First post, by DonutKing
- Rank
- Oldbie
I'm trying to consolidate my parts stockpile into systems so I can get rid of them.
The machine I'm working on at the moment is:
UM8810 rev 1.1 BIOS 3.2J
Am5x86-133
16MB 60ns RAM single SIMM
512KB 15ns cache
S3 Trio DX 2MB
AWE64 CT4500
DOS6.22 (no windows)
I seem to have hit a strange problem with certain games, such as Doom, Heretic, Hexen, and Raptor.
When using Sound Blaster digital sound effects, instead of music I hear horrible popping/static, and the keyboard becomes very slow to respond. If I do manage to quit to DOS the keys are swapped around seemingly randomly i.e. typing QWERTY will give heaps of random letters and numbers. Trying to CTRL + ALT + DELETE just types random characters onto the command line. A hard reset seems to be the only solution.
It works fine if I use AWE music, but no digital sound effects device. Setting no music device but AWE or sound blaster for digital sound, causes the issue.
Funnily enough Tyrian, Blood and Duke 3D work perfectly with AWE sound and music. So it doesn't just seem to be a protected mode thing. Possibly a DOOM engine thing but I don't know why raptor does it too (unless it shares some part of sound code?) I've also tried Duke 2 and Halloween Harry without problems.
I do not have aweutil resident, only the /S in autoexec to initialise it.
To resolve this I have tried:
-Replacing the CT4500 with an AWE64 Gold CT4390
-disabling all drivers and EMM386 from autoexec.bat/config.sys (game doesn't run at all without himem.sys loaded)
-different versions of aweutil (1.20 and 1.36) and diagnose (4.04 and 4.05)
-patched raptor from 1.0 to 1.2
-replaced DOS4GW with DOS32A (using SB utility)
-Disabled all ROM shadow and cache in BIOS
-Set all RAM and cache timings, and PCI-Host wait state to slowest possible settings in BIOS
-Changed from IRQ5/DMA1 to IRQ7/DMA0 for sound card using CTCM/CTCU
-Disabled turbo mode (button on case)
-Confirmed motherboard jumpers
-Tried /A20CONTROL:OFF option for HIMEM.SYS
-Disabled L1 and L2 cache
None of these have helped.
I note that after switching to DOS32A I get the following message if I manage to exit to DOS:
WARNING: real mode interrupt vector has been changed: INT00H
WARNING: real mode interrupt vector has been changed: INT18H
I've used norton utilities to perform a comprehensive memory test, it ran over 3 hours and found no faults.
I'm out of ideas 😒
Attached is config.sys/autoexec.bat
Any suggestions would be appreciated!
If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.