First post, by hooby
Background: I am setting up a system for playing old games with some spare parts available to me.
I have pretty much everything working except from one important feature: CD audio.
The system has a VIA based motherboard with integrated graphics and audio, and I have a SATA optical (DVD/CD) drive attached.
I got Windows 98 SE installed as well as all the device drivers.
Problem: Because there is no analog audio connector either on the CD/DVD drive or on the motherboard by default applications with CD audio do not output any sound. I suspected that this would be an issue, and am taking advantage of the setting to use digital CD audio (under Control Panel > Multimedia > CD Music: “Enable digital CD audio for this CD-ROM device”). At first glance this seemed to be working; the system can play audio CDs with the native CD player app, etc. However, there is some lag and stuttering like its being buffered at the start of play.
In games (Mechwarrior 2, Heretic 2, Descent 2) it gets much worse, where it plays fragments of the audio with gaps every second or so, or causing the game to hang.
I am trying to identify where the bottleneck is and see if there is any solution out there. I can’t imagine digital CD audio is that taxing of an operation.
I have tried swapping the optical drive with another model SATA drive but get the same result, so I don’t think the issue is specific to the drive.
Other audio plays clearly, so it’s not affecting all music/sound, just redbook CD audio.
System info:
VIA VT8237R Plus South Bridge (SATA RAID controller)
VIA VT1618 Multi-channel AC’97 Codec
Windows 98 SE
DirectX 7 installed