I'm guessing I'm not the only one experiencing "pops" in the sound effects after doors are opened etc. A bit of research reveals this might a problem with the SoundBlaster16 emulation. Changing to another Soundblaster via the config file gets rid of the "pops" but also means much inferior sound. Anyone know of any fixes?

I tried to change sound device to all possible SBs, and sound pops remain. If anyone finds a proper dosbox config, please share the info!

The adlib sounds didn't seem to suffer from this, but it's a bit of a bummer to resort to those.
There was an old post on vogons that suggested sb1 would be pop-free, but it wasn't for me.

It works well with adlib.I confirm

I try to choose only ROLAND CARD with MUNT to have a better sound fx but i don' t know why the sounds popp with the fx.
Maybe someone will find the solution.

I thinks the best to have a good music and good sfx is with roland or mt-32.

just post the workaround anyways.

Thank you for taking the time to troubleshoot this problem.

Yeah you saying what you did would be nice. As is it's just sitting there unplayable until it's fixed.

The worst that can happen with you posting what you did is me having to reinstall it when/if the update hits. Much better than having paid for something that won't be played.

No news, can't play with sound popping. Please somebody help.

EDIT:

I just downloaded and tried launching a different version of the game, takem from an abandonware site. The same "popping" issues with the sound happened. Which means that GOG's version of the game is not to blame for this.
Must be some kind of issue/incompatibility between this game and DosBox.

Until the DosBox techs can figure a way to fix the sound issues, there's not much than can be done.

yeah, this appears to be a problem with dosbox itself. i've tested the game in 86box and there is no popping in that. so far i've found no way to fix it in dosbox, though i managed to determine that the popping only occurs when the game is playing back audio samples stored in the game's .cat files. if you configure the game to use adlib then it simply will not use the samples, which is obviously not an ideal solution.

on a semi-related topic, if you want to hear the game's (arguably) superior midi soundtrack as opposed to the adlib music, start the game with "legacy -roland" on the command line (just make sure you're using munt or something and not general midi or else it won't sound right at all). it will use midi for the music and soundblaster for everything else. i've had the game for years and only recently realized you could do this.

I recently bought and installed the game and I can confirm the popping is real and unbearable, especially when wearing headphones. I wanted to play this game today, so it's a real bummer. This needs to be fixed.

Yeah refunded it since the dev is playing coy with the maybe fix he's sitting on.

I don't understand the reasoning behind not wanting to tell us the unofficial potential fix he has come up with, just because it'll screw up the game IF an official fix is found and implemented in the future.

I'd rather try an experimental fix than have a game sit unplayed in my account waiting for an update that'll might never come.

I check back here periodically, nothing so far.

it's been 3 months and no followup. instead of leaving this vagueness here, why not just tell us what you know and let the users decide what to do with that information?

Any news yet?