Towncivilian wrote on 2025-09-28, 23:53:

Have you tried with hardware sound acceleration set to "No acceleration"?

This motherboard has two ISA slots. Can you try putting the AWE64 in the other slot? I'm wondering if the one it's in now is a shared PCI/ISA slot and that could be causing some issues somehow.

Also, you mentioned planning to install a 512MB RAM stick in this motherboard. This is a 440BX chipset and 512MB sticks will likely be recognized at half-capacity (256MB) by this chipset unless they are low-density (which I think are either extremely rare or basically non-existent). If you are in the US, I have 3x256MB PC133 CL3 RAM sticks I'd be happy to give to you.

Really! Cool! Lemme know how you wanna set that up.

I tried setting the recovery time all the way up to 4, and it didn’t change anything that I could notice. Completely turning off hardware accelerated sound also completely muted Half-Life, so that’s an obvious no-go.

Some areas have consistent slight slowdown, and are thus accompanied by audio garbling in 3D accelerated mode, so it may just be a performance problem. The ones that almost always have slowdown are the scene with the forklift, G-Man in the tram next to the spilled nukage, and anywhere near the Anti-Mass Spectrometer. It would make sense I guess, this AWE64 Value has only the base 512KB of onboard memory and is a dated card by contemporary standards, but it’s still strange that the problem only really gets bad in 3D accelerated mode. I think, if I were to buy my way out of the problem, getting a SB Live or similar card would be a smarter start, right?

An SB Live would likely work more seamlessly, yes. I believe I have one I can also send to you with the RAM, if you are interested. I will send you a PM to discuss shipping details.

Looking at the motherboard manual, you can also try toggling the settings "Passive Release" and "Delayed Transaction" as they also relate to ISA card compatibility.

To the best of my knowledge, the 512KB of RAM is used to load MIDI soundfonts and doesn't relate to usage in modern games.

I have an AWE64 in my similar build (quicker P3, but 440BX chipset). I can try to play Half-Life to see if I happen to get the same issues, although I'm running Windows 2000 so I'm not sure how much of a useful test it would be.

TheMysteriousGray wrote on 2025-09-28, 14:17:

Dipshidian wrote on 2025-09-28, 13:21:

What video settings are used in Half-Life? To rule out the possibility of the 3D card API affecting performance, testing the game in all modes — Software, OpenGL, Direct3D — might be worth a try if you haven’t already done so. To be extra sure, try using an older PCI or AGP video card (with or without 3D acceleration) with DirectX compatibility to make sure the GeForce MX isn’t introducing any unwanted behavior in Half-Life.

Direct3D at 640x480. I have an ATI Rage IIc that came with my mobo bundle I could test, though I have no idea if it'll run the game any good.

ATi Rage2C is slower and older card, ATi minimum with 640x480 is Rage Pro/Rage128/Rage 128Pro with Half Life, also Rage2C does not have OpenGL driver, Direct3D/3DCIF only.

ATi Rage2C/Rage Pro are better suited for Win9x, Rage128/Rage128Pro can run 3D stuff at W2K/XP at playable speed. If you want, you can test Half Life with Rage2C and my dirver also, its just for Win9x and Rage2C Direct3D is not made for Half Life.

Disable the AWE64 in device manager and see if the graphics hitches go away or stay. My hunch is that the audio stuttering is a side effect of something else in the system as the card will loop over the audio buffer if it doesn't receive new data in time and repeat recently rendered sections of audio.

TheMysteriousGray wrote on 2025-09-28, 23:12:

I tried lowering the hardware accelerated sound to Basic and ran another test using OpenGL. It did not appreciably change anything.

As for ISA bus timings, I don’t seem to know where to look or if this BIOS even has a feature to monitor it. This is an Award BIOS, version SS for this specific motherboard.

EDIT: found the feature mentioned. 16-bit I/O Recovery Time is set to 1.

Setting a higher value may help, or it may not. A value of NA is supposed to set the default value of a 3.5 cycle delay, and any other setting is added on top of that.

Towncivilian wrote on 2025-09-29, 00:15:

Looking at the motherboard manual, you can also try toggling the settings "Passive Release" and "Delayed Transaction" as they also relate to ISA card compatibility.

^ This may also play into it:

From Adrian's Rojak Pot Bios Optimization Guide: […]
Show full quote

From Adrian's Rojak Pot Bios Optimization Guide:

Delayed Transaction
Options: Enabled, Disabled
This feature is used to meet the latency of PCI cycles to and from the ISA bus. The ISA bus is much, much slower than the PCI bus. Thus, PCI cycles to and from the ISA bus take a longer time to complete and this slows the PCI bus down.
However, enabling Delayed Transaction enables the chipset's embedded 32-bit posted write buffer to support delayed transaction cycles. This means that transactions to and from the ISA bus are buffered and the PCI bus can be freed to perform other transactions while the ISA transaction is underway.
This option should be enabled for better performance and to meet PCI 2.1 specifications. Disable it only if your PCI cards cannot work properly or if you are using an ISA card that is not PCI 2.1 compliant.

Passive Release
Options: Enabled, Disabled
If Passive Release is enabled, CPU-to-PCI bus accesses are allowed during passive release of the PCI bus. Therefore, the processor can access the PCI bus while the ISA bus is being accessed.
Otherwise, the arbiter only accepts another PCI master access to local DRAM. In other words, only another PCI bus master can access the PCI bus, not the processor. This function is used to meet the latency of the ISA bus master, which is much longer than that of the PCI bus master.
Enable Passive Release for optimal performance. Disable it only if you are facing problems with your ISA cards.

Try to be consistent with your testing (ie. if you've left DirectSound acceleration to 'full' or 'basic') in Windows, don't change it while you alter the BIOS settings. Otherwise you might end up fixing the problem and not know exactly what helped in the end.

Delayed Transaction was disabled in the BIOS. I flipped it on and tested all the way to abt halfway through Unforeseen Consequences and all audio issues are completely gone! I had turned off high-quality audio in the menu though which might have made a slight difference, will test with high quality audio after work.

This place has been so helpful for helping me rule out issues with my system and figure out things to buy when current components didn’t cut it.

Great to hear "Delayed Transaction" did the trick. I'm surprised that it was set to Disabled, pretty sure on my abit BX133-RAID board, it's Enabled by default.

Don't forget to try to raise the sound hardware acceleration level back to full now that the root cause seems to be resolved.

UPDATEA: booted the system again to test and Half-Life had no sound whatsoever. Turns out the audio acceleration was all the way off for some reason, set it to full and restarted, and now all the audio issues are back. Setting it to Basic didn’t help. Delayed Transaction is still enabled.

Seems it only worked the one time. I think I’ll need that SB Live after all. If I have both cards installed (the AWE64 for DOS games, the Live for everything else), then as long as they don’t have resource conflicts, they should work fine in the same system, right?

Is the audio quality still on low? The ISA card may have a problem with the higher quality sound + reverb the game has.

TheMysteriousGray wrote on Yesterday, 12:38:

Seems it only worked the one time. I think I’ll need that SB Live after all. If I have both cards installed (the AWE64 for DOS games, the Live for everything else), then as long as they don’t have resource conflicts, they should work fine in the same system, right?

Yes it works fine, I have a non-PNP ISA card (PicoGUS), a PnP ISA card (ES1869F) and a PCI card (SB Live! Value) in the same system and they coexist. You just need to be aware of how the resources are assigned. If you want to run DOS games reliably you should a) set the IRQ and DMA PnP assignment (used by the AWE64) in the BIOS to manual/Legacy ISA so windows doesn't try to assign anything on top, use unisound or OEM init tool in baremetal DOS (if you use that) to initialize the card to the IRQ and DMA cleared in the bios, and also override the resource assignment in windows to use those same values.

I initially tried to use the ES1869F ISA PnP as a windows 98 card but ran into performance issues like stuttering and audio delay in some games (like quake 2 and THPS2), ultimately I couldn't find a working configuration. Once I put in the SB Live, all the audio related issues with win98 games disappeared. Other issues cropped up like the system not shutting down properly or conflicts with Yamah S-XYG50 softmidi, those went away once i used the Audigy driver pack from philscomputerlab rather than than the SB Live drivers.

On top of that you get four point and 5.1 surround (depending on the version of SB Live) and EAX which is fun to play with. Alternatively you can get an Audigy 2 ZS which works well with win98 as well.