UPDATE: I don't believe it! I uninstalled Pandora Directive, the folder was empty, then reinstalled it, and it STILL doesn't detect my sound card anymore!

What the fuck has happened? Do I need to format my entire harddrive for this to work again?!

Doubt you'll need to reformat. Maybe you need to try messing with the sound card settings within the game some more. Tex has a ton of options, so try trial and error. (Start with SoundBlaster 16 and General MIDI/MPU-401.)

Check the virtual store. That is most likely to be your problem.

Any news?

Hey, I cleaned out the virtual store, deleted everything in the game folder and then uninstalled and reinstalled. Good news: The sound was back! Bad news: My save games didn't survive.

Luckily, somebody posted a link to a website that had save games and I was able to find one that was remotely close to mine - so not too much of the game experience was lost, I hope..

...and I'm done messing with .conf files!

While you had the other conf settings, did you notice any difference (when it worked) in sound?

If you are careful, and you keep a backup copy, you should not have any problems messing with .conf files. I hope this will not prevent you from trying to modify them altogether. They can do many useful things, not just sound; you can change the size of the windowed game, for example, to make it larger, and change the default launch state from fullscreen to windowed if you wish.

It never worked, so I have no idea

+1

For example if your monitor is widescreen and stretches the games in full screen, you can set the output resolution to your monitor's native res. DOSBox keeps the aspect ratio all nice.

How is this done?

Warning, don't do any direct copying and pasting as Lhademmor found out the hard way. Also, make a backup before you edit this, especially if you're not sure what you're doing.

In your .conf file go to the first bunch of options, should look something like this:

fullscreen=false
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=1366x768
windowresolution=original
output=ddraw
autolock=true
sensitivity=100
waitonerror=true
priority=highest,normal
mapperfile=mapper-0.74.map
usescancodes=true

Now, there's a bunch of interesting things you can do here. As you can see, I've changed "fullresolution" from "original" to the resolution of my laptop's screen, this would be different for you I'm imagining.

I believe that for scaling to work you have to change the output to something other than surface.I use ddraw but other options that support scaling are "overlay", "opengl" and "openglnb".

You can also change "fullscreen" from false to "true" if you want it to start in full screen. Not a big deal as you can switch with Alt+Enter anyway.

Warning, don't do any direct copying and pasting as Lhademmor found out the hard way.

Thanks for the info!

No problem. I should point out that I learned most of this by looking at the "# Comments" in the .conf file itself and by experimentation.

There is a full discussion of everything in the configuration file and what settings you can pick on the DOSBox wiki:

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Dosbox.conf

Splendid!