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Problem running Black Dahlia on 166 MMX

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First post, by dave343

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Hey all,

I'm trying to run Black Dahlia, if you never played it, do so! It's one of those 1998 FMV games, starring Dennis Hopper. So the problem I'm having is during the cut scene's, and it's pausing for large gaps, and then seems to 10x fast forward until it catches up. Then it'll play fine for a few moments, then it freezes, and finally fast forwards. The 2nd problem I'm having is with the audio. I'm getting all the music, but no voices. During the intro movies, all the music was playing, and sound effects, but I couldn't hear any of the speech. I'm playing this on a P166 MMX, and back in the day when I bought it, I also ran it on a P166 mmx and it was butter smooth. It only requires a P90, with a rec'd spec of P120. The game was designed for Windows 95 (no Dos support) which my 166 had back in the day, 95C, but because I need decent USB support, I have Windows 98SE installed along with the un-official SP3 pack. Also, the game wants to install DX 5.0, but Win 98SE has 6.1 installed... but I can't see that being the cause. Lastly, I'm wondering if it's my CDRom. I have a 40x no-name brand installed on the system. Originally I ran the game on a 36x or maybe it was 16x, NEX Ready 9712 (I think was my original system). Could this be a DMA issue? IDE Driver issue? Bios setting I don't have enabled? My complete system specs below, thanks in advance for any help! 😀

Pentium 166MMX
32MB EDO (2x16)
Asus TX97-E
Quantum Bigfoot 1.2GB EIDE
ATI 3D Rage II 2MB PCI (I think it's Windows Drivers, although I "may" have installed the drivers from this forum)
Sound Blaster 16 (1740) ISA. (I have a 2940 I can try, but the 1740 has the nice Yamaha chip)

Reply 1 of 7, by clueless1

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I think you might be onto something with DMA and your optical drive. Did you check that DMA is enabled for it?

I don't think it would hurt to try installing DX 5.0. If it doesn't help, you can reinstall a later DX over the top. In fact, I don't think there is a reason to not run DX9 on Win98. It should be backward compatible. You may want to try that as well.

the Bigfoot was a slow HDD even back in the day. Make sure it has DMA enabled too.

Best of luck!

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
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Reply 3 of 7, by dave343

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clueless1 wrote:

the Bigfoot was a slow HDD even back in the day. Make sure it has DMA enabled too.

Best of luck!

My bad, it's actually a Quantum Fireball 1.2GB, when I get home I'll check out the suggestions, thanks again.

Reply 4 of 7, by dave343

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I got the issue resolved 😀 Game runs butter smooth now. Ended up replacing the no-name 40x CDrom with a Lite-On 48x and that seemed to fix not only the video pausing, but also the no speech issue. I didn't change any video/sound drivers, and DMA was enabled on the CDrom already. Thanks for the replies!

Reply 5 of 7, by clueless1

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Great to hear you got it fixed. 😀

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks

Reply 6 of 7, by HighTreason

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Excellent you found the fix.

For anyone reading this thread from a search, Atlantis: The Lost Tales appears to respond to this kind of issue in a similar fashion.

> The beginning of speech is cut off.
> Some of the animations also lose their beginnings or run choppily with dropped frames.
> The music won't always start playing when it should.
> Sometimes, it can take upwards of a minute for a cutscene to start - on a Pentium II 450MHz system.

This seems to go away with better CD-ROM drives and DMA enabled. It took me a few weeks to figure this out. Oddly, I was using a Panasonic drive (Early DVD Reader) so you'd think it would have been fine, but no. The Samsung (CD-RW, 32x Read), Lite On (16x CD-ROM) and even Artec (52x CD-ROM) ran the game much smoother. I guess this is an issue to look for then with games which make heavy use of streaming 'video' or similar from the CD-ROM. ROTH was not affected, but as this is an older game with much lower system requirements, they most likely implemented a work-around from the start as the game will run on DOS with a fairly weak (486DX2) computer, has very low bit-rate movies, most things happen in game-land anyway and apparently the game only requires a 2x CD-ROM drive and 8MB of RAM - significantly less than Atlantis which appears to have almost identical requirements to Black Dahlia. Atlantis, however, runs pretty badly even on its rated Pentium 90 and it seems the box was later revised to account for this.

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Reply 7 of 7, by dave343

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HighTreason wrote:
Excellent you found the fix. […]
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Excellent you found the fix.

For anyone reading this thread from a search, Atlantis: The Lost Tales appears to respond to this kind of issue in a similar fashion.

> The beginning of speech is cut off.
> Some of the animations also lose their beginnings or run choppily with dropped frames.
> The music won't always start playing when it should.
> Sometimes, it can take upwards of a minute for a cutscene to start - on a Pentium II 450MHz system.

This seems to go away with better CD-ROM drives and DMA enabled. It took me a few weeks to figure this out. Oddly, I was using a Panasonic drive (Early DVD Reader) so you'd think it would have been fine, but no. The Samsung (CD-RW, 32x Read), Lite On (16x CD-ROM) and even Artec (52x CD-ROM) ran the game much smoother. I guess this is an issue to look for then with games which make heavy use of streaming 'video' or similar from the CD-ROM. ROTH was not affected, but as this is an older game with much lower system requirements, they most likely implemented a work-around from the start as the game will run on DOS with a fairly weak (486DX2) computer, has very low bit-rate movies, most things happen in game-land anyway and apparently the game only requires a 2x CD-ROM drive and 8MB of RAM - significantly less than Atlantis which appears to have almost identical requirements to Black Dahlia. Atlantis, however, runs pretty badly even on its rated Pentium 90 and it seems the box was later revised to account for this.

I tested Black Dahlia a few years back on a Pentium 75 and it ran pretty good. As for Dos support that was an error printed on the box, it actually has no official support for Dos. Unless that was changed... but Take 2 said they were going to correct that error on the box.
But for the CDRom issue, I guess the better or more well known brands of CDRoms probably have more cache. BTW, nice Youtube channel. I subscribe.

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