does passing -primarysound and/or -snoforceformat do anything?

I don't really think it's an audio driver issue personally.. I initially suspected that it was a symptom of another issue and changing cards/acceleration/drivers etc is really just moving the peas around on the plate. My gut reaction is to blow away the OS install and start fresh, and if it still happens then there's some kind of hardware issue/compatibility problem. Or do a fresh install on another drive/SD card as a test.

Assuming that there are visual stutters that go along with the audio stutters, I guess the ultimate test would be to start half life with the -console parameter and use "nosound 1" and see if the visual stuttering improves at all.

TheMysteriousGray wrote on 2025-09-29, 12:33:

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.

Did you try turning high quality audio off again? The game has a lot of reverb audio processing.

Other things.
-Do a Defragment Analysis on the hard drive and see if the Half-Life folder contains a lot of fragmented files.
-Check if hard disk buffering/caching is enabled in device properties.
-Motherboard/chipset drivers.

Since I have a relatively similar system with the same sound card, I will install Windows 98SE on a spare hard drive today and see if I encounter similar audio problems with Half Life and test another game like Unreal Tournament as well.

What is the model number of your AWE64? I've got a CT4520.

I did a partial disk defragment and switched from the 3dfx MiniGL driver to the default OpenGL driver (since Voodoo 3 is apparently fully OpenGL compliant or close to it), and while the stuttering hasn't disappeared, it's no longer extremely distracting. The audio only seems to stutter/skip slightly when there's occasional moments of choppiness or slowdown, which feels more understandable than the game's audio turning into a SHODAN-style garbled mess. Audio is still on Low quality and the audio acceleration is still set to Basic tho, and there's no guarantee the game won't just break audio again, but we'll see.

I also read in another thread that one of the reasons the game will stutter, at least on the audio front, is because the speech audio files are not precached and have to be loaded in during gameplay, which makes complete sense to me. While some audio SFX would hitch a little bit here and there during the game's worst moments, it was always the speech that got garbled the most severely.

Towncivilian wrote on 2025-10-12, 11:52:

Since I have a relatively similar system with the same sound card, I will install Windows 98SE on a spare hard drive today and see if I encounter similar audio problems with Half Life and test another game like Unreal Tournament as well.

What is the model number of your AWE64? I've got a CT4520.

Mine is a CT4500. I'm currently using the SBLive 0100 you gave me as the primary audio output, with the AWE64 handling DOS audio and mixed into the Live. Both are working without issues.

It took me a few hours to get everything set up and find working drivers, then I had to troubleshoot the system freezing any time I launched any 3D game - meanwhile the dxdiag Direct3D tests were all successful. Seems that it was an IRQ conflict and telling the BIOS that PnP OS is installed to have the OS configure resources, then disabling the parallel port to free up an IRQ for the AWE64 resolved that issue.

I played through the first few minutes of Half Life GOTY updated to 1.1.1.0 to match your stated configuration. I encountered no audio issues - no stuttering or glitchiness whatsoever. I have the audio set to High Quality, and EAX/A3D are enabled in the game's options, though from what I can tell the AWE64 does not support either audio extension.

I do not hear CD audio, but I believe this is because I don't have the 4-pin analog audio cable from the CD-ROM connected to the AWE64. I need to rip one out of another system shortly to see if that fixes it. It could also be that the CD image I burned did not burn properly and does not contain the audio track portion of the disc, though I don't believe that is the case, because Exact Audio Copy recognizes that there is an audio track when I insert the disc into a different computer.

This is with Windows 98SE (updated through windowsupdaterestored.com & just rloew's PATCHMEM and PATCHDSTR unofficial fixes and NUSB36E, nothing else), Radeon 9000 PRO (ATI Omega Driver 2637 based on Catalyst 4.2), Intel Chipset R3.40, Microsoft's built-in SoundBlaster AWE64 driver, DirectX 9.0c, and all hardware acceleration features enabled for both graphics and audio. Half-Life is set to use Direct3D at 1280x960 resolution. Using an 80GB Deathstar using the motherboard's onboard UDMA33 controller with DMA enabled in Device Manager and verified that it's using UDMA Mode 2 (UDMA/33) using HWiNFO.

I also played 10 minutes of Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force without any audio problems, after installing the SBW9XUP AWE64 driver.

Some BIOS settings that I feel may be relevant in your troubleshooting, and the settings I'm using which work for me:

• SoftMenu III Setup:
  • AGP Transfer Mode: Default
  • In-Order Queue Depth: 1
• Advanced Chipset Features
  • Idle/Pipeline DRAM Leadoff: Disabled
  • 8 Bit I/O Recovery Time: NA
  • 16 Bit I/O Recovery Time: NA
  • Passive Release: Enabled
  • Delayed Transaction: Enabled
  • AGP Aperture Size (MB): 128
• PnP/PCI Configurations
  • PNP OS Installed: Yes
  • Force Update ESCD: Enabled (this will run once, probably good to do after changing the above setting)
  • Resources Controlled By: Auto(ESCD)
  • PCI Latency Timer x8(CLK): 4

Can you post a screenshot of Start -> Run -> msinfo32 -> Hardware Resources -> Conflicts/Sharing?

I'm also still wondering if DMA is really working. Can you download something like HWiNFO or System Information Viewer to examine which DMA mode the hard drive is operating in?

Also, have you inspected your motherboard for bad capacitors? I've preemptively fully recapped my BX133-RAID since abit boards around this timeframe tend to have defective capacitors. Bizarrely, I also had to replace one capacitor on the AWE64 because there was a pinhole at the top of the cap, as if somebody stuck a needle through - super weird.

Are you using a 40-conductor or 80-conductor IDE cable? Your board only has UDMA/33, but I tend to use 80-conductor cables even in such cases because of the additional ground wires for reduced crosstalk.

I can examine the hardware tomorrow, but last I saw the board it had no capacitor issues of any kind. I also don’t know for sure if my IDE cables are 40-pin or 80-pin, nor the difference between the two.

Enclosed is a screenshot of the Conflicts/Sharing tab from the SysInfo window.

I also used HWINFO to check my system, and the hard drive is using UDMA/33 like Towncivilian said. No detected problems.

I don't see any obvious problems with the IRQ sharing there.

Do you have the Intel chipset drivers installed?

Towncivilian wrote on 2025-10-13, 22:49:

I don't see any obvious problems with the IRQ sharing there.

Do you have the Intel chipset drivers installed?

I reinstalled them to make doubly sure. It had no effect on the sound.

I feel like I should clarify that at this point, I am running the 1.0 release of Half-Life and using a Voodoo3 GPU instead of the 1.1.1.0 version, with the full OpenGL driver instead of MiniGL, and the problem is significantly reduced. I notice that the game is overall slightly choppy with these specs, which leads me to believe that the actual issue this whole time has been that the game simply isn't running optimally on this setup and I would need something more powerful to make the issue go away.

How much more powerful is the Radeon 9000 PRO compared to a Voodoo3 or an MX-4000? If the performance gain is significant, then I think I'm right and it's just a matter of the system being too weak to run Half-Life smoothly, similar to Deus Ex. It would explain why no other game has any audio issues on this setup.

Thanks for clarifying. Not sure offhand about the speed difference between Radeon 9000 vs the Voodoo3 or MX-4000.

I just realized from re-reading your first post that the CPU is underclocked. How come? How are you achieving the underclock - reducing FSB, or multiplier? If it's the former, I'm wondering if that affects the AGP and PCI bus speeds and contributing to the audio stutter.

Can you try Half-Life with the CPU operating at normal clock speed to see if that improves the audio stutter?

Towncivilian wrote on 2025-10-14, 00:19:

Thanks for clarifying. Not sure offhand about the speed difference between Radeon 9000 vs the Voodoo3 or MX-4000.

I just realized from re-reading your first post that the CPU is underclocked. How come? How are you achieving the underclock - reducing FSB, or multiplier? If it's the former, I'm wondering if that affects the AGP and PCI bus speeds and contributing to the audio stutter.

Can you try Half-Life with the CPU operating at normal clock speed to see if that improves the audio stutter?

I have the CPU underclocked because my motherboard is a 1.0 revision and does not have the correct clock generator chip to correctly achieve 133MHz bus, as it does not have a 1/4 PCI divider and thus the PCI slots would become unstable. I could try, but I feel like it would do more harm than good to go above a 100MHz bus even with the RAM you gave me.

I have a Pentium III 850 at 100MHz bus coming in the mail this Wednesday, but I don't have confirmation that it's functional. I'll test it to see if it works when it arrives, and if it may help with performance.

I also checked some benchmarking websites, and a Radeon 9000 is significantly more powerful than a Voodoo3, comparatively speaking, the least of which being it's a 128MB card vs. the Voodoo3's 16MB. I'd say on average it's probably twice as fast or more, so it can handle the load of a game like Half-Life a lot more smoothly, but I've already spent far too much on what I have and don't have any interest in spending more just to make one game sound better. the new CPU with slight overclocking to push it into the 900MHz range might be my best bet for performance increases, unless I really wanna shell out money for a third graphics card or a new mobo. Which, I don't.

oh the Radeon 9000 completely wipes the floor compared to any Voodoo3 (and Voodoo5 for that matter). Even the mobility variant. TnL, pixel shaders, compressed textures, 32-bit color, a good fillrate... It's literally generations ahead.

I figured it would, and it probably would have been better value for money to get a Radeon card for the performance boost, but if my goal was limited to “get old games to run well”, I could have saved myself hundreds of dollars by just using emulators and wrappers on my modern rig like I was doing before. I feel like the inherent novelty of building an old machine is part of the fun, even when you run headlong into compatibility issues and hardware limitations.

The new CPU arrived a couple days ago. I haven’t overclocked it, but so far it seems to have not made a particular difference with the sound issue as it currently stands. I think I’m gonna try enabling the console and putting in some commands to meddle with the settings, or perhaps trying out a couple patches to see what changes.

Update: trying to enable the console causes this version of Half-Life to crash.

However, something even stranger happened: after that incident, my AWE64 Value crapped out and would no longer play CD audio or MIDI, so I yanked it out and removed the drivers. Once the Live was the only sound card in the system, the audio issues in Half-Life have disappeared almost entirely!

I can only guess that, for some reason, HL only wanted to use the AWE64 for audio no matter what other card was in the system OR which one was the preferred audio output in Multimedia settings, so the audio was still screwed up despite everything I tried to fix it. Maybe HL needs IRQ 5 to handle audio properly, and now that the Live was the only card and taking up IRQ 5, the audio works more appropriately now? I dunno.

Very interesting. I do wonder if the AWE64 has had issues before that and it was causing problems on the ISA bus. I can say that I did not experience any issues with an ISA ES1869 on IRQ5 active next to an SB Live on IRQ10 as long as the SB Live was set to the primary card in multimeda settings.

NeoG_ wrote on 2025-10-20, 08:03:

Very interesting. I do wonder if the AWE64 has had issues before that and it was causing problems on the ISA bus. I can say that I did not experience any issues with an ISA ES1869 on IRQ5 active next to an SB Live on IRQ10 as long as the SB Live was set to the primary card in multimeda settings.

I’m not sure. The only problem I can think of was Deus Ex having really crunchy, crackly audio, but that was before I installed the drivers from the CD.

I had a brief moment where wave audio was randomly disabled on the Live yesterday too, which makes me think the card may not be dead and something else happened. Still, I think I would prefer getting a dedicated MIDI card instead of trying to reinstall the AWE64 Value, as that card has a notorious problem with Build Engine games where the game suffers from slowdown if the card is used for both sound and MIDI, and the sound fx are at higher quality than 11KHz. The Live doesn’t have this problem, but DOS games can only use the card’s internal synthesizer for MIDI and it sounds like poo compared to the SC-55 I have.