On Windows 98SE? Geeze, that's really weird. I don't know what to say.

The closest I've come to this was when my C: drive was filling up and Virtual memory started "thrashing" the drive because there was no more room on C:

The combination of that with the Sound Card disappearing doesn't make a whole lot of sense, though. That once happened to me with an "on-board" audio chipset which had a heat-issue (died after the PC warmed up a few minutes).

Only thing I can think of there is to look in SYSTEM (Device Manager) in your Control Panel and look for your SoundCard. If it's there but has a yellow or red mark on it, you've probably got some kind of hardware conflict (yellow is more likely, as red-marked items should be fully disabled). If it's missing completely, then you might have a heat issue like the one I described above. If it's there and the driver and resources look good then I don't know what to think. When your Duke3D audio dies, do you have any audio at all (IE:Windows)?

What sort of sound card do you actually have? A real card that plugs into a slot on your motherboard or a crappy integrated POS? My folks have the latter in their machine and, even under 98SE, it plays funny buggers with DOS games all the time although nothing like you describe. Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior will detect it one minute and then stubbornly refuse to the next.

Yes, other sounds (Windows, other games) work.
Well, i looked into the audio thing, and there was this: VIA AC'97 AUDIO CONTROLLER (WDM). What can i say, really weird.🙁

BTW the problem is with shadow warrior too. Haven't tested it on blood yet.

Mr.i Duke wrote:

Well, i looked into the audio thing, and there was this: VIA AC'97 AUDIO CONTROLLER (WDM).

I wouldn't mind betting this is the culprit. Have you tried updating the drivers for it? Failing that, I would suggest you disable it and get yourself a decent PCI sound card.

the AC 97 is actually a pretty solid piece of hardware, but it's primary fault is that it's not 100% sound blaster compatible, so it's more or less useless for retrogamers. Stuff will probably still work, just not very well.

I use the AC 97 myself and love it (for the most part). Going to buy an add on audio card sometime in the future, but I'm holding off until I actually NEED one since money is tight right now. Whatever it is, it'll be a non Creative Labs card for sure. 😉

Mr.i Duke wrote:

...VIA AC'97 AUDIO CONTROLLER (WDM).

Hrmm. This appears to be the same chipset (onboard VIA) as the one I had mentioned earlier. I remember this as having it's SoundBlaster settings in the BIOS.

It had similar symptoms as yours: worked fine at the start, got fuzzy, faded, then disappeared. The main difference here is that only your DOS audio seems affected, whereas with mine it actually "went away" (no longer appeared under the control panel).

There's nothing wrong with the Audigy cards except:

1. Audigy 1 lied about audio rate.
2. Audigy has crappy software.
3. Must point directly to driver .inf for proper install and less problems when installing drivers. (Pretty much true for all hardware anyway....).

Heck the Audigy 2 actually came with NT4 drivers wheras the Audigy 1 didn't...stupid creative. Hopefully they are backwards compatible with the Audigy 1. Don't see why they wouldn't be.

Anyways prefering integrated Audio over a Soundblaster card is just INSANE.

So, the Audigy 2 actually HAS 96KHz 24-bit audio with a 104dB SNR? And drivers that DON'T crash? Hmm...

I really think that Creative needs to have a class-action put on them for the Audigy... and they need to give everyone new Audigy 2 cards that have the features that Audigy was supposed to have, but didn't. (I've tried sampling stuff at 96KHz. It doesn't work. It's muffled and the range is about 8000Hz (that's 4000Hz per channel). Not that it matters -- human ears can't hear above about 22KHz anyway (that's 44.1KHz total). Bah. Fuckers. I hate 'em. (Did I mention? Their crappy drivers caused my computer to lock up again today during a write operation care of their AC-3 decoder chip. This time I didn't have to use my four boot disks -- I could just use the W2K CD. Still, a pain in the ass when you're trying to download, uh, totally legitimate stuff off of FastTrack. Doubly so when you have to spend 10 minutes waiting for CHKDSK.)

You should get a Turtle Beach or the Hercules Audiophile card. There was one I was looking at a few days ago that was absolutely magnificent. I think it was a TB. I can't really remember.

The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz?

The Santa Cruz has somewhat mixed performance when it comes to games, from what I understand. I've had my eye on it for a while though, and it'll probably be what I pick up.

Anything other than a Creative Labs card. Their driver support is almost as bad as ATI's. 😀

It wasn't a Santa Cruz. It was something else. I think.

Mr.i Duke wrote:

BTW the problem is with shadow warrior too. Haven't tested it on blood yet.

I MAY have a possible software solution. BUT it will require booting into DOS to play these games that have problems, and you'll have to know something about configuring MS-DOS *.PIF files and batch files, etc. because I don't feel like writing an entire how-to here. AND - you'll need to provide more information about your sound chip and your motherboard.

(Anyone here have any suggestions for a utility he could run that would report configuration, components, etc.? I'd still need to know the manufacturer of his mobo.)

Of course, you could always disable your on-board sound and buy a new sound card. It would work a whole lot better, and probably sound better too.

3DMark reports all that information, but at over 10MB it's not exactly a lean download. I think DirectX does, too. Try running "dxdiag".

Okay, well - what he needs to do is give us his motherboard information (manufacturer, model name, model number, chipset, etc.). That would be the biggest help to get him started.

We'd also need to see copies of his autoexec.bat and config.sys, I think. Although I'm not sure if Saka's pure DOS drivers conflict with Windows 98 upon bootup... hmm...

Y'know what? I think (with a little help) I'll write a utility that will retrieve that info and put it in the clipboard/to a file. Now I just need to find where Vlad is...😉

You won't be able to report mobo mfg. or the actual AC97 chip.

Sorry, why won't I be able to?