I have this legacy machine: p200mmx, 64mb ram, sbpci128, s3virge, voodoo2, using dos 6.20
In the games with hires mode (640x480) when I select high resolution the sound and music got garbled, like full of static/the sound becomes "metallic". All is normal with vga mode.
The games affected until now are slam n jam, test drive off road and time commando.
Do you have another soundcard to test?
unluckily...no.
I'm not so expert in this but these games are not hardware accelerated (voodoo), do I lack some s3 virge dos drivers or vesa driver maybe?
It could be that the video cards are hogging the PCI bus and not leaving enough bandwidth for the sound card.
You might try looking for PCI-related settings in your BIOS to fiddle with, or just get an ISA sound card for DOS games.
The mobo is a asustek tx97. I found in the pci menu in bios a setting about pci latency clock: it's set to "32"
I tried to reduce the number and the corrupt sound happened in lower resolution too.
😖 Buying a ISA card...if I think that when I was a child I exchanged an isa awe32 for this card... 😖 stupid me.
Now it makes sense...
You are using a PCI soundcard. These cards use software to emulate ISA cards. This software has a overhead (it needs cpu time). Once you go to SVGA your cpu can't handle it anymore.
On a faster machine it would likely work, but not on your Pentium.
So for you:
ISA all the way! If you have ISA slots there is no excuse for not having a nice ISA Sound Blaster 🤣
SB16s are the easiest / cheapest to find
SB16's are a good choice, as they have an OPL chip and a 16-bit stereo DAC and are both widely supported and mostly backwards-compatible to Adlib/SB/SBPro. You can hook a MIDI synth (with a joystick-to-MIDI cable) or MIDI daughterboard (most are buggy though from what I've read) to them later as well if you want to have that capability.
