Originally posted by Unregistered Anyone have any suggestions as to what I can do to get rid of the stuttering?

Honestly? It sounds like you've done just about everything already. About the only other thing I can think is to switch to different audio chipset/soundcard as some are a bit on the "weak side".

Drat! Not what I wanted to hear.

Well, changing sound cards isn't really an option . . . I have an Asus MB with the nForce 2 chipset, and I'm using the integrated Soundstorm APU. So I'd have to go out and buy a card just for this game . . . NOT! 😁

Guess I'll just have to put up with it.

Originally posted by Unregistered Well, changing sound cards isn't really an option . . . I have an Asus MB with the nForce 2 chipset,

Well, I certainly wouldn't consider the nForce2 a "weak" chipset.

Sometimes, various factors combine together to just make a game unplayable without "full" emulation. There was a Mac version, but that's "out" as an option because it requires a PowerMac.

Future option may be DosBox, but the game requires a 486 AND VESA, so that may be a good long while.

Present options: VMWare or "Virtual PC" (both will probably be poor for the action portions of the game), and a Dual-Boot setup.

I'd say a dual-boot setup between Windows 98 and XP is the optimum solution.

Progress!

SC3 still stutters and crackles a little during the cutscenes, but during conversations it's virtually gone.

Turns out that moving the CPU usage slider down to the lowest setting, actually improved the performace of the game! I got the idea from another message here, and frankly never would've thought to do that. I mean, since when does allocating less CPU cycles actually make a game run better? 😕

I guess VDMSound is needlessly wasting cycles at the highest setting, which causes the system to suffer? Dunno.

That isn't VDMSound, it's NT's Virtual DOS Machine.

If you have a powerful machine, you may also try the Cap DOS timer feature on that same screen. It may prove useful to better 'synchronization' of the game's timer under windows.

Since I haven't seen a working solution offered for this, I'll offer my two cents:

I've gotten Star Control 3 working with solid sound for speech, although the cinematics still have stuttering sound. I have VDMSound set to the Soundblaster 16 setting, but in the Star Control 3 SETSOUND setup program, I have digital audio set to simply "Soundblaster compatible" (it's the most "basic" soundblaster setting). Make sure you're running the setup with VDMSound as well. Using these options, I get solid non-stuttering sound for any speech outside of the cinematics.

Also, it doesn't hurt to run the game from a virtual drive, as this game does an awful lot of in-game loading from the CD.

No solution for SC3, but i have the same problem with different games mainly during videos or sequences.

Reducing the CPU usage to a minimum nearly wiped out the problem, only small gaps remain.
"cap DOS timer frequency" shows no effect.

also turning down the DMA servicing to 2 / 10 helped a bit.

switching to older SB drivers and stuff didnt help at all!

(i could try a non VDMS CPU timer to reduce speed)

maybe this helps some ppl