Reply 20 of 32, by dionb
- Rank
- l33t++
Pretty sure the clipping isn't related to it being an MT-32 title. All that means is that the instruments are off and if the game used custom sysex stuff (which Civ doesn't) it wouldn't do that. It just happens to trigger a badly clipping string sound - a quite loud, sustained low one.
Edit:
Also checked whether the bad behaviour I had been seeing (system hanging after trying to run setup in Master of Magic or Colonization, awful clicking in SB mode in Tyrian, extremely bad Doom2 performance and sound disappearing after a few notes, including crash of the MIDI synth) was motherboard-related. So I moved the card to a system with a Full Yes 82430I motherboard - i430FX, 5x ISA and pretty much my reference for trouble-free compatiblity. I normally run 4 sound cards in this system (GUS, PAS16, either Aztech NXPro or some SB16, and a MusicQuest MIDI card) and within the constraints of the available resources, everything 'just works'.
Results:
- MoM and Col setup still crash in exactly same way.
- SB mode clicks like hell in Tyrian
- Doom2 does work better, SB sound is bad and clicky too, but at least doesn't crash out and MIDI keeps playing.
Also tried WSS in Descent and failed to get it to work with any combo of driver or synth. As soon as you try to test WSS, the whole sound card seems to go down and sometimes system hangs.
Conclusion:
It wasn't my motherboard/Cyrix CPU. This card's compatibility is awful and its behaviour when it's outside its comfort zone is worse. Oh well...