VOGONS


First post, by RYZINN

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Hey all,

I built a retro rig sometime ago and went with a standard AWE64 ISA card. The card itself works flawlessly for most of my DOS games and a few CD games, however some games that rely for CD audio have issues. Mainly choppy, static sounds, (Simpsons virtual springfield, Beavis + butthead Virtual stupidity, Diablo, Star Wars Jedi Knight, Etc). The issue primarily occurs when dialogue is spoken in these games but it also seems to happen during in game cutscenes. Initially I thought maybe my disc drive was the culprit and have since swapped in multiple disc drives with various speeds (4x, 12x, 16x) only to have the same issue. The discs themselves are in pristine condition so it can't be that either.

My suspicion is that it may be the awe64 itself. the input that connects to the disc drive may be faulty? The drivers should be good, I'd assume, as pretty much all other sound and output from the card seems fine.

Anybody have experience with this? Should I try and buy another card? I have a spare SB16 I could swap in and see if the issue continues though I'd imagine I might have to remove the AWE64 drivers?

Reply 1 of 7, by Cuttoon

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Hi, sorry, I'm mostly commenting here to watch the topic and give it some attention. But, I can only guess so far.

You might have to give a more precise description of the symptoms - or maybe it's my reading comprehension.
Does the sound stutter? Or is it distorted? Or is there too much noise in it?

Also, different AWE64s around. But probably won't matter.

In general, once you detach the audio cable between CD drive and sound card, all you here then is the digital audio of your card.
With most games, the actual CD audio tracks ('red book') are only ever used for music. Like with SW Jedi Knight:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/star-w … ces-ii/techinfo
So that's what will go via a shielded 3- or 4-wire cable from the CD drive to the sound card and will be mixed into the other sources, mainly the digital audio.
Muting "CD in" in the mixer will have the same effect as detaching that cable.
Those cables are neither rare nor special, so you'd easily find another one to test, but that's probably not it.
Make sure you have the correct cable for the card, their pin arrangements vary. Most are "L-G-G-R" but not all of them.

Not quite sure, but attaching headphones to the CD drive front connector (if available) might be another way to test the cd audio vs the card's output.

Cutscenes are rather large chunks of data that might come from the CD directly because they were deemed too big to put on the HDD installation. Thus being maybe the only content that still needs the CD to read data.

Possible explanation for stutters and such: Sometimes the initial CD access simply slows down the whole system too much because IDE (P-ATA) can be a mess. Try tampering with DMA settings or even get a SCSI system if you want to try that out.
Controller problems usually won't be affected by changing only the drive.

Also, possible workaround: Put the whole CD on the HDD as an image and mount it with a suitable utility, imitating a CD drive. But only works with data, afaik. Some Windows cd players actually read the CD tracks bit by bit from the CD and replay that as digital sound (instead of using the drive as a CD audio player via analogue output over the sound card) but I don't think any games do or could be made to.

I like jumpers.

Reply 2 of 7, by RYZINN

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Thanks for the reply! Yeah sorry, its more of a stuttering sound. Like the cd itself is skipping? It's especially prominent during any kind of cutscene. Starcraft's opening cinematic for example. If I get a minute, I'll try and take a video of the issue.

Reply 5 of 7, by Repo Man11

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RYZINN wrote on 2022-03-23, 01:42:

Win95, sorry. Pentium 200 if that matters.

Okay, is DMA enabled for the optical drive?

"I'd rather be rich than stupid" - Jack Handey

Reply 6 of 7, by RYZINN

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Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-03-23, 02:05:
RYZINN wrote on 2022-03-23, 01:42:

Win95, sorry. Pentium 200 if that matters.

Okay, is DMA enabled for the optical drive?

Wasn't sure if that was a thing for win95 or not. Anyway, just checked, it was disabled. Enabled and restarted. That did the trick! Thank you so much. Issue resolved!

Reply 7 of 7, by Repo Man11

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RYZINN wrote on 2022-03-23, 02:24:
Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-03-23, 02:05:
RYZINN wrote on 2022-03-23, 01:42:

Win95, sorry. Pentium 200 if that matters.

Okay, is DMA enabled for the optical drive?

Wasn't sure if that was a thing for win95 or not. Anyway, just checked, it was disabled. Enabled and restarted. That did the trick! Thank you so much. Issue resolved!

I had an issue with drive speed on a motherboard a couple of months ago, turned out to be the same thing. Some driver packages enable DMA on Win9x as part of the installation (such at the Via 4 in 0ne), but with others you have to be sure to do it manually, and if you don't you get these strange performance issues.

"I'd rather be rich than stupid" - Jack Handey