Mixed-Up Fairy Tales Help

Game Sample Music
(recorded from a real MT-32)

Mixed-Up Fairy Tales Updates/Patches (none)

Mixed-Up Fairy Tales' original requirements:

MS-DOS 5.0 or greater
80286/10 MHz or faster
2x CD-ROM
640K RAM
19 MB Hard drive space
VGA
Ad Lib, Pro Audio Spectrum, Roland MT-32/LAPC-1/CM-32, Sound Blaster, Thunderboard or 100% compatible sound card
Mouse

Audio Problems
- Poor quality or no sound
- Unable to initialize your audio hardware

Extras
- Mixed-Up Fairy Tales Demo (ZIP file) [995 KB]
- Find it on eBay
- Google

Audio Problems

Audio problems are common in the later Sierra DOS SCI games. There's no single fix for all these games.

Problem - Poor Quality / No Sound (Win9x and XP):
The game has no sound or the music is of poor quality.

Solution 1 (preferred):
Play the game in DOSBox. It also will work with the MT-32 sound module, if you are fortunate to have one.

Solution 2:
Use VDMSound. The game work well with VDMSound. The sound will be as good as your audio hardware, and as with DOSBox, it works with the MT-32 sound module.

Solution 3:
Play the game with FreeSCI, a third party Interpreter for Sierra's early SCI games.

Solution 4 (DOS/Win9x):
Install DOS drivers for your soundcard. Without DOS drivers installed you won't have sound in a DOS window in Windows 9x. If you can't find DOS drivers for your soundcard, there is an alpha (developmental) version of VDMS that you can try.

Problem - Unable to initialize your audio hardware:
On starting the game you get the message:

Unable to initialize your audio hardware

This error is timer related. It only occurs on computers faster than those of when the games were originally released.

Solution 1 (preferred):
Play the game in DOSBox. By playing your game in DOSBox, you can avoid this and other timer problems. Even the Windows version can be played in DOSBox if you install Windows 3x in it, first.

Back when computers came with a "Turbo" switch (a sort of speed switch,) Sierra's workaround was to turn off the Turbo switch to start the game, after which you could turn the Turbo back on. If you have your cycles in DOSBox set too high, you may still encounter this problem. You can mimic the turbo switch solution by lowering your cycles (Ctl+F11) before starting your game. You may raise the cycles back up after the game starts (Ctl+F12).

Solution 2:
Patch the old audio driver with GOSiERRA or SBSIERRA.

Solution 3:
Use the updated driver,AUDBLAST.DRV (sb16drv.exe)

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