I am trying to run the first HoMM game on an HP laptop running Vista SP2 and it has Conexant High Definition onboard sound.

The game is running fine except the background music isn't working. I do get ambient sounds and a little music plays in fights but that is it.

Maybe this is something to do with the new 2.x installer and making games work with Win8 but I notice this latest install does not play the short intro video to the game either. There is no New World Computing logo, etc. It just loads the initial screen with the menu directly now or at least it does on this computer. On my other one but using the older installer, I get the full intro before I get to that screen and also music works fine but it is a different computer.

I am wondering what setting or settings I might need to change in the DOSBox .conf file to fix this.

Anyone have any ideas?

Okay, now this is mind-boggling. GOG seems to have removed the image file with music and animations altogether. (the installer is only 20MB or so, that should've tipped me off)

I'll look if there's something that can be done about it, but for now it looks like you have to use older installer. That is, if you still have it.

Srsly, guys? So now we have ripped-off version of Heroes just like the one that we used to download from ware- oh! I mean "abandonware" sites? I really hope this was just overlooked by someone.

So it is because of the new installer that there is no music and the loading screen for the game is now gone? :(

I will try helping you out. It will involve some work, but hopefully you (and anyone affected) can get a proper working copy of HoMM1.

First, there're some files to download.
1. Pick up 16bit Stereo Music from this thread, courtesy of BlackChar.
2. Get the movies from here. I uploaded these movies from my GOG HOMM1 installation (I hope they won't ban me for that). The password is gogcom
3. Install GOG HOMM1 normally. Now open the installation folder and create a new folder named DISC. Inside of it you should create HEROES folder. Open it and extract the movies into it. If done correctly, they should be under DANIM folder, so in general you should have DISC\HEROES\DANIM containing all the movies.
4. Now in the DISC\HEROES you should also create a SOUND folder, that will contain all the music files uploaded by BlackChar. I don't know if he retained the folder structure, but make sure the sound files are under DISC\HEROES\SOUND.
5. In your HOMM1 installation folder (if done with default settings) you should have a SETUP.EXE file and a Dosbox folder containing DOSBOX installation. Open a new window with this DOSBOX folder view, then drag and drop the SETUP.EXE from HOMM1 folder onto DOSBOX.EXE. This should open HOMM1 configuration.
6. In the configuration dialogue, press buttons in the following order: 1, 8, 3, 4. This will make HOMM1 use 16bit STEREO music.
7 Open notepad and drag and drop the homm.conf file. Scroll it down until you will find
[autoexec]
Below that there should be a line starting with imgmount d [blahblah]. I am not sure about that one, as I changed my HOMM1 installation to my tastes.
8. Change that imgmount d line into
mount D .\DISC\ -t cdrom -label HEROES and save it.
9. Check if your HOMM1 has sound and intro movies. If everything was done properly and I haven't screwed anything in my guide.

If you have any questions, shoot.

Thank you very much for the time and effort you just put into trying to help me out. I have a fully functional installation now and the solution was simple. I retrieved the 1.x installer I had saved on a USB drive stored in my closet and noted as the above poster mentioned, the discrepancy in file sizes between it and the newer one which is about 1/3 the size of the 1.x one. Installing with the old installer results in an install that works just fine with the into playing and the music playing with no further fiddling around on my part.

Once again, GOG has screwed up. I am not pleased. It is a good thing I've learned not to trust them anymore and save old installers.

I'll post about this in general so hopefully someone from GOG sees it and does something to fix the current installer for people who need it to work properly.

Cool, thanks for a prompt fix :)

Any chance of tweaking DOSBox config and adding stereo music, while you're at it?

I also think that is a good idea to update both HoMM1 with stereo music and HoMM2 with better quality music. The links are on the forums. Unless there are any licensing "nonos," why not use them?

It won't work. If you set anything apart from 8-bit mono sound, you will get silence instead of music.


/edit
Just to clarify if this is not known: GOG version of HOMM1 is the one taken from HOMM1 Win/DOS hybrid. It had 8bit mono music for DOS and 8bit mono or CD-Audio for Windows version. Of course, the Windows version is cut, and so is the CD-Audio. What we are left with is 8bit mono music.

BlackChar copied the proper stereo files from his DOS version of the game and shared it with other GOGers, so now everyone can get a proper DOS version of the game with 16bit stereo music.

Nope it's not :) The disc image still has 73MB and it's the same file as before, which means there are no stereo files included. The DOS setup allows you to select them but then the game wont play anything, just as CRW says.

There's a topic right here on a forum which describes exactly what is missing, how to get it back and there is also a download link for those files, since they probably aren't on a game master you started with (or at least, that's what users here have deduced ;) )

(edit: heh, ninja'd)

This is exactly the kind of thing I expect GOG to provide when they are able. The point in part of buying from GOG is to get an elegant installation the first time, to have this stuff done for you. It is what makes purchasing the game worthwhile versus going the abandon ware zero cost route. Thank you very much for the timely response and basic fix for this issue. As is noted above, it would be nice to see GOG go the extra distance here and enhance the audio for this game rather than rely on users to go find it, download it and set it up themselves. I expect nothing less than the very best from GOG. :D

Can I take that to mean you guys are actually working on it then?