First post, by noizex
Hello,
I obtained a nice CT2940 card, with the OPL3 chip rather than the Creative one, similar to this:
It works nicely, I managed to use my Wave Table with it as it has a header for it, BUT... often when launching or quitting from a game, it emits loud crack/pop noises. Sometimes it happens between the scenes or before game loading screen, never in actual gameplay. For example in Hexen it would crack loud soon after launching the game, even before the loading bar appears, then it would make a less loud crack before showing the menu and it would also emit that noise when quitting from the game.
I'm not familiar with the SB line and various quirks of these cards, my definitely does have the hanging/sticky note (I think that's the name) where in Doom using MIDI music it would hang on one particular note until next one plays. Maybe these pops & cracks are also part of the experience, but I wanted to post some example, so maybe someone who knows these cards better could tell me - if that's normal or something is off. It's not a big problem, mostly at night when I want to play I need to make sure to lower the volume before starting to play. It's just something that makes me wonder - can this be fixed or not? 😀
I was suspecting caps because some were looking pretty beaten on this card, with holes on top caps and scratched. ESR tests looked good, capacitance also but I decided to replace few that looked a bit off and well.. it didn't help at all.
Here's video of Hexen being played, there will be 3 cracks - very early after launch, then before getting to main menu and then after quitting. I played a bit to show that there is nothing like that during gameplay which makes me wonder if it's some initialization state that makes the card emit this when it's not yet ready to play, and then it just plays normally until it gets deinitialized?
(WARNING: there is loud pop right in the beginning so watch your sound levels; also for those who did not play Hexen, the loading bar with bones is supposed to sound that way, that's the normal sound, just not the pop before and after that bar 😁)
https://youtu.be/_Pchfe0oVRc
Has anyone experienced similar problems?