I was in Boston for much of the past week as my mom had a medical conference to attend and before I left, I decided to, once again, install Daggerfall. This time around, I decided to go with that pre-configured version that comes with several mods/quest packs already in it, such as the one that allows skills and attributes to rise to 200 (provides some extra longevity to the game), the one that makes Barenziah and her kin look like actual Dark Elves (blue skin), and Eye of Argonia. After installing it, I messed around a bit with the resolution and scaling to get Daggerfall to fit this laptop screen.

So, I took the laptop to Boston with both Mount and Blade: Warband and Daggerfall on it and spent most of my hotel room time (waiting for my mom to finish her conference for the day) playing Daggerfall. I've always known soundblaster provided more varied musical themes, but I was always too lazy to switch to it with my older installs, and this pre-configured version came with soundblaster 16 already enabled, so one of the first things I noticed was the larger amount of variety in musical themes.

My favorite tavern theme from Arena is, much to my joy, now in Daggerfall, for me, and I love another store theme and another tavern theme provided by soundblaster in addition to several other themes scattered across the world. Daggerfall sounds much better, now. Anyway, I'm having fun with just my usual role-playing routine. I love the role-playing aspects of Daggerfall, so I'm just cruising around the Illiac Bay taking on quests and affecting my reputation with various factions in addition to slowly getting rich enough to settle down in a city of my choice with some expensive house and my ship just waiting for when I decide to go on vacation. I'm also gradually taking on the main quest and, in general, simply enjoying seeing my character progress.

I did have a quick question, however. At the beginning of the game, where I always utilized Daggerfall's excellent character creator, I've never fully understand if the supposed level of difficulty for leveling up slowed down skill progression or required more skills to level up (thereby limiting my peak level). I always used to think it was the former, but after setting the maximum health per level to 30, I noticed something that supported the latter, instead. My current character is settling on 15 maximum health per level and my customary immunity to paralysis, increased 3x magery, and expertise in long blade in addition to banning the weapon types I'll never use and leather armor and I'm comfortable with it, but I'm just curious to know how that leveling difficulty feature works.

Other than that, I just started this topic because I wanted to share my latest experience, had a few quick questions, and this area is kind of moving slowly with Skyrim being the main area of attention. By the way, is there a way to shut that horse up? I still get some sound glitches, here and there... such as the one with my horse never shutting up when I'm in a menu or the one where I'm in a dungeon and, all of a sudden, and inexplicable, annoying noise starts up and seems to be location-specific (meaning I can move away from the noise). What's up with those? Are they compatibility issues with DOSbox or are they just Daggerfall problems, in general?

I am confused. I don't think SB16 plays the additional tavern tunes; it uses the same obnoxious tune that they use for shops. It's the others, such as if you use MPU-410 where you get the more sedate shopping track and multiple tavern tunes. Are you sure you have midi set to SB16?

As for the difficulty dagger, it only affects how many uses a skill needs before it increases.

MPU-401 has multiple tracks for the taverns (one is the other song that played in Arena's), and a separate track for stores entirely. Dungeons tend to all have that really generic music with the "pipes" if you are using MPU-401 as well.

I have no idea what I have, then. According to what you're saying, I must have MPU-410, but I can't tell what it's set to. Here's what I currently have:

[mixer]
# nosound: Enable silent mode, sound is still emulated though.
# rate: Mixer sample rate, setting any device's rate higher than this will probably lower their sound quality.
# Possible values: 44100, 48000, 32000, 22050, 16000, 11025, 8000, 49716.
# blocksize: Mixer block size, larger blocks might help sound stuttering but sound will also be more lagged.
# Possible values: 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 512, 256.
# prebuffer: How many milliseconds of data to keep on top of the blocksize.

nosound=false
rate=22050
blocksize=2048
prebuffer=10

[midi]
# mpu401: Type of MPU-401 to emulate.
# Possible values: intelligent, uart, none.
# mididevice: Device that will receive the MIDI data from MPU-401.
# Possible values: default, win32, alsa, oss, coreaudio, coremidi, none.
# midiconfig: Special configuration options for the device driver. This is usually the id of the device you want to use.
# See the README/Manual for more details.

mpu401=intelligent
mididevice=default
midiconfig=

[sblaster]
# sbtype: Type of Soundblaster to emulate. gb is Gameblaster.
# Possible values: sb1, sb2, sbpro1, sbpro2, sb16, gb, none.
# sbbase: The IO address of the soundblaster.
# Possible values: 220, 240, 260, 280, 2a0, 2c0, 2e0, 300.
# irq: The IRQ number of the soundblaster.
# Possible values: 7, 5, 3, 9, 10, 11, 12.
# dma: The DMA number of the soundblaster.
# Possible values: 1, 5, 0, 3, 6, 7.
# hdma: The High DMA number of the soundblaster.
# Possible values: 1, 5, 0, 3, 6, 7.
# sbmixer: Allow the soundblaster mixer to modify the DOSBox mixer.
# oplmode: Type of OPL emulation. On 'auto' the mode is determined by sblaster type. All OPL modes are Adlib-compatible, except for 'cms'.
# Possible values: auto, cms, opl2, dualopl2, opl3, none.
# oplemu: Provider for the OPL emulation. compat might provide better quality (see oplrate as well).
# Possible values: default, compat, fast.
# oplrate: Sample rate of OPL music emulation. Use 49716 for highest quality (set the mixer rate accordingly).
# Possible values: 44100, 49716, 48000, 32000, 22050, 16000, 11025, 8000.

sbtype=sb16
sbbase=220
irq=7
dma=1
hdma=5
sbmixer=true
oplmode=auto
oplemu=default
oplrate=22050