VOGONS


First post, by tincup

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Running a CT2800 Vibra16-S [DSP 4.13 I think] in W95 I experience a garbled 'electronic' noise/sound in Papryus's Indy-500 game which developes within a few seconds to a sustained high pitch sound that persists even after the game is closed - a reboot is needed to clear it.

Is this the dreaded hanging note bug?

I'm testing cards for a reasonable one card ISA Win-Dos solution. So far Indy is the only game that I have problems with the CT2800. However, 'Diagnose' does not see an MPU-401 port even though it's set in autoexec as 330, and I can't find any other device that might be conflicting with it. Is this correctible or part of the problem?

Reply 1 of 9, by 5u3

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Do you have a MIDI device connected to the sound card? If you're just using the card alone, it can't be the "hanging-note"-bug, since that only affects MIDI signals.

Also, which Indy 500 game?

Indianapolis 500: The Simulation (1989)

IndyCar Racing (1993)

Reply 2 of 9, by tincup

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Su3 - no just the one card. And the game, Indy 500 The Simulation. Sound runs fine in a dos box under W98/Turtle Beach Montego, but has weird sounds on W95/CT2800. I'll try swapping in an Ensoniq ES1370 card and a CT4170 to see what happens..

Reply 4 of 9, by tincup

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I don't think so. I have the original boxed copy in my racing collection [it's the grand daddy of serious racing sims - along with World Circuit] which I installed and copied to my rigs many times, and several downloads of the game off the internet, but I should check. There are a couple of DLs out there that do not have the audio driver and only run with PC speaker sound - but that's not my problem. The cracked version avoids having to enter words from the game manual I know that.

I spent a few hours swapping audio cards and playing around with IRQs etc., no progress.

BTW if you are a fan of racing sims take a look at IndyCar Racing 2 for Rendition - pretty amazing given it's time..

Reply 5 of 9, by tincup

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Nope, neither original nor hacked version runs sound properly as of yet. No problem on the W98/Montego rig though, but that box is setup for USB controllers, not analog gear like the W95-Dos/CT2800 box. Hmmm, more fussing....

My question had less to do about solving the problem at hand than about whether the harsh synthesized sustained sound was the famous "hanging note", which I don't think I've ever experienced since I never used Creative gear.

Reply 6 of 9, by badmojo

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This might have nothing to do with it but I was having trouble with my CT2800 last night (digital audio wouldn't play in XWing CD ROM collectors edition, playing under DOS mode in Windows 95), and it turned out to be some sort of conflict with oakcdrom.sys. I wacked a mitsumi drive in there and used the MTM driver instead, and all was well.

Life? Don't talk to me about life.

Reply 7 of 9, by ratfink

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Resource conflicts cause stuck FM music in some games iirc, when the sound effects get called. But the whole games crashes. I think alt-tabbing sometimes causes similar effects when playing some dos games under windows.

Of course that's not the same as one note being played continually in MIDI music while the rest of the music [and the game] continues, which is what the so-called hanging note bug is.

There's also some sound cards seeming to amplify electrical noise so that in my 386 several different cards have a high-pitched whine that they don't have in other systems, at least when using headphones. That's not a stuck note as such either.

Reply 8 of 9, by 5u3

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I was asking about the crack because a randomly downloaded version of the game did indeed produce FM sound garbage at high CPU speeds on my test machine. The original version I got with my SB 2.0 card seems to work fine.

Try slowing down your computer before running the game.

Reply 9 of 9, by tincup

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Hmm... It's a P-200 and the W98 box on which it does run is P3-1000 so I don't think speed is the issue. One clue is that the audio is off/distorted from the get go, garbly/electronic sounding rather than the plain early PC game tune it normally is. I figured the CT2800 just didn't like the game/driver.

Also, my boot to windows autoexec/config is very plain - just set blaster/highmem/emm386/files/buffers/stacks type - no mouse/cdr or complicated settings. So the game is running in a pretty vanilla dos box.

EDIT: original game files from floppy and running exe with /v /a switches and audio is fine. Thanks for help