First post, by Unregistered
Ok, I was finally able to get Master of Magic to load with both music and sound effects in WinXP. The thing is so picky about conventional memory, it took a while to find a configuration that would actually let me run it with both music and sound effects.
The music works great, and the sound effects are fine except in combat. Every time something in combat makes a sound, the game freezes for ~2 seconds prior to making the sound effect, and then again for ~2 seconds after the sound effect is through playing. This pause is eliminated if I just disable sound effects. The music doesn't affect it, and works fine in all cases. But, in any case, this slows combat to a crawl as you have to go through that pause before and after every unit makes any kind of move.
The sound effects seem fine in other places other than combat where this occurs. In the opening scene, for instance, the character voices don't pause the scene, they flow with it normally.
I have tried every Output device listed in the Sound Blaster configuration, as well as using the different DPS Sound Blaster versions. I have made sure the settings, in the game and in the VDMS configuration, are both set to 220, 7, 1 for port, irq, and 8 bit dma settings.
I use WinXP with 256 ram on an PIII 500, and had no problems running the game last year. I wasn't using VDMS, but a long drawn out configuration that involved rebooting everytime I wanted to play the game. It was annoying, but I can't even resort to this anymore because I am on a network and computers access the internet through my computer. So I need WinXP up and running so it maintains the firewall and access to the internet. Is there any way, VDMS or otherwise, to get this sound problem fixed?