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Help - FM music played at slow speed on DOS games.

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First post, by manuelink64

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Hi to everyone:

I rescued and old Toshiba Satellite 4020CDT. (64MB RAM, 6.4GB HDD, PII-300MHz). without OS.
Installed Win98SE from scratch and all the drivers and programs from the Toshiba (TIAS) website (yep, they still there!).

The specs PDF says the notebook has equipped with a Yamaha OPL3-SA3 soundboard.
I was happy to play old DOS games again with a "real" OPL card, but the nightmare begun:

- Fisrt, setup the soundcard is pain in the ass between the BIOS and the official DOS utility.
- Second, the Tiido YMF tool don't detect the soundcard at first glance (tried the /FORCEPNP, a little success! ).

a few hours later, I (believe) configured correctly the soundcard (the Tiido and official tool don't play anything in SB test, but WSS and OPL are ok)

Then try a few of my favorite DOS games in "Pure" DOS and Win98 CLI.
- Lotus III - Ultimate Challenge
- Tyrian 2000
- F29 Retaliator
- Raptor: Call of the Shadows

All of them has fluctuation on speed, some are constantly slow (Raptor, lotus) like the classic NTSC to PAL game conversions,
others play at correct speed for a few seconds, then slow, then speed up and go on in the same loop (Tyrian).
F29 are OK.

The soundFX are OK even if select a S.Blaster type card

it's maybe a bad drivers, CPU, DMA, IRQ, NB Chipset thing?

I use the default SET BLASTER values.

Thanks in advance.

[Unisys CWP] [CPU] AMD-X5-133ADZ [RAM] 64 MB (4x36) FPM [HDD] Seagate 8.4GB [Audio] SB16 SCSI 2 (CT1770) [Video] ATI Mach64VT2 [OS] Windows 95 OSR2.5

Reply 1 of 3, by Joseph_Joestar

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On a desktop machine, I got random music slowdowns in Tyrian and a few other games when I used DVI to connect my graphics card to an LCD monitor. Switching to a VGA connection solved the issue.

I doubt this is what's causing your issues, but if you want to make sure, try connecting an external monitor to the laptop using a VGA cable and see if that makes any difference. Supposedly, it has to do with some DOS games running at 70 Hz while the first implementations of DVI could only carry 60 Hz. Not sure if that's even applicable to a laptop's built-in monitor, but it might be worth a shot.

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Reply 2 of 3, by manuelink64

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2020-02-18, 22:37:

On a desktop machine, I got random music slowdowns in Tyrian and a few other games when I used DVI to connect my graphics card to an LCD monitor. Switching to a VGA connection solved the issue.

I doubt this is what's causing your issues, but if you want to make sure, try connecting an external monitor to the laptop using a VGA cable and see if that makes any difference. Supposedly, it has to do with some DOS games running at 70 Hz while the first implementations of DVI could only carry 60 Hz. Not sure if that's even applicable to a laptop's built-in monitor, but it might be worth a shot.

thanks, I will try it in 2 weeks when I can reach my laptop, I am on another city now.
I did have a hunch about the Graphic Card / video output thing.

reading the video specs, I am not sure about this graphic card can handle the 70Hz DOS mode, even on a external source.

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[Unisys CWP] [CPU] AMD-X5-133ADZ [RAM] 64 MB (4x36) FPM [HDD] Seagate 8.4GB [Audio] SB16 SCSI 2 (CT1770) [Video] ATI Mach64VT2 [OS] Windows 95 OSR2.5

Reply 3 of 3, by Tiido

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The sound issues are likely due to conflict between what is set by BIOS and what other programs want to set. I had some headache with my Toshiba laptop also and it took some fiddling to finally get sound.

As far as slowdown goes, it most probably is due to 60Hz operation of the LCD. There definitely is no 70Hz support with it, you should try to connect an external monitor and see if it helps (and you can probably see in a menu of that monitor about what rates are output to it).

T-04YBSC, a new YMF71x based sound card & Official VOGONS thread about it
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