try?

Also you can overwrite the DosBox program with clean DosBox SVN Builds. You can find them at http://www.emucr.com/2012/01/dosbox-svn-r3775.html. There is a file libpng12.dll does not include download it from any dll site.

Link to modified dosbox expired. Could you please upload once again?

You still can find this on http://the-postmortem.com/files/dosbox.exe

This didn't seem to work for me. I copied "dosbox_test.exe" into the One Unit Whole Blood DOSBox folder, changed the shortcut to point to it (in Properties/Target), and the game still runs fine but the music volume still won't change. Any ideas? I'm getting tired of having to deal with such loud music.

I think the fixes in the custom dosbox build are in the latest SVN builds.
I'm using r4093 and the music slider is lowering the music. If that doesn't work try DOSBox x and the ECE versions from the SVN page. I hope one of theses works.

http://www.emucr.com/search/label/DOSBox