Some idea's

When you say mute the sound is that cd audio ?
what audio cable are you using 2pin/4pin or none ?
try a different cd rom driver
try booting from a dos 6.22 or 5.0 floppy disk

I wonder, which models of drives are they specifically?

Also it may help to use different CD (eg. SHSUCDX + videccd.sys) instead of the usual MSCDEX + oakcdrom.sys combination.

Davros wrote:

When you say mute the sound is that cd audio ?

From what BSoD and I have mentioned in private chatter elsewhere, he has to mute all audio (both SFX and streamed CD audio) for that level to load. It also isn't tied to the sound card, given he has issues with both a Yamaha Audacian 32 and a SB16.

Davros wrote:

Some idea's […]
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Some idea's

When you say mute the sound is that cd audio ?
what audio cable are you using 2pin/4pin or none ?
try a different cd rom driver
try booting from a dos 6.22 or 5.0 floppy disk

Yeah, I mute everything for it to load, including cd audio.
It's a 4-pin.
I'll be looking into that and report back once I manage to set a different one up.
Don't have any of those, unfortunately.

DX7_EP wrote:

I wonder, which models of drives are they specifically?

Also it may help to use different CD (eg. SHSUCDX + videccd.sys) instead of the usual MSCDEX + oakcdrom.sys combination.

First drive is model TS-H492C/DELH by "Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology", second drive is model GCE-8400B by "Hitachi-LG Data Storage,Inc."

I've been seeing posts about other drivers, like those ones, so I'll try them out soon and report back.

For me the most stable combination is usually VIDE-CDD.SYS and good old MSCDEX.EXE (with /E switch when EMS is available)

I tried vide-cdd.sys with mscdex and it still failed with both drives. Now I'm using vide-cdd.sys with shsucdx and level 3 now loads on both drives (I'll be sticking with my original one as it behaves better, the newer one is quite finicky). The one issue I'm getting with this method now is that CD Be Quiet (cdbq) is no longer functioning, instead saying the device is not ready all the time. I have managed to avoid this problem by navigating to the D: drive and using the dir command, which will then allow me to load cdbq, but this seems an inefficient way to load this program.

Edit: Ok, update. CDBQ doesn't like vide-cdd when used with shsucdx for some reason until I force it to work via accessing the drive somehow. However, I found out some more bad news. The crash on level 3 still exists. It just doesn't happen the first time, but will happen the second time (regardless of cdbq limiting the drive or not). It will load the first time just fine, however, trying to load it a second time causes the same crash as described in the first post, so these drivers are supplementing the problem, but not solving it. (I'm really digging their smaller footprint though)

1 - If you get a brand new decent CD-R and make a copy of your Tomb Raider media, does it work?
2 - Are you using SmartDrive? Maybe some caching (and another layer of indirection when reading data from CDs) would help. Just be sure to load SMARTDRV.EXE after MSCDEX.EXE. If you are using SHSUCDX there should be an utility to patch SmartDrive and create a SMARTCDX.EXE that should be used instead.

Can you disable DMA for the IDE channel where CD-Rom is connected too?

I have an Abit KT7 which has Problem when reading files from CD when DMA is on.
For example on a CD with hundreds of pictures, there a few unreadable or corrupt.

The CD I've been using has been a CD-RW, however, it does the same thing with an original copy as well.

I have not been using SmartDrive. I just tried using it in conjunction with MSCDEX and it did nothing to help. Trying to use smartcdx but I can't seem to get it to work at all. Not sure how you're supposed to use it.

I can adjust DMA within Windows (had it enabled). I disabled that, but it made no difference, though I'm in real mode DOS so I don't think it even sees that (?).

Agent of the BSoD wrote:

The CD I've been using has been a CD-RW, however, it does the same thing with an original copy as well.

I have not been using SmartDrive. I just tried using it in conjunction with MSCDEX and it did nothing to help. Trying to use smartcdx but I can't seem to get it to work at all. Not sure how you're supposed to use it.

I can adjust DMA within Windows (had it enabled). I disabled that, but it made no difference, though I'm in real mode DOS so I don't think it even sees that (?).

If you want another set of drivers to try, look at these

I can disable DMA in Bios.

Disable DMA and set to PIO-Mode

Sammy wrote:

I can disable DMA in Bios.

Disable DMA and set to PIO-Mode

Disabled UDMA for it and tried PIO mode on every setting (auto, and 0 - 4), nothing changed.

Agent of the BSoD wrote:

Don't have any of those, unfortunately.

here:
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Tried the 6.22 boot disk. Was able to run TR without actually installing it, and I can load level 3 just fine there (albeit with no sound at all).

Edit: Speaking of no sound, I just went to test that very thing. I removed my set blaster line, removed the sound card driver line, and ran TR's setup and selected no sound, and now no matter how many times I load level 3, it's fine. (internally, the game still seems to be "playing" the background music as I can see my drive being busy with that, despite not being able to hear it at all, though I know it stops if you set the in-game music volume to 0)

Well, that doesn't really narrow down anything, since it worked fine if you muted the sound card in the first place. From the MS-DOS bootdisk navigate your HDD, initialize your sound card, set the correct environment variables and try it then.

That's what I was trying to do, but I can't seem to access the C: drive at all.

Oh... it is probably because it is FAT32. DOS 6.22 won't access those.

alexanrs wrote:

Oh... it is probably because it is FAT32. DOS 6.22 won't access those.

Yep, I Google'd that and came to the same conclusion. It is indeed FAT32.

IMHO the way to diagnose this would be:
1- Try the same drive in other computers
2- Try other soundcards
3- Try the same drive and soundcard on another PC

I put in the drive I just bought into my Pentium 3 system (I can't do that with the sound cards since the Pentium 3 lacks ISA slots and I lack any other system to do this with), and loaded up DOS mode, loaded up TR (cd audio was missing, probably a driver problem, but I could see the drive playing it regardless of me hearing it, moot point anyway) and level skipped to level 3, and it crashed instantly. So I plugged back in the drive that was always with this system, did the exact same thing with the same configs (which is oak + mscdex), level skipped to level 3, and all is fine. So I made a save of that level, loaded level 1 again, loaded save, still fine (this made it crash on my other system when level 3 does load, since it only loads unless another level is loaded). So I can conclude that the drives are again at fault, as the main drive in this system will not crash the game whatsoever.

Edit: Yep, definitely the drives. I put in the working drive into my retro machine, fired up the game, and it's all fine no matter what I do.