Pinball Illusions - can't get rid of sound stutter \ VOGONS

Pinball Illusions - can't get rid of sound stutter

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First post, by cwy

Posted on 2011-04-15, 17:59

cwy Offline

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I don't see any post about sound stuttering with "Pinball Illusions", so I hope this is a fixable problem. During the game's intro ("In 1992, we brought you Pinball Dreams, etc.), the sound is fine. Then I go to in the table menu (where I choose which of the 3 tables to play), the music is fine there too. As soon as I see the pinball table, the audio stutter starts to occur. THE TABLE SCROLLING AND BALL MOTIONS ARE JERKY TOO, and the jerkiness seems to go hand-in-hand with the audio stuttering. When I exit the table, it brings me back to the table menu, and the music, which was fine before I started the table, would also stutter.

Other notes:

I'm using the latest DOSBox version 0.74.

I've tried using IRQ 7 or 5 for sound, both in DOSbox config and in the game's own sound settings (by running "illusion s" at the command line). Old-time DOS users would know that whenever there were audio stutters, changing IRQ usually fixed it. But it didn't here.

I've tried all the in-game resolution settings (320x240, 640x480, 800x600, etc.) and the sound stutters occurred in all of them.

The setting "machine = svga_et3000" allows me to play the game in 800x600 SVGA mode. From older posts, it seems others had major problems with this, but for me it was easily fixed.

I've tried using core = simple | normal| dynamic | auto , and none fixed the sound stutters.

As the DOSBox FAQ suggests, I've tried different values for cycles (1000, 5000, 10000, 30000, max, auto), and the sound stutters always remained and sounded the same. Using a higher or lower values didn't seem to improve or make worse the stutters.

I've tried output = surface | overlay | opengl | openglnb | ddraw . The two opengl settings would give me a black screen when the pinball table is supposed to be seen. The other settings work fine, but don't fix the audio stutters.

And now my specs:

CPU: INTEL, Core i5-750 Quad-Core 2.66GHz,
Motherboard: ASUS, P7P55D-E LX
RAM: KINGSTON, 4GB (2 x 2GB) ValueRAM PC3-10600 DDR3 1333MHz
Hard drive: Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS 750GB 7200 RPM
Sound card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS Card, PCI
Video card: EVGA 015-P3-1480-AR GeForce GTX 480 (Fermi) 1536MB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1

Reply 1 of 14, by bloodbat

Posted on 2011-04-15, 20:18

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Have you tried setting the sound to use Gravis Ultrasound? (And enabling it/configuring it in dosbox.conf)

Reply 2 of 14, by cwy

Posted on 2011-04-15, 23:23

cwy Offline

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Choosing GUS didn't work. I still had all the same symptoms.

Reply 3 of 14, by cwy

Posted on 2011-04-16, 01:31

cwy Offline

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I've tried older DOSBox versions from 0.6x to 0.72 and the audio didn't stutter, but I also couldn't play at SVGA resolutions because 0.6x to 0.72 don't support SVGA.

DOSBox 0.73 gave me the same symptoms as 0.74 - audio stutters even at VGA.

Reply 4 of 14, by h-a-l-9000

Posted on 2011-04-16, 06:15

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Whats your CPU usage while running DOSBox?

1+1=10

Reply 5 of 14, by leileilol

Posted on 2011-04-16, 06:43

leileilol Offline

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Try changing all those rates to 48000 in the conf file. One of the changes between .72 and .73 (IIRC) is the default rate no longer being 22050

long live PCem

Reply 6 of 14, by cwy

Posted on 2011-04-16, 15:40

cwy Offline

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@leileilol: I tried audio rate 22050, 44100, 48000, but all to no avail.

I tried it on my old Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop with WinXP Home SP3, Geforce Go 6800 video and Intel integrated audio, and the game ran with no stuttering in both audio and video in all resolutions, including 800x600. This was done with Dosbox 0.74, with cycles at any value and machine = svga_et3000 or svga_et4000.

I'm still hoping to run it on my Win7 desktop so I'll do more research on possible causes, and I'm suspecting it's my X-Fi sound card.

Reply 7 of 14, by cwy

Posted on 2011-04-16, 16:55

cwy Offline

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I used my motherboard's integrated audio instead of my Creative X-Fi PCI card, and the audio stutters remained.

Has anyone been able to play this game on Win7 64-bit and what are your video and audio specs?

Reply 8 of 14, by h-a-l-9000

Posted on 2011-04-16, 17:03

h-a-l-9000 Offline

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> Whats your CPU usage while running DOSBox?

Are you running something else in the background?

1+1=10

Reply 9 of 14, by bloodbat

Posted on 2011-04-16, 18:31

bloodbat Offline

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cwy wrote:
I used my motherboard's integrated audio instead of my Creative X-Fi PCI card, and the audio stutters remained.

Has anyone been able to play this game on Win7 64-bit and what are your video and audio specs?

Me...X-fi Titanium Fatality Champion, Radeon HD 5770 1 gb vram, but I used to have a Geforce 9600 GT with 512...no problems under either.

Why did you change the video to et3000? It works fine for me with s3.

Reply 10 of 14, by cwy

Posted on 2011-04-16, 18:36

cwy Offline

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@h-a-l-9000:
My CPU is usage was less than 5% with DOSBox running so that didn't seem to be a problem. I had Avast anti-virus disabled also.

Reply 11 of 14, by cwy

Posted on 2011-04-16, 18:43

cwy Offline

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bloodbat wrote:
Me...X-fi Titanium Fatality Champion, Radeon HD 5770 1 gb vram, but I used to have a Geforce 9600 GT with 512...no problems under either.

Why did you change the video to et3000? It works fine for me with s3.

Only machine = svga_et3000 and svga_et4000 allow me to play in 800x600 and 640x480, otherwise I get a garbled table display.

Reply 12 of 14, by garrynichol

Posted on 2011-04-19, 03:30

garrynichol Offline

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Have you tried this yet for the video options?

output=openglnb

Reply 13 of 14, by cwy

Posted on 2011-04-19, 16:20

cwy Offline

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@garrynichol

Both opengl and openglnb gave me a black screen when the pinball table was supposed to be on the screen.

I've since tried another Win7 64bit PC with different hardware specs and got no audio stutters there.

Also, on the PC I had the audio stutters, I didn't have any audio problem playing other games in DosBox: Elder Scrolls: Arena, Duke Nukem 3D, Under a Killing Moon, Alone in the Dark, Phantasmagoria.

So it seems it's the particular hardware combo on this particular PC that causes the audio problem with this particular game.

Reply 14 of 14, by cwy

Posted on 2019-01-14, 17:12

cwy Offline

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Just want to bring some closure to this issue, and perhaps help others too. I'm STILL using the PC I was using back in 2011 when I started this thread. I bought Pinball Illusions that was included in this bundle at GOG, and it has given me no audio problem. The DOSBox version included in the game is 0.74 from the year 2013. Its included DOSBox configs look similar to those I had tried. My PC has one major new component: MSI GTX 970 graphics card. Otherwise it is identical to what I had. I can play the game in 800x600 with no sound stutter whatsoever. I could even capture the game in DOSBox (by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F5) and upload it to Youtube. So either my new graphics card did the trick, or the game or DOSBox had been modified.

As shown in my Youtube channel, I could play newer games like Fallout 76 and Fallout 4 on my old PC, which was bought in early 2011. Is Moore's Law finally broken? Or has game tech slowed down?

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