With more testing I noticed that while the game is running, the console window (or debug window, whatever you would like to call it) is being flooded with the message "Illegal read from ef________" where "________" is what looks to be a hex address of some kind.

Maybe I have a bad install of Zone 66? I'll try reinstalling it...

Alright, I figured it out, but I'm still really confused. If someone with some technical expertise could give me a clue, I'd love it.

What I did to solve the problem is try to figure out what was different about my configuration than before. Obviously I had changed something and had forgotten what it was.

The reason I reformatted is because I got a new motherboard and processor. Seeing how it was faster, I had upped the cycles from 10,000 to 20,000. This was the only difference I had made to my configuration, but I kept ignoring it because I had figured that couldn't possibly be eliminating the music from my game.

I was wrong. I just dropped the cycles down to 10,000 and BLAM! I have music.

What the heck?! Was this game just designed not to play music on faster computers? I find that hard to belive. What is going on here?

I'm going to test starting the cycles at 10,000 and increasing them as the music plays. I wonder what will happen? Experiment time!

Ok! More information! Adjusting the cycle count while music is playing has no effect. It just depends on the cycle setting at startup.

The real interesting thing is this: At 10,537 cycles I get music, but if I set the cycles to 10,538 I lose music. What breaks at 10,538 cycles? I've fixed my problem, but I'd really like to know whats going on here from a technical standpoint.

By the way, I was using 0.63 version for all these tests. I apologize for not mentioning that on the first post.

It's the way many games detect the sound card: they issue a command to the sound card, then sit idle in a loop and count to ten (or rather, ten billion) and if nothing happens by then, they assume there is no hardware. If the CPU is too fast, that counting loop is done too fast and the game doesn't get it. Clever games always wait a certain amount of milliseconds instead, but as you see, not all games are clever. 😀

The thing is it detects the sound card regardless. The only part I'm losing is the music. I get SoundBlaster sound effects either way. If it were a problem with sound card detection, I doubt I would get any sound at all. Zone66 also has a "/s" command line option that forces the use of a SoundBlaster, so no detection is required. The issue remains even when using this command flag.

If I took some P4 2.0 ghz. Put a SB16 in it, and formatted it to pure DOS would I get sound AND music from Zone 66? I'm thinking I would. I could be wrong though.

It's still possible that the music is breaking due to a timing/speed issue (besides detection). It could be that there's some kind of timeout occuring with the game trying to communicate with the music hardware.

It's also unfortunately very common for this kind of thing to happen, as programmers often used shortcuts and sloppy code that breaks or misbehaves on faster computers.