Have you installed the Intel Chipset drivers for the 440BX chipset? Not sure if Win98 already has drivers built-in for the 440BX, but running newer chipsets without drivers can do nasty things with playing sounds while running games or other intensive tasks.

I think both Gunmetal and SOF games support A3D 2/3.0 so try removing the A3D.dll and/or A3DAPI.dll (Unreal supports A3D 2.0 for sure)
or upgrade both to the latest versions, A3D.dll 2.9 and A3DAPI.dll v3.3.678 in the A3D 3.12 pack
This will determine if it's an API issue as A3DAPI V3+ has it's own internal audio renderer for non DS3D cards.

I wonder if it's a resource conflict. If you haven't already, I'd try going in the BIOS and reserving resources just for the SB16 and then set up Win98 to match.

ZanQuance wrote:

I think both Gunmetal and SOF games support A3D 2/3.0 so try removing the A3D.dll and/or A3DAPI.dll (Unreal supports A3D 2.0 for sure)
or upgrade both to the latest versions, A3D.dll 2.9 and A3DAPI.dll v3.3.678 in the A3D 3.12 pack
This will determine if it's an API issue as A3DAPI V3+ has it's own internal audio renderer for non DS3D cards.

I tried that and nothing happened. No difference was made in SoF, and there's no A3D files in the GunMetal directory when I checked.

Thandor wrote:

Have you installed the Intel Chipset drivers for the 440BX chipset? Not sure if Win98 already has drivers built-in for the 440BX, but running newer chipsets without drivers can do nasty things with playing sounds while running games or other intensive tasks.

I installed it yesterday and nothing happened.

shamino wrote:

I wonder if it's a resource conflict. If you haven't already, I'd try going in the BIOS and reserving resources just for the SB16 and then set up Win98 to match.

There shouldn't be anything like that going on since I don't really have anything in my computer that should be conflicting. I can still try to see if reserving resources fixes anything though.

Well, I just did ANOTHER install of Windows 98 and I maybe found the problem: drivers! I used the Windows 3.1/DOS drivers for my SoundBlaster and that seems to be a big no-no with Win98. So here's what I did this time in exact order

0: Installed USB drivers for 98SE
1: Installed drivers for the Yamaha YMF740 XG built into my motherboard (that I didn't know I had until today because I'm a doofus)
2: Installed video drivers for my Voodoo 3 3000
3: Installed DirectX 7.0a
4: Used the Add New Hardware Wizard to set up the basic stuff for the SB16 (mine is a CT2290 so I used SB16 or AWE32 100% compatible and not plug and play)
5: Installed the Windows 95 drivers from the Sound Blaster 16 CD

And done! Hexen II doesn't have ear-bleedingly bad stutter anymore and neither does anything else seemingly. I'll test some more games and get DOS drivers for the SB16 if necessary (I don't run a lot of games from pure DOS since nothing I play requires it) but it looks like everything is okay now.

EDIT: Installed the same drivers on my primary Win98 install. No problems with stuttering anymore! Looks like the solution is to not be lazy and hunt down working Win9x drivers for the SoundBlaster cards.