Do you have music enabled too?
What happens if you start StarCraft from a just rebooted machine with both sound & music disabled? (Ctrl-S, Ctrl-M)

Yes I have music enabled too. I thought maybe it was the CD spinning up but I since copied the file so the CD isn't required.

It is a good point though, I have made the assumption that it is sound that is the issue. I will try your suggestion shortly, thank you.

Okay so I tested without music & sound and the problem doesn't happen. So it does seem sound related.

If I enable just the music the problem doesn't happen either. But if I enable the sound (and just the sound) then it happens.

I did find that DMA was not working on the HDD only the CDROM. I ended up updating the BIOS and moving the CDROM to another IDE channel, but Win98 still wouldn't enable DMA.

I then disabled DMA in the bios for the primary channel and now DMA works on the HDD, odd! But unfortunately that didn't fix the issue.

I think I will try another sound card when I get time.

Basically the sounds reside on the HDD in stardat.mpq and broodat.mpq
However, you can extract them and even replace them by custom sounds - even single files only and store them in a lower quality.
But I guess that won't solve your problem either.
Sadly disabling music does not help at all.

So I just can guess it may be something DirectX related.

Try to run sound tests with DXDIAG please.
Perhaps it's just a driver issue...

No DirectX issues, all looks ok. Thanks 😀

Have you tried an older version of StarCraft? I know the patched version that allowed you to copy over the MPQ files was long after StarCraft released. I wonder if there were regressions on older hardware that they just didn't care about anymore by the time that patch finally came out?

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I've tried 1.05 and 1.16.1 (which I'm on now) and both were the same.

I really need to test with another sound card.

I might actually need to try a fresh Windows install too, I have installed lots of random stuff on this one.

Saying that the game runs fine otherwise, so not sure!

Love having this place, I did a bit of a google search but it's so hard to find old info/forums that would have discussed this ~25 years ago!

mwdmeyer wrote on 2023-04-01, 04:04:

but it's so hard to find old info/forums that would have discussed this ~25 years ago!

What happened was, a lot of the old forums were custom scripted perl scripts, running server side, then around the turn of the millenium, vBulletin became a thing, and set the style of forums thereafter. Most of the custom forums which used a lot of system resources when a lot of users were online and were somewhat crashy and vulnerable to various denial of service methods, died off, or upgraded to vBulletin style software. However when upgraded many of them lost all their previous content, as it was too difficult to migrate. Archive.org at the time, had the same problem as us all in those days, disk space, it could only fund enough for the very popular sites, most of the hardware forums of the time didn't even rank... but if they did, all they got was one or two topics listings off their perl generated pages, and none of the "deep" stuff because it was all hiding in the backend. So blam, pretty much all the forum knowledge on all topics gathered in 5 years of mass population world wide webbing was all gone over a couple of years. Paradoxically, older forms of group messaging, like mailing lists and newsgroups, were preserved better, and sometimes when google's artificial stupidity is napping, you can stumble your way into such goldmines.

Yes, I could tell such a story too. Perhaps on how starcraft.at has disappeared.
For me, I have experience with StarCraft since season 3 (fall or winter 1998?).
Later I've been league scripter and manager at stammkneipe.de
Then I became referee at World Cyber Games.

Sadly, I never have heared about such an issue with that game.

Did you know that TCP/UDP port 2838 was StarCraft related, but not a Blizzard product?

I ended up replacing the SB 32/AWE with an AWE64 and that seems to have (at least mostly) resolved the issue.

Maybe it's a driver issue with DirectX? Have you tried different audio drivers?

Maybe adjust the hardware acceleration in DirectX`?

mwdmeyer wrote on 2023-04-01, 00:44:

I did find that DMA was not working on the HDD only the CDROM. I ended up updating the BIOS and moving the CDROM to another IDE channel, but Win98 still wouldn't enable DMA.

I then disabled DMA in the bios for the primary channel and now DMA works on the HDD, odd! But unfortunately that didn't fix the issue.

I think I will try another sound card when I get time.

You wrote that swapping sound cards already helped somewhat, but it sounds to me you are missing the chipset/IDE-bus master drivers (you need to install these for Win95/98). DMA stands for direct memory access, so without it there is a considerable lag on a system this old when any disk access is required (and that is a lot, especially when gaming!), although I'm not sure if it plays into how your sound card would perform per se.

I'm surprised you didn't notice it wasn't working properly besides StarCraft (you must have a really fast HDD).

You may have to reinstall Windows to get things working properly, because the chipset/IDE drivers would typically precede all the other stuff.

leonardo wrote on 2023-04-08, 09:55:

You wrote that swapping sound cards already helped somewhat, but it sounds to me you are missing the chipset/IDE-bus master drivers (you need to install these for Win95/98). DMA stands for direct memory access, so without it there is a considerable lag on a system this old when any disk access is required (and that is a lot, especially when gaming!), although I'm not sure if it plays into how your sound card would perform per se.

I'm surprised you didn't notice it wasn't working properly besides StarCraft (you must have a really fast HDD).

You may have to reinstall Windows to get things working properly, because the chipset/IDE drivers would typically precede all the other stuff.

Wait, he told about he swapped the sound card, not the installation itself.
If, it may be the sound drivers or the hardware itself then.