First post, by Zoomer
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Hey everyone!
I'm fiddling around with my retro system again right now. I had a Windows 98 SE with that third-party sp3 installed (or whatever it's called) and suddenly I had this urge to reinstall everything anew. I hoped that the reinstall will help me to get rid of that problem I'm talking but it looks like it's still there.
The problem I'm having is that I couldn't get CD audio from a CD image to work. I'm trying to use either Alcohol 120% 1.9.5 build 3105 trial or Daemon Tools 3.47. I'm running Windows 98SE on a P4 3ghz, i875 chipset system with Audigy 2ZS or Aureal Vortex SQ2500. So I have few CD games in my collection with CD audio tracks (or RedBook audio as it is sometimes called). One of them being "Ignition" and the other is "International Rally Championship". They both play fine when I'm using a real CD in a real CD-ROM drive. The only quirk is that I can't enable "Digital audio" in "Multimedia Properties" in Control Panel since I'm using VxD Creative Drivers for better performance (WDM ones sometimes cause stuttering and microfreezing in games with hardware accelerated audio). So I have to use that tiny little cable which goes from the drive to the soundcard but that's not a problem.
The problem is that I don't want to use physical CDs for obvious reasons. Not only that is a hassle to insert/eject CD each time I want to play this or that game but I also hate how Windows 98 handles access to the CD-ROM drive (the autorun which automagically drops me into game each time I insert the "Ignition" game cd, and that terrible microfreeze when Windows 98 detects the CD and so on) and the painful noise my drive makes when the spin speed reaches its maximum.
Now, I know that Daemon Tools and Alcohol 120% both have support for CD Audio. When a game tries to read some music track, the emulation software intercepts that call and streams the needed track directly to DirectSound. And while it sounds dodgy on a paper, I'm 10000% sure that once it worked for me with the same exact audio card,drivers and games on the other system (a P3 i815 system, on which I also can't get the emulated CD Audio to work at this moment too). So I enabled "Analog audio" in this software's settings and chosen the proper audio device but had no luck with all this in games.
I'm also sure that the CD Images are proper since the games and Windows Media Player detect the CD audio tracks. By the way Windows Media Player can even play them fine! The games detect CD tracks just fine too and kinda start playing them but there's no CD Audio can be heard 🙁
So my question is: does anybody here have a working CD Audio with CD emulation software on a Windows 98 system? Or maybe someone have an idea why it might not work? I've tried great many configurations and settings. I've tried installing WDM drivers so I can enable digital audio; I've tried changing around drive letters so the emulated drive is the first in a row; I've tried to get it working with different soundcards (that being SB Live! 5.1, SB Audigy 2ZS, Vortex SQ2500); I've even tried different PCs (one on i815 chipset, one on VIA Appolo 133 (or something like that) and one I'm using now - the Asus P4C-800e Deluxe i875 one). Nothing helps 🙁
MB: Asus P3B-F 1.03 (2x ISA)
CPU: PIII-S 1.4GHz/VIA C3 800MHz
RAM: 256MB PC133
Video: GeForce 4600Ti/Voodoo 5 5500/Voodoo 3 3500 for DOS Glide
Audio: SB16 OPL3 + Audigy Platinum Ex
OS: Windows 98