VOGONS


First post, by MrD

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I'm trying to play the top-down Alien Breed-like shooter 'The Machines' on my real DOS computer, but it seems to be incompatible with my ALS100+chip sound card for digitised sound effects.

The issue is that when sound effects play, there will be alternating periods of the gameplay freezing and playing every second. This also occurs during the pre-rendered intro. If you disable sound effects (F4 on the city menu for options), there's no freezing during gameplay and the music plays fine.

The OPL music is unaffected by the freezing regardless of sound effects being on or off (and it seems the game has separate soundtracks for OPL2 and 3, which is nice).

The SETSOUND.EXE (unrelated to Miles) crashes if asked to autodetect the card in Dosbox and on hardware, but you can manually pick a card fine as well as test digitised audio. I've tried the 'Sound Blaster', 'Sound Blaster Pro 1'and 'Sound Blaster Pro 2' options, and both IRQ 5 and 7 and DMA 0 and 1 (changing the ALS100+ card's params with A3CONFIG.EXE).

I've tried it with a CMI8330-based card and a Yamaha Audician 32 Plus instead and they work fine, so I guess it's just this one oddball card. This is one of the very few games that aren't compatible with ALS100+, I've found - I've been very happy with it (I can make a thread listing compatibility if anybody is curious about ALS100+) and I can live without The Machines' SFX if I have to. Though if anybody knows of any neat tricks that might make it work, I'd appreciate it. I even gave moslo a go, just in case. 😀

My guess is that Merit's custom SB sound driver is slightly incorrect - not handling interrupts correctly, or not checking values or status, etc.

My system: P200, S3 graphics, Asound Gold ALS100+ sound, 64 MB ram.