I also have a vibra and have had a few similar issues. Here's my thoughts:

-Pretty sure it is an aspect of the Lotus 3 game that you can only have SFX or music and not both simultaneously. So this is not a soundcard issue.
-For the 1992 game that goes to PC speaker and does not play soundblaster sound - try playing it in dos mode (not windows dos box) and see if that helps. Also, maybe try using the "unisound" program/driver to enable your vibra in dos or a windows dos box (I assume its a pnp card) and see if that helps, I needed to do that in order to get SB music with the game Overkill for some reason. Additionally, I encountered a similar issue when I had a pentium 233mmx and I found that if I used setmul to lower the speed of the cpu, then the soundblaster sound would work (I needed to do this in order for Street Rod 2, an older dos game, to recognize that I had a SB card).

-for the crackling audio, see if you have the same issue when running the game from Dos instead of a windows dos box. A small handful of dos games give me some audio issues when running from within windows 9x, but are ok when running from dos. Try also the unisound driver I mentioned above and see if that helps, note that you have to adjust CD audio volume up from 0 (the default value) when running unisound. Also might as well see what driver you are using within windows and see if a different one might help.

Thanks dukeofurl. My findings were from the ms-dos 6.22. I only tried the Alcatraz from 1992 on Dosbox just to see if it would play sound. It did. In my ms-dos environment it did not. I will try to give unisound a chance. The same applies with the cracking sound in The Horde. It happens under ms-dos 6.22 not under Dosbox.

Regarding slowing down the P90: Is there ms-dos software which can slow down a p90? Not sure if these 90 MHz are already too fast for Alcatraz. The problem with this game is that it only has an exe, no manual can be found online and the install.exe just copies files. There is no way to select the soundcard.

It seems UNISOUND is for PNP cards only. I bought a non-PNP card because I had some issues with PNP Soundblasters under DOS. So this does not seem to help then.

Does your blaster variable go to conventional settings like irq 5 or 7, dma 1, baseport 220?

Some early games were hard coded to expect the SB at these settings so having them at other settings can cause issues.

mombarak wrote on 2024-11-08, 21:27:

- Can I use a different/load Soundblaster .SYS driver to improve/change the sound quality? Like for the mouse driver (ms mouse, CTmouse) there might be different options which I am not aware of.

IIRC Vibras removed the mixer filters the SB16 had.

Thanks dukeofurl. I thought of the same thing because it seems Dosbox uses A220, IRQ7 and DMA1. So I changed my non PNP Soundblaster to use this with the SET variables in autoexec.bat and the driver parameters in config.sys by simply replacing the 5 to a 7. But it did not help. I also use exactly the same files of the game in Dosbox and on my P90 Dos 6.22 system.

I really wonder what could cause this. Is there any non PNP UNISOUND-like driver out there?

Thanks leileilol. So you say I might break the sound output entirely by using a SB16 driver?
I wanted to try the CTSB16.SYS instead of of the VIBRA16.SYS.

Vibra16C should be all PnP, no? It's a very late SB16 and has no OPL on it.
Just use unisound to initialize it to IRQ7 by setting BLASTER properly before running unisound.

As others mentioned, Lotus only plays Adlib even with the SB option chosen, and you either pick music or race sfx. This was common in older racing games.

So I tried UNISOUND with SET BLASTER values only and it still does not work unfortunately. I tested Doom to make sure sound plays with this configuration. But in Whacky Wheels, it cannot detect the soundcard with UNISOUND. So I am not sure if it fully works as expected and Alcatraz just does not work or if there is still and issue somewhere.

I wonder if the Dreamblaster X16GS wavetable might cause this because in the Alcatraz game I get only PC speaker sound effects. Not sure if it would also normally play PC Speaker music too.

What is your SET BLASTER line in autoexec.bat
I think it should be
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
and unisound should configure it like asked.
... vibra might not have high dma so H1 might also do
also unisound mutes some inputs by default so you might need to set volumes up.

edit:
https://retronn.de/imports/soundblaster_config_guide.html

I tried everything. Now I have reached a point where I think the system works fine with every other game so it might be an incompatibility to my specific sound card... 🙁