The significance is that you need a qualified path in order to run a program (I guess is the reason). The period means "current directory" and slash is the directory delimiter. It would be similar to standing one level down and writing kigb_lin/kigb
And no, I don't have KiGB running on a Linux system. Maybe other people do. I don't care about KiGB.

What is the significance of the dot-slash?

Anyway, I tried it, kigb ran this time, but still no sound. Also, the contact email address I sent my message to is dead, so... forg' it. I'll just stick to BGB+Wine.

I have a question... you guys who are giving me advice... do you actually have KiGB running on an Ubuntu/Linux system, or is this all theoretical conjecture and experimenting based previous experience with running OTHER things on Ubuntu/Linux?

Try aoss ./kigb
You need to give aoss the command exactly as you would give the command on the command prompt.

Ok so... the deal with KiGB is that I download it, unzip it, then double click to run. It's not like... something you can alt-f2, type KiGB, and it's off. So... my terminal looks like this:

sketchman3@sketchman3-desktop:~$ cd /home/sketchman3/kigb_lin
sketchman3@sketchman3-desktop:~/kigb_lin$ aoss kigb
exec: 13: kigb: not found
sketchman3@sketchman3-desktop:~/kigb_lin$ 

I tried doing the  "Alt-F2>aoss>Run with file..." but that didn't work either.

When you run kigb from the command line does it spit anything out?
Sometimes it'll say what the problem is.

did you run "aoss kigb" or "aoss ./kigb" ?

but i'm not saying oss is necessarily the issue. i can't remember when canonical dropped compatibility.

it probably wouldn't work anyway because canonical removed alsa compatibility layer. i compiled a kernel with oss enabled a while back to play quake3 arena but there are probably some tutorials (or maybe binaries) out there to help you do this. worse still, you could switch to gentoo, if you're feeling suitably masochistic. good luck.

Yeah, I have ALSA. KiGB needs to step up their game, yo!

Downloading alsa-oss now

Edit: Still nothing. Hmmm... lemme check my emails and see if they've written me back...

yeah aoss/alsa-oss is a great software

That's what I was thinking. KiGB could be built with OSS in mind and OP is likely using ALSA.
OP, try

sudo apt-get install alsa-oss

If you want a second source emulator, try Gambatte.

oss support was deprecated from the ubuntu kernel some time ago. i suspect this could be where part of the problems lies. i've found various softwares only work with oss and this caused me a bit of pain of the past year and a bit.

I was going to suggest compiling it from source but it seems to be closed source
Did you try posting on the Ubuntu forums?

Hmm which sound architecture are you using? ALSA/Pulse/OSS/etc?

Oh yeah. I forgot about Mednafen. I haven't heard anything about it's audio accuracy, so I didn't even consider it. All I keep hearing about is BGB and KiGB.

Will try that apt-get, though.

Edit: Did not change the greyed out Sound option.