@keenmaster486 I'm pretty much out of ideas at the moment (and can't find a T41 to test with).
If you play a wav file with media player, and then start a DOS Prompt, is audio still playing normally? What about when you start a DOS game?

Please also install the A04.1 attached in this post. You can adjust buffer= in the .ini (needs a system reboot to apply). Try adjusting that and see if it makes any difference.

@stanwebber can you also try the attached version? First, without any changes, see if the MIDI stutters are gone. Then, in the .ini file, set priority to realtime instead of auto and reboot. Retest if the first note during FM playback is still messed up. Also retest MIDI as well.

Thanks for the Sysinternals process explorer tip, I will use that!

the first fm note still gets mangled with some frequency, but setting priority to realtime has cleared that up 100%. i don't think my experience is the norm though. i've come to discover that my soundcard and/or system is very timing sensitive. it has very little to do with cpu usage as there typically isn't any. what seems to fix the stuttering in most cases is a generous increase to the audio buffers. this has worked for bassmidi (vst), qsynth and munt. timidity++ was a complete mess until i raised its thread priority to above normal. audio in dosbox ece was barely recognizable until the audio blocksize was increased above 4096 (default 512).

it took a heavy lift. but i have most everything adjusted by trial and error so that playback is smooth. as you can imagine, latency is a nightmare. this soundcard is the worst i have ever used and i'm stuck with it.

voplsrv is working as well as it can on my system i think. i also tried it out on an athlon xp kt133a board and the results so far have been good. btw, the install.bat is not updating the new voplsrv ini so i had to manual replace the old one.

Does instaling the WDM Audio update for 98SE (269601USA8.EXE) and/or SweetLow's updated SBEMUL.SYS ( http://sweetlow.orgfree.com/download/sbemul.zip - providing local mirror in case of link troubles) improve things

sdz wrote on 2026-07-16, 17:50:

Please also install the A04.1 attached in this post. You can adjust buffer= in the .ini (needs a system reboot to apply). Try adjusting that and see if it makes any difference.

No difference. All DOS programs and games produce no FM audio at all. OPLWIN32 still working fine. OPLWIN32 also works fine if I run it simultaneously with a DOS program (one that is not trying to write to the OPL2 ports).

Btw DOS games produce PC speaker and SB digitized sounds just fine, so it's not like they're muting the audio output or something.