Is anyone out there successfully using Dosbox under Mandrake 10.1?
I have dosbox installed, and it plays my old DOS games really well,
but I can't get any sound from them.

There doesn't seem to be any way to specify
which sound device to use, and it always picks a non existant one
and then complains that it cant open it. With my config (just
/dev/sound/dsp), it always complains that it can't open
/dev/sound/dsp1. Feeling clever, as root I made a soft link called
/dev/sound/dsp1 that just pointed to /dev/dsp (as does /dev/sound/dsp).
Dosbox was more clever. The next time I started it, it said it couldn't
open /dev/sound/dsp2! I created one of those; it complained that it couldn't
/dev/sound/dsp3... and so on.

Is there some dosbox option that doesn't show up in the man page
or at their web site that would let me point it directly at a sound
device?

Thanks!

I have resolved this problem and thought I would post for other old DOS gamers on Mandrake.

First of all, if you haven't tried dosbox, you should. It is an excellent x86 emulator that is totally focused on gaming. The design intent is faithful reproduction of a DOS hardware and software environment so that old DOS games will run properly.

That said, the solution to my sound issue was to realize that if you have KDE sounds enabled, you run into trouble. KDE grabs the sound device and holds it for a configurable amount of time. One the sounds I had playing was a sound when a new window was created. Hence, as the dosbox window opened, KDE was holding the sound device and dosbox couldn't get it. Result was no sound.

To resolve, simply turn off the "new window" sound, or turn off the KDE sound system entirely. I like the KDE sounds (I am running a hand installed KDE 3.3.2, and the sounds are WAY nicer than those that come with Mandrake's KDE 3.2) and so I kept the sound system on. I simply disable the "new window" sound when I want to fire up Digger, my favorite old DOS game.

Hope this helps.

Have you tried typing
soundwrapper dosbox
instead of just plain dosbox?

This routes dosbox sounds through arts (which is KDE sound daemon), so there will be no fighting about who gets the sound between KDE and dosbox.