Wow, I'm such a Keen n00b.

[Deltamatic]

I can't hear anything from Keen 4 unless I switch it to PC speaker.
I've listened to the .midi recreations of the music, but it just isn't the same.
How to I solve this problem that I suspect has a blatantly obvious solution?

[Genius314]

Are you using DOSbox?

[Deltamatic]

Nope, just running the files. It worked for Keen: Vorticons.

[StupidBunny]

The difference between Vorticons and Galaxy is that Vorticons is designed specifically to work solely with the PC speaker, meaning that it will play sound on pretty much any computer. Galaxy, by contrast, uses SoundBlaster for the main sound effects, and the PC speaker setting is presumably for computers of the age that didn't have SoundBlaster or speakers but needed sound of some kind.

Unfortunately, modern sound cards won't play the SoundBlaster sound effects or music, which are not wav/midi format in Keen, so your options are either to (a) play Keen on an old computer (which probably isn't an effective option if you don't own one ), or (b) download DosBox and run Keen with that. DosBox emulates the olde tyme SoundBlaster and so will play the non-PC-speaker sounds for Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, etc.

[Deltamatic]

I have a 98 box. Will that do?

[_mr_m_]

I never had problems playing any of the Keen games on Windows 98. You should be able to get sound and everything from it.

[Deltamatic]

Ah, thank you much.
Now the only problem is how to transfer the file to the isolated thing... my CD burning software has been acting up on me, but I think I can manage it.

[StupidBunny]

When I want to move stuff from my main Windows XP computer to my Windows 95 computer, I use floppy disks, since they can be written and rewritten much more easily than CDs, and the 95 has no USB ports. On the other hand, floppy disks can't hold much (I think I had to use a CD to get Hexen and Strife onto my laptop) and, of course, few computers these days have floppy drives.

[tulip]

I wouldn't count on Win 98, my version never played the correct sounds for Keen 4-6. Why don't you just use DosBox? (You realize this is an emulator, that can be downloaded freely, right?)

[IMA3HDDMNKY]

Win 98 may include DOS, but it isn't the same thing. It does have problems running DOS games. Either run the games in DOS or use this wonderful DOS emulator if you can't or don't want to deal with DOS.

[K1n9_Duk3]

I guess that the main problem is your soundcard, not the operating system. In the old days, soundcards used the ISA bus, where you had to know a base adress, interrupt number and DMA adress to have the soundcard play anything at all. Nowadays, you've got PCI, PCIe or onboard soundcards, which use a completely different concept of addressing the card.

The Keen sound and music engine can only address the old ISA cards. Therefore just changing back to Win98 won't help in those cases.

My old SoundBlaser Live! (a PCI card) had option to emulate a SoundBlaster 16 (ISA), but that would only work under Windows 95/98. So if you've got a SB Live!, you could get it to run.

Otherwise, using DOSBox or VDMSound is the only way (that I know) to get the sound and music to work.

[DaVince]

For your old rig, if sound doesn't work then VDMSound is probably the more sensible solution since it emulates the sound only, and leaves the rest to your real version of DOS (rather than the much slower DOS emulator DOSBox).