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First post, by 3faltigkeit

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Hi, I am quite new into retro gaming and are hoping this old thread is still active. I just put an AWE32 PnP in my rig (K6-III+ 550 MHz, MS-5169,256 RAM, GeForce2-Ti).
I noticed issues which seem to be related to the sound card in some games. In Screamer 2 and also Screamer Rally, if I setup no sound card the game has only music no fx sound but runs without any issues. If I let the setup dedect my sound card automatically (soundblaster 16 mono, also tried ST and soundblaster etc.) I just have fx and no music. And the game has issues. At start in the menu or later at the start of a race it runs with only one frame per every 2 or 3 seconds. After maybe 30 seconds or something like that it runs normal. I have installed the AWE32 update driver and software from the cd. Windowes 98SE device manager stated no conflicts. So at this point I have no idea what causes this behaviour.
Newer games like Unreal, Blood 2 or even older games like Doom2 or Keen 4 have no issues at all. Does somebody have any advice how to dig deeper into this issue and maybe find a solution?

PIII-S @ 1.8GHz, TUSL2-C, 512 MB CL2, GF 7600GS, SB X-Fi
AMD K6-2+ @ 620 MHz, ASUS P5A, 256MB RAM, GeForce2MX, Voodo02SLI + AWE64Gold+Roland SC-55
AMD 486 160 MHz, 32 MB RAM, Terratec Maestro 32/96, Trident TGUI 9440 AGi 2MB VLB

Reply 1 of 17, by vetz

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Moved to new topic from Screamer 2 advice needed

3faltigkeit. Here on VOGONS please only necro post if you have something useful to add to the previous discussion, especially when its 4 years old. Your post was a new question not very relevant to the previous discussion which was more related to the 3DFX versions.

3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)
3D Acceleration Comparison Episodes

Reply 2 of 17, by chinny22

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Are you playing from Windows or booting into dos mode?
I've a somewhat similar rig (P3 600, GF2MX, Awe32) and don't have problems, but always boot into dos mode.

Reply 4 of 17, by 3faltigkeit

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Hi Sorry for the late reply. I was some days offline. But it seems there were two issues. The first one is about the massiv stuttering. It was causes by deamon tools. If I mount something in the virtual drive it causes the stuttering. So with the screamer 2 disc inserted in the physical drive works. But sill only with fx sound and no music.

I start the game out of windows 98SE (no reboot in ms-dos mode). The sound device was auto detected using the screamer 2 setup. I checked the autodetected resources, dma and interrupt against the device manager and it seems correct. Other games are using the same settings and are working.

In blood from 1997 which uses the Build Engine I had similar issues. Same stuttering with mounted discs in the virtual drive and no game music. For this I installed the latest game patch which I found online and yeah all save games were broken but now the music is working.

So I will check if there is an newer Windows 98SE deamon tool version and a Patch for Screamer 2.
Screamer two has no AWE32 as an option in the setup. It detects it as SB16. Maybe thats the reason why only fx is working. I will check if they maybe added AWE32 with a newer game version.

PIII-S @ 1.8GHz, TUSL2-C, 512 MB CL2, GF 7600GS, SB X-Fi
AMD K6-2+ @ 620 MHz, ASUS P5A, 256MB RAM, GeForce2MX, Voodo02SLI + AWE64Gold+Roland SC-55
AMD 486 160 MHz, 32 MB RAM, Terratec Maestro 32/96, Trident TGUI 9440 AGi 2MB VLB

Reply 5 of 17, by Pierre32

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3faltigkeit wrote on 2021-10-04, 05:22:

Screamer two has no AWE32 as an option in the setup. It detects it as SB16. Maybe thats the reason why only fx is working. I will check if they maybe added AWE32 with a newer game version.

It's worth manually experimenting with different SB types from the list.

Reply 6 of 17, by chinny22

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last version of Deamon tools to run on 9x is 3.47

The only patches for Screamer 2 are to enable different video acceleration options, doubt it'll help but no harm in trying?
You can get the patch from this link
http://www.mediafire.com/?ibncq938344shtc
from this post on vogons
3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)

Reply 7 of 17, by soggi

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3faltigkeit wrote on 2021-10-04, 05:22:

So I will check if there is an newer Windows 98SE deamon tool version...

chinny22 wrote on 2021-10-06, 09:35:

last version of Deamon tools to run on 9x is 3.47

As chinny22 said, DAEMON Tools 3.47 is the last version for Win9x and w/o spyware.

You can download it from soggi.org (my website, maybe you'll find some other interesting tools/utilities), www.creopard.de or www.oldversion.com.

Screamer 2 / Rally (Bleifuss 2 / Rally) patches / 3dfx patches are still pending, but will be added to my website in the future.

kind regards
soggi

P.S. Nice to see someone from the neighborhood @Dresden, it's a small world!

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - talent borrows, genius steals...

Reply 8 of 17, by 3faltigkeit

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Hi and many thanks. Currently, this is a crazy week at work so I have to apologize to answer that late.
Regarding Screamer 2 - I am not sure, maybe it streams the game music directly from the CD?
I have CD volume muted with in the Windows sound mixer and also no audio cable routed from the cdrom drive to the awe32.
So yeah I will check this out the evening.

@chinny22 yes, the only patches that I found were for enabling 3dfx graphics. So I think they won't help.
@soggy thanks for sharing your website - there is interesting stuff going on, but I have to check more in detail soon

PIII-S @ 1.8GHz, TUSL2-C, 512 MB CL2, GF 7600GS, SB X-Fi
AMD K6-2+ @ 620 MHz, ASUS P5A, 256MB RAM, GeForce2MX, Voodo02SLI + AWE64Gold+Roland SC-55
AMD 486 160 MHz, 32 MB RAM, Terratec Maestro 32/96, Trident TGUI 9440 AGi 2MB VLB

Reply 9 of 17, by soggi

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You're welcome, but please call me "soggi", not "soggy"! 😉

There's no reason to hurry...take the time to check it out!

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - talent borrows, genius steals...

Reply 10 of 17, by 3faltigkeit

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Ah sorry soggi. And yes I tried it using an audio cable. When I connect the cdrom drive to the awe32 and unmute CD volume in the windows mixer, I have very loud noise in Screamer 2. I can see that there are permanent read actions indicated by the drive led once screamer 2 is in the menu. SO I gues normally there should be music. In windows there is no noise. I also tried it with Blood there was music when the CD volume was muted without any CD. When it is unmuted the music is gone and the loud noise appears. And there are now reading action on the drive aswell. So maybe there is something wrong with the sound card - I don't know. So the Screamer games are the only ones with this issue - maybe I just have to accept it. I don't have the correct english word for this kind of noise but in german we would call it "rauschen"...

PIII-S @ 1.8GHz, TUSL2-C, 512 MB CL2, GF 7600GS, SB X-Fi
AMD K6-2+ @ 620 MHz, ASUS P5A, 256MB RAM, GeForce2MX, Voodo02SLI + AWE64Gold+Roland SC-55
AMD 486 160 MHz, 32 MB RAM, Terratec Maestro 32/96, Trident TGUI 9440 AGi 2MB VLB

Reply 11 of 17, by soggi

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3faltigkeit wrote on 2021-10-11, 10:22:

Ah sorry soggi.

No problem. 😉

3faltigkeit wrote on 2021-10-11, 10:22:

I don't have the correct english word for this kind of noise but in german we would call it "rauschen"...

I just would call it "noise", more precise "acoustic noise" - as "noise" is used for all kinds of "Rauschen" (physical). If you want to describe the sound of the noise, maybe it's a whooshing noise?

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - talent borrows, genius steals...

Reply 12 of 17, by 3faltigkeit

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Mhm, it is static and pretty similar to white noise of old TVs - like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ea9SFu8q5bE

PIII-S @ 1.8GHz, TUSL2-C, 512 MB CL2, GF 7600GS, SB X-Fi
AMD K6-2+ @ 620 MHz, ASUS P5A, 256MB RAM, GeForce2MX, Voodo02SLI + AWE64Gold+Roland SC-55
AMD 486 160 MHz, 32 MB RAM, Terratec Maestro 32/96, Trident TGUI 9440 AGi 2MB VLB

Reply 13 of 17, by 3faltigkeit

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It seems there are two CD Audio connectors on my AWE32 Board. One standard and a smaller one, which seems to be sound blaster proprietary.
CD Audio is only written on the smaller proprietary connector. The standard connector right next to the other one isn't labeled at all. That's why I assumed it is also CD Audio
just in another from factor. But to be sure, I checked ebay and ordered such a special sound blaster CD audio cable. It will be shipped from the netherlands so I guess it will take a couple days until it arrives. Then I will give this a try. I also ordered a Joystick-Midi adapter from China... I would like to try out some gerneral midi stuff. Maybe game music works better that way... So if somebody has a sound canvas SC-55 mkII to spare I probably would like to take it 😁

PIII-S @ 1.8GHz, TUSL2-C, 512 MB CL2, GF 7600GS, SB X-Fi
AMD K6-2+ @ 620 MHz, ASUS P5A, 256MB RAM, GeForce2MX, Voodo02SLI + AWE64Gold+Roland SC-55
AMD 486 160 MHz, 32 MB RAM, Terratec Maestro 32/96, Trident TGUI 9440 AGi 2MB VLB

Reply 14 of 17, by soggi

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Good look, hopefully this cable will work!

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - talent borrows, genius steals...

Reply 15 of 17, by Gmlb256

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3faltigkeit wrote on 2021-10-04, 05:22:

Screamer two has no AWE32 as an option in the setup. It detects it as SB16. Maybe thats the reason why only fx is working. I will check if they maybe added AWE32 with a newer game version.

It's normal that certain games may automatically detect the SB AWE card as SB16 for digitized sounds (the AWE option is an alias if they appear for digitized sounds) because they are really SB16 equipped with EMU8K chip.

3faltigkeit wrote on 2021-10-13, 12:14:

It seems there are two CD Audio connectors on my AWE32 Board. One standard and a smaller one, which seems to be sound blaster proprietary.
CD Audio is only written on the smaller proprietary connector. The standard connector right next to the other one isn't labeled at all. That's why I assumed it is also CD Audio
just in another from factor. But to be sure, I checked ebay and ordered such a special sound blaster CD audio cable. It will be shipped from the netherlands so I guess it will take a couple days until it arrives. Then I will give this a try.

I assume that the standard CD IN connector is broken on that SB AWE32 card considering that you aren't getting CD music on that port, wish you good luck too with the small white CD IN connector.

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 16 of 17, by 3faltigkeit

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I tried a lot of things and maybe I started from the wrong direction. But now the cd music is working.
At first I tried the new CD audio cable with no success. A couple days late on a flea market I found a SB 16 Vibra for a few bucks.
So I checked it with another sound card and the issue still persists.

Later I noticed that in Windows 98 the CD Audio was configured for the drive letter of deamon tools virtual drive.
By the way this caused the issues that I had with deamon tools. I unckecked the cd audio capability in the deamon tool options and the extreme stuttering was gone.

And finally I used the original screamer 2 CD. I tried it with deamon tools with a disk image and than with a burned image, at first.
And that gave me the white noise. With the original CD the music is working.

So I am happy that my AWE32 is working fine and not damaged. Also now I have my Sound Canvas SC-55 in place. Although it is not the mk2 version the difference is huge. Duke3d and blood game music sounds awesome.

So thanks everyone - Problem solved

PIII-S @ 1.8GHz, TUSL2-C, 512 MB CL2, GF 7600GS, SB X-Fi
AMD K6-2+ @ 620 MHz, ASUS P5A, 256MB RAM, GeForce2MX, Voodo02SLI + AWE64Gold+Roland SC-55
AMD 486 160 MHz, 32 MB RAM, Terratec Maestro 32/96, Trident TGUI 9440 AGi 2MB VLB

Reply 17 of 17, by soggi

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Nice to hear your issue has been solved! Hm...haven't been at a flea market in DD for years, maybe a decade - have to change this. 😀

kind regards
soggi

Vintage BIOSes, firmware, drivers, tools, manuals and (3dfx) game patches -> soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

soggi.org on Twitter - talent borrows, genius steals...