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Tyrian freezes on VIA VP3 chipset

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First post, by Paar

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Hi. I made this system recently, with motherboard using VIA VP3 chipset (586B southbridge). I works pretty well and is quite speedy, but I have problem with Tyrian. This game freezes ingame after some time and no matter what I set in BIOS, the result is the same. Well, not always - it works fine with disabled SFX. Other games I tried work fine so far.

Tried:
1. Slowing down CPU.
2. Changed VGA card.
3. Changed sound card.
4. Reverted back to unmodified BIOS (I have modified it for proper UDMA mode detection in DOS).

Nothing helps. Tyrian is quite notorious for various problem with sound cards, perhaps it has problems with VIA chipsets too (I know that on some old 486 chipsets the sound doesn't work at all).

Any idea how to solve it, if it can be solved at all? Perhaps some TSR? Who knows what's happening, perhaps some DMA problem.

Reply 1 of 7, by Gmlb256

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Which sound card are you using? For most SBPro-compatible clones, selecting WSS with DMA channel 0 works on Tyrian.

VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce3 Ti 200 64 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS

Reply 2 of 7, by Paar

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Tried SB Pro 2, Aztech AZT1605 and Yamaha YMF701 cards There is probably some DMA conflict so I'll to mess around with some values. But I think I already tried Aztech card in WSS mode with same result.
Another problem is my computer always freezes when I enable UDMA driver for HDD and run an app with sound.
DMA handling of this chipset seems pretty picky.

Reply 4 of 7, by mockingbird

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Paar wrote on 2024-05-08, 11:11:

Just switched to 430VX chipset motherboard and everything works flawlessly. Yeah, I don't think VIA is misunderstood and actually not that bad. At least this particular chipset.

Yea, but is it the VP3 that's flawed or is it the VT82C586B...

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Reply 5 of 7, by megatron-uk

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Tyrian definitely seems tricky with digital audio/DMA. I tried two no-name, bare-bones ESS1868 cards with it and the results were poor; either no digital sound, or digital sound which would crap out after a few samples, or the system would (admittedly rarely) lock up.

I swapped to a Yamaha YMF719 card and it started working.

Interestingly these problems were also on a (earlier) VIA chipset based system; VIA VT82C496G.

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Reply 6 of 7, by DarthSun

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Really picky. Some retro system, sound problem, or not starting, or freezing . RyZen+vsbhda16 system ok, for retro madness is finally stable - also Tyrian and OpenTyrian

The 3 body problems cannot be solved, neither for future quantum computers, even for the remainder of the universe. The Proton 2D is circling a planet and stepping back to the quantum size in 11 dimensions.

Reply 7 of 7, by Paar

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mockingbird wrote on 2024-05-08, 14:46:

Yea, but is it the VP3 that's flawed or is it the VT82C586B...

Who knows, but I'm inclining more to southbridge (therefore 586B) which should handle DMA. Perhaps combination of both? Who knows. I really wanted to give the VIA chipset a chance but it's a mess. Maybe it would work fine with period correct HDD but I'm not interested in that.

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-05-08, 14:47:

Interestingly these problems were also on a (earlier) VIA chipset based system; VIA VT82C496G.

Tried mobo with this chipset a few years ago and I think I couldn't get sound working in that game.

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