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Curious quality issue with AWE64 Gold + Impulse Tracker

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First post, by habys

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Impulse Tracker sounds garbled -- playable but tempo is too slow and the sound is corrupted. A work around is to set the output to mono within Impulse Tracker. I don't have an issue with Scream Tracker, Open Cubic Player, or any games. Anyone experienced this or anything like it?

I've really only tried removing various parts of my startup to make sure they aren't causing troubles, but to no avail.

Thanks for any suggestions.

system

PII 450MHz
Video: Number Nine Imagine 128
IDE: XT-IDE v1.1.5
PSU: Seasonic Snow Silent AT
Extended Memory: 393216K
OS: MS-DOS 6.22

autoexec.bat

@ECHO OFF
CTTY NUL
C:\CMD\EMM386.EXE AUTO
SET SOUND=C:\SB16
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6
SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E MODE:0
SET CTCM=C:\CTCM
SET TEMP=C:\TMP
SET TMP=C:\TMP
SET COPYCMD=/Y
SET MTCPCFG=C:\MTCP.CFG

C:\SB16\DIAGNOSE /S
C:\SB16\AWEUTIL /S
C:\SB16\MIXERSET /P /Q
C:\CTCM\CTCU /S 
LH C:\SDD\UNIVBE.EXE

LH C:\CMD\CTMOUSE.EXE /P /B
LH /L:0;2,45456 /S C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE /X
LH C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE 8192 16 A+ B- C+ D+ E+ F+ /N /E:32768
LH C:\CMD\ZENO\ZENO174.EXE /Q
LH C:\CMD\DOSKEY

PROMPT $p$g
PATH C:\VIM73;C:\DOS;C:\CMD;C:\EXT
LH APPEND C:\EXT
MODE CON: RATE=32 DELAY=1
CTTY CON

config.sys

SWITCHES=/F

DEVICE=C:\CTCM\CTCM.EXE
DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /NUMHANDLES=128 /TESTMEM:OFF /Q
DEVICE=C:\CMD\EMM386.EXE X=B800-C7FF I=B000-B7FF RAM A=64 H=128 D=256 AUTO NOTR

DEVICE=C:\CMD\DOSMAX\DOSMAX.EXE N+ P- R- U02 U08 U09 U0A U0B U0C U0D U0E U70 U72 U73 U74 U76 U77

DOS=HIGH,UMB
BUFFERS=11,0
LASTDRIVE=H
FCBS=1,0
STACKS=0,0
DEVICEHIGH /L:1,12048 =C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE
DEVICEHIGH /L:1 C:\CMD\NANSI.SYS /X
FILES=40

Reply 1 of 5, by habys

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So after some experimentation, I noticed the card is normally detected as "Soundblaster 16"

starting with this driver:
/sITAWE32.DRV

I'm able to fix the sound quality. That was simple, sorry for the noise..

Reply 2 of 5, by alvaro84

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Nah, it wasn't noise, the other software you mentioned use the card in SB16 mode and having troubles to do so in Impulse Tracker shows that something is indeed wrong, somewhere in the system.

EMU8000 driver comes with some limitations BTW, like the inability to play notes above 176kHz (2 octaves above the "base" for 44.1kHz samples that many modern modules contain). Also the samples have to fit into the RAM of the AWE Gold and with AWE it sometimes needs more memory (4 times as much in corner cases) than with GUS or Interwave that support 8-bit and pingpong looped samples.

With that 4MiB you're covered for everything a GUS Classic can contain in its 1MiB though, even in the worst case scenario where each and every sample is 8-bit and a full length pingpong loop (and they can fit nicely in the GF1's 256k banks leaving no wasted space) ... which is not typical to say the least.

Shame on us, doomed from the start
May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts

Reply 3 of 5, by ahyeadude

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alvaro84 wrote on 2024-06-17, 02:46:

EMU8000 driver comes with some limitations BTW, like the inability to play notes above 176kHz (2 octaves above the "base" for 44.1kHz samples that many modern modules contain). Also the samples have to fit into the RAM of the AWE Gold and with AWE it sometimes needs more memory (4 times as much in corner cases) than with GUS or Interwave that support 8-bit and pingpong looped samples.

Are these limitations of the EMU8000 also present in OCP? For example, I have no issue playing yuki satellites with my GUS PnP card with 16MB of RAM, but my AWE64 with 28MB of RAM refuses to play that track.

Reply 4 of 5, by digistorm

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Yes, the EMU8000 is limited in that regard, but OCP handles it differently. It decimates the samples in a certain “smart” order until it fits, and if the pitch of a sample exceeds 192 kHz it just halves the pitch on the fly until it is below that. Quite annoying if you know a track very well, but better than nothing I guess.

Reply 5 of 5, by alvaro84

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digistorm wrote on 2025-10-11, 23:32:

Yes, the EMU8000 is limited in that regard, but OCP handles it differently. It decimates the samples in a certain “smart” order until it fits, and if the pitch of a sample exceeds 192 kHz it just halves the pitch on the fly until it is below that. Quite annoying if you know a track very well, but better than nothing I guess.

I think it would be nice if OCP kept the original sample too and even made a series of halved and quartered and so on samples if necessary. It would be a one dimensional mip-mapping, so to say. Pitch slides could still cause problems with this technique, though, you'd have to know the highest frequency of a note in advance before you start playing anything.

Shame on us, doomed from the start
May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts

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