Speed is actually what's killing performance!
Faster the drive longer you have to wait for spin up/spin down times where as a older drive just chugs along slow and steady.
The good news is a lot of software exists to slow down optical drives often one example is linked below
http://cdbq.dosforum.de/

Soulreaper wrote on 2022-09-16, 04:51:

I have an annoying issue I have tried to resolve for quite sometime. First I will add no issues during installs, playing music f […]
Show full quote

I have an annoying issue I have tried to resolve for quite sometime. First I will add no issues during installs, playing music from cd. But when I play a game that has red book audio in it for instance (Quake or Tomb Raider 2). Game loads and plays great until the music being played in game needs to loop back to the beginning or another track is requested the game freezes for a sec or more. This completely ruins the flow. I have tired many optical drives, swapping cables, made sure I was using an 80 wire cable, changed various BIOS settings, tried different sound card drivers, fresh windows install, smart people can hopefully steer me in the right direction.
Here is my config
biostar m7vig Pro
AMD Athlon XP 2 GHZ
Sound Blaster Live
3dfx voodoo 3 2000 pci
RADEON 9800 Pro agp
atapi dvd a dh20a4p
I ran a benchmark the drive is performing well I did get an average seek time of 9ms can brute force a different setting. I did find a indepth regedit post somewhere out there with values and explanations but I cannot find it again. I did find a pata to sata adapter card that just plugs to the back of a sata drive then you can plug a ide cable to the otherside could this increase my drive performance?

I'm sorry to say, but this is just the experience that you'll have on DOS/Win9x. Querying the floppy disk / CD-ROM drive will completely halt everything else the computer is doing and having a game that plays music from the CD will result in regular skips in gameplay as the track "rewinds" or is changed. It's a feature, not a bug on Windows 95/98.

In my experience, this greatly depends on the CD/DVD drive that you're using. It really seems to be a lottery of sorts, some drives simply don't cause the system to stutter when changing CD audio tracks, while others do.

Personally, I've had better luck with newer DVD drives (made in 2004 or so) than with older ones. It might have something to do with UDMA capabilities or the internal cache buffer of the drive as well. I'm not very knowledgeable on this subject, just sharing the experiences that I had with my retro systems.

Perhaps try switching to a VXD driver and using the good old analog CD audio?

It's also worth a try using constant velocity (CLV) on the CD drive.
Maybe using 1x, 2x or 4x will do force this behavior.
Nero Drive Tool (?), a taskbar utility, can init different speeds.

Edit: I meant CAV, not CLV..
Edit: No, CLV was alright. Drat! 😂

leonardo wrote on 2022-09-20, 13:48:

Soulreaper wrote on 2022-09-16, 04:51:

I have an annoying issue I have tried to resolve for quite sometime. First I will add no issues during installs, playing music f […]
Show full quote

I have an annoying issue I have tried to resolve for quite sometime. First I will add no issues during installs, playing music from cd. But when I play a game that has red book audio in it for instance (Quake or Tomb Raider 2). Game loads and plays great until the music being played in game needs to loop back to the beginning or another track is requested the game freezes for a sec or more. This completely ruins the flow. I have tired many optical drives, swapping cables, made sure I was using an 80 wire cable, changed various BIOS settings, tried different sound card drivers, fresh windows install, smart people can hopefully steer me in the right direction.
Here is my config
biostar m7vig Pro
AMD Athlon XP 2 GHZ
Sound Blaster Live
3dfx voodoo 3 2000 pci
RADEON 9800 Pro agp
atapi dvd a dh20a4p
I ran a benchmark the drive is performing well I did get an average seek time of 9ms can brute force a different setting. I did find a indepth regedit post somewhere out there with values and explanations but I cannot find it again. I did find a pata to sata adapter card that just plugs to the back of a sata drive then you can plug a ide cable to the otherside could this increase my drive performance?

I'm sorry to say, but this is just the experience that you'll have on DOS/Win9x. Querying the floppy disk / CD-ROM drive will completely halt everything else the computer is doing and having a game that plays music from the CD will result in regular skips in gameplay as the track "rewinds" or is changed. It's a feature, not a bug on Windows 95/98.

Yes this is what I fear. I've been playing pc games since windows 3.1 I just can't remember this being a thing. I will say my pc game library was much smaller back then I guess the only games I played back then that had mixed data cds was Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider 2, Quake and Half-Life. My copy of Quake was a friends so I never even played with the original soundtrack at least when I played on win 95 and win 00 until I got my own copy by that time I was on xp and I believe I had sata by that point. I feel like I would remember the game freezing like I am experiencing now. Thanks to all the posts with suggestions I have tried them all last night with no positive results. First I tried that sata adapter that was a disaster I had forgotten that sata drives don't have any cd audio plugs on the back at least the ones I have on hand. The adapter was extremely slow caused constant freezing. Then I tried changing some registry keys that I have messed with before thinking it might change something duh it didn't. I tired changing RAM sticks, over clocking cpu and RAM, under clocking cpu and RAM, running different pio modes. At some point I corrupted my install and I crashed after the windows splash screen could not even get into safe mode. At that point I decided to fresh install and be systematic about it I found no drivers to make a difference. My setup is very niche so I have some requirements I run external midi turns out SB pci cards are crap sending out mpu 401 midi stuff. So I found a board with onboard sound with a gameport which works great and run the other audio with the sb live card. So I have my first pc I built which is of a similar speed but has onboard sata I want to try it and just see but there is no onboard game port. My other option is I found a pentium 2 board I could try I just need to find ram, power supply, and a sound card.
So as you said it was a feature could you say that with windows 2000 this was still present or had the performance been improved. I am just curious I have no issue on my xp machine with this cd type. It just sucks that microsoft got rid of dos in xp which made playing these games a pain. I guess I am going to ultimately get another hard drive and dedicate that to ripping the discs that have the issue and play with a virtual drive. Any suggestions on ripping tools and virtual drive tools. I have read that some people have problems ripping bin/cue with sound blaster live cards has anyone had any experience with that. I guess I can rip them on my modern pc come to think of it I have a ssd laying around I can use that sata adapter and use that drive for game rips.

Zeerex wrote on 2022-09-20, 20:22:

Perhaps try switching to a VXD driver and using the good old analog CD audio?

I was already using VXD and the analog audio. I have worked around the issue. I ripped the disk with alcohol 120 to bin/cue on an ssd and installed daemon tools on the windows 98 machine put the ssd in the machine and bingo. But then I found out I have to use WDM drivers to get the cd audio stream to work. Any suggestions for a better virtual drive I know daemon tools is the best but I would rather use the VXD drivers. Is there a version of alcohol that works in windows 98. Anyway I so far ripped Tomb Raider 2 and Quake and both worked beautifully.

Soulreaper wrote on 2022-09-25, 17:11:

leonardo wrote on 2022-09-20, 13:48:

Soulreaper wrote on 2022-09-16, 04:51:

I have an annoying issue I have tried to resolve for quite sometime. First I will add no issues during installs, playing music f […]
Show full quote

I have an annoying issue I have tried to resolve for quite sometime. First I will add no issues during installs, playing music from cd. But when I play a game that has red book audio in it for instance (Quake or Tomb Raider 2). Game loads and plays great until the music being played in game needs to loop back to the beginning or another track is requested the game freezes for a sec or more. This completely ruins the flow. I have tired many optical drives, swapping cables, made sure I was using an 80 wire cable, changed various BIOS settings, tried different sound card drivers, fresh windows install, smart people can hopefully steer me in the right direction.
Here is my config
biostar m7vig Pro
AMD Athlon XP 2 GHZ
Sound Blaster Live
3dfx voodoo 3 2000 pci
RADEON 9800 Pro agp
atapi dvd a dh20a4p
I ran a benchmark the drive is performing well I did get an average seek time of 9ms can brute force a different setting. I did find a indepth regedit post somewhere out there with values and explanations but I cannot find it again. I did find a pata to sata adapter card that just plugs to the back of a sata drive then you can plug a ide cable to the otherside could this increase my drive performance?

I'm sorry to say, but this is just the experience that you'll have on DOS/Win9x. Querying the floppy disk / CD-ROM drive will completely halt everything else the computer is doing and having a game that plays music from the CD will result in regular skips in gameplay as the track "rewinds" or is changed. It's a feature, not a bug on Windows 95/98.

Yes this is what I fear. I've been playing pc games since windows 3.1 I just can't remember this being a thing. I will say my pc game library was much smaller back then I guess the only games I played back then that had mixed data cds was Tomb Raider, Tomb Raider 2, Quake and Half-Life. My copy of Quake was a friends so I never even played with the original soundtrack at least when I played on win 95 and win 00 until I got my own copy by that time I was on xp and I believe I had sata by that point. I feel like I would remember the game freezing like I am experiencing now. Thanks to all the posts with suggestions I have tried them all last night with no positive results. First I tried that sata adapter that was a disaster I had forgotten that sata drives don't have any cd audio plugs on the back at least the ones I have on hand. The adapter was extremely slow caused constant freezing. Then I tried changing some registry keys that I have messed with before thinking it might change something duh it didn't. I tired changing RAM sticks, over clocking cpu and RAM, under clocking cpu and RAM, running different pio modes. At some point I corrupted my install and I crashed after the windows splash screen could not even get into safe mode. At that point I decided to fresh install and be systematic about it I found no drivers to make a difference. My setup is very niche so I have some requirements I run external midi turns out SB pci cards are crap sending out mpu 401 midi stuff. So I found a board with onboard sound with a gameport which works great and run the other audio with the sb live card. So I have my first pc I built which is of a similar speed but has onboard sata I want to try it and just see but there is no onboard game port. My other option is I found a pentium 2 board I could try I just need to find ram, power supply, and a sound card.
So as you said it was a feature could you say that with windows 2000 this was still present or had the performance been improved. I am just curious I have no issue on my xp machine with this cd type. It just sucks that microsoft got rid of dos in xp which made playing these games a pain. I guess I am going to ultimately get another hard drive and dedicate that to ripping the discs that have the issue and play with a virtual drive. Any suggestions on ripping tools and virtual drive tools. I have read that some people have problems ripping bin/cue with sound blaster live cards has anyone had any experience with that. I guess I can rip them on my modern pc come to think of it I have a ssd laying around I can use that sata adapter and use that drive for game rips.

Some games like Half-Life saw a patch that allows you to use the audio tracks converted to mp3 audio and not have to play music from the game disc. I believe for Half-Life this was 1.1.0.9 or 1.1.1.0. I don't recall if any of the other games you mention have such patches - I know some later builds of Quake 2 feature mp3 playback as well, but those may not be available for your retro-hardware. Just another tip on how to get around the problem!

Edit: It is also true that some CD-drives seek a lot longer than others. Even small delays can make a huge difference when you are in a fast-paced game. A difference of even a quarter-second can feel like an eternity, so make sure your drive is at least somewhat nimble. Usually the spin-down time won't make a difference if music is being played, because the disc doesn't stop spinning while music is being played.

chinny22 wrote on 2022-09-20, 13:29:

Speed is actually what's killing performance! Faster the drive longer you have to wait for spin up/spin down times where as a ol […]
Show full quote

Speed is actually what's killing performance!
Faster the drive longer you have to wait for spin up/spin down times where as a older drive just chugs along slow and steady.
The good news is a lot of software exists to slow down optical drives often one example is linked below
http://cdbq.dosforum.de/

Hello, i'm having the same "issues", i'm playing Quake with CD-ROM + Analog audio cable for soundtracks in the disc, but everytime a track ends and starts again have 1 second stuttering. The link doesn't work anymore, where can i find these kind of software to slow the optical drives ?

EDIT: Found it here http://tools.dosforum.de/
I'll let you know if that solves the problem

EDIT 2: Does not work, i also tried Nero DriveSpeed, but only allows me to decrease the speed at 24x and not less. Stuttering is still present.

This post has few more options
Throttle CD-ROM drive speed in DOS?