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Megarace 2 unplayable due to my sound card?

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First post, by dukeofurl

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This is bizarre. I have a run of the mill vibra pnp sound card at b220 irq 5 Dma 1 that came with my gateway 2000. If I play megarace 2 off the CD without a soundcard selected it works fine (in silence).

When I go to install it to my HDD I'm prompted to select my sound card. If I use the auto detect feature, the install program freezes every time. If I manually select my cards details I can at least install it, and then sound plays in the opening cinematics, but then the game always freezes when on the load screen for the first race. In fact my speakers make a little pop noise when the game freezes. I get the speaker pop if it freezes in the installation sound card auto detect as well. This happens in both dos and windows 98 dos shell too, and happens regardless of whether I choose the card as a sbpro or regular SB compatible card.

I did a little googling and didn't come up with anyone having this particular issue. The card and system works great with countless other games and the game works well if I play it in silence. I guess I could try the card at another irq. Any other ideas come to mind?

Reply 1 of 5, by dionb

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PnP...

My first suspicion would be a resource conflict. If it doesn't happen with all games, I'd suspect the high DMA that you don't mention to be the problem.

How do you initialize the card?

What I would do in this case:
1) REM (or just remove) any lines referring to Creative init software (i.e. CTCM/CTCU) in AUTOEXEC.BAT
2) choose desired resources (A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6 would be my default)
3) in BIOS, set those resources to reserved / non-PnP (or if the BIOS makes you
4) initialize the Vibra using UNISOUND (i.e. make a SET BLASTER= line in AUTOEXEC.BAT with the resources, then run UNISOUND.EXE)

Assuming that works and you don't get any errors, give Megarace 2 another try.

Reply 3 of 5, by Gmlb256

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Configuring an SB16 sound card with the SBPro option won't give you stereo separation.

If the issue is related to HDMA, then the OP's sound card may have the Vibra16XV chip which affects compatibility with some DOS games when selecting the SB16 option.

VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce2 GTS 32 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS

Reply 4 of 5, by dukeofurl

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Thanks guys, I have tried your suggestions, and I've also tried a few different irq and Dma settings and I still get the same lockups.

By the way, if it freezes in a windows dos window, I can't exit and close the dos window or open the task manager. It seems to have totally locked up the machine and I need to do a hard reset.

Reply 5 of 5, by dukeofurl

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I have a hunch there is some conflict between the card and the CD-ROM as the game either locks up in the installer when I press the button to install it (which occurs after you choose sound card settings, curiously enough)... Or, if I wait until after I install to choose a sound card, it locks up in game on the screen where it would start loading the track - which I assume is fmv spooled off the disc.

However, basically every other CD-ROM game I have works fine with sound while the CD drive runs... And I also played around and tried several different irq and Dma settings to see if I could fix the error with no luck, so still a little in the dark here.

It's funny how it works out - I have about 50 other nostalgic favorite games on this PC, but now that I know I can't run mega race 2, it's the one game I feel the most like playing 😂

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