Are you using a laptop?
If you are there are issues between XP, certain games and hotkey drivers (e.g. 00hotkey.exe on toshibas) that cause the screen to go black irretrievably. I never used to have this problem, but then one day it just started happening.

Manias, are you running any kind of motherboard/temperatur/fan monitoring program?

I remember a warning saying that they can cause problems for VDMSound because they 'lock' onto the hardware in a certain way.

Also check for a file/driver called GIVEIO.SYS. It is - as far as I know - a "helper" for those monitoring programs when accessing the I/O devices.

A temporary rename should allow you to test that.
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MiniMax

Hey guys! First of all thanks for replying 😀
But.. No giveio.sys or laptop 🙁
I heard about the system monitor issue before, but when i reinstalled windows i did not install those things anymore.. So that's not it either!
Thanks tho 😀

I am just throwing ideas at you Manias - perhaps one of them will strike gold:

• Hardware accellerations
  Have you tried lowering/disabling hardware accellerations for sound and graphics in your host OS?
• Anything in the Event Logs?
• Tried directing sound to a file instead of to a device?
• Tried running the games with DOSBox in fullscreen mode?
• Tried a different graphics driver? Newer, older, ...
• Install the OS with/out APIC, ACPI or whatever all those IRQ sharing and power management modes are called?
• Another DirectX?
• Disabling on-board graphics, USB, Ethermet, ....
• VDMSound can generate some diagnostics logs. Tried that?
• Do you run the games from a CD? The real thing, or a virtual CD? Perhaps a virtual CD drive will work better?
• Disable joystick support in VDMSound?
• Run without VDMSound and use WinXP in Win95 compatibility mode?

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MiniMax

heya 😀
-tried the acceleration thing, nothing
-logs just show as normal just nothing happens after a certain point which seems to change also. Something like initializing this n that and then nothing more
-i've tried running games with no sound n vdmsound -> nothing
-Here's the weird thing : DOSBox works like a charm!!
-tried different drivers, nothing
-tried powermanagement on/off/uninstalled/etc nothing..
-tried to run with standard XP directx whichever that is.. now 9.. nothing
-tried the rest, not running from a cd/virtual cd... ran with allll sorta vdm settings with sound/without, same w joystick etc.
-Also tried to run games without vdmsound with 95 compatibility, and some ran but without sound...
*SO FRUSTRATING!!!!*

Manias, can you make a test-install of WinXP on a spare partion? Or install into a different directory, e.g. C:\WINTEST instead of \WINDOWS?

If you can, try installing just WinXP + SP1. No graphics driver, no sound, no nothing. You should still be able to run XP in 800x600 pixels. Create a shortcut to %SystemRoot%\system32\command.com, and configure it for EMS, XMS, warning-before-close, do-not-close-when-done, blah, blah, blah.
Launch the shortcut, and use the MEM command to verify that you get EMS and XMS memory.

Insert the game CD, install/configure for no sound and run.

Does it run? If not, try (un)commenting some of the NTVDM stuff being loaded from %SystemRoot%\system32\AutoExec.NT, and try to run the game again.
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MiniMax