First post, by keropi
- Rank
- l33t++
Hiya!
I've been re-visiting GODS and re-discovered 🤣 that the SB music only sounds correct when the soundblaster is set to IRQ7, else you get mixed samples out of place that get cut off.
Naturally I tried disabling cpu caches , didn't help. So I just kept trying solutions and discovered these facts on my SB16 setup that uses IRQ5:
a. if I use the sb-init program to set the 8bit IRQ to 7 (after booting to my default setting that is 5) the music sounds correct, as expected. If you run the game once with IRQ5 and then run the sb-init program to get back to the irq5 then the game will keep working fine until next reboot. Basically boot with IRQ5, init to IRQ7 and run the game , init back to IRQ5 and the game still works fine.
b. if you boot to a config that has EMM386 loaded then music will sound correct , no matter if IRQ5 or 7 is set.
So there must be some sort of bug in the game's SB init code? I did try to consume almost all of my XMS to a ramdisk and leave ~10mb free under the first 16MB of ram in hopes that it will fix it like other games that have DMA issues but no luck.
Anyone has any idea of what to try next? Obviously booting to an EMM386 configuration is a workaround but I would really be interested in a fix/workaround that would just patch the issue without EMS...
TIA for any thoughts on this!
