First post, by captain_zins
- Rank
- Newbie
Greetings, everbody.
Thanks to all the helpful information this fantastic board has to offer I've managed to set up a retro gaming machine using an old Thinkpad T42. It works almost perfectly except one minor issue that I just can't solve by myself.
My setup looks like this:
- Thinkpad T42 23744WG
- Pentium 1.7 GHz
- 1 GB RAM
- ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 32MB
- SoundMAX Integrated Audio
- Intel 855PM Chipset
- DirectX 9.0c
- Windows 98SE & XP as a dual boot.
And here's the problem:
While some games run perfectly and with no noticeable issues at all (Need for Speed 3, Stracraft, Commandos), others suffer from short freezes that last for a fraction of a second and seem to be sound-related. Namely Half-Life (Opposing Force), Duke Nukem 3D, Dungeon Keeper 2, and Command & Conquer.
I've discovered that these short freezes only occur right before new sound effects are played for the first time. The whole game just hangs for a brief moment. These are for instance shots in Duke Nukem 3D or speeches in Half-Life's training course. But when the same effects are repeated for a second time no freeze occurs.
To me it looks like these sounds have to be loaded in some kind of cache which seems to be the bottleneck. Because, if you play for a while and then restart the whole game everything up to the point you've played before works fine. Every sound effect that has been used during the first play, now doesn't cause a freeze. Also, a fresh installation of the game completely removes the issue — until the computer is restarted. I was even able to get rid of the issue by just copying the game files of Duke Nukem 3D from one directory to another before starting the game.
The problem is noticeable in Windows 98SE and XP as well. But sound and music in general work absolutely fine (CD audio, mp3, wav). Could it still be a driver issue? I'm using different driver versions in each system (98SE: 5.12.01.3600; XP: 5.12.1.5450).
Any help is much appreciated.
Best regards
Captain Zins
