VOGONS

"Popping" and crackling audio in some games with CT4780 and Voodoo Banshee

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First post, by ramp4ge

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Hey folks. So this one's been fighting me and I'm annoyed.

I'm getting a system set up. It's an Athlon 1133 on a k7s5a. 512MB RAM. Sound is from a CT4780 with the onboard sound and game port disabled.

I'm currently running the V1.01.03 but I've also tried the V1.03.00 drivers.

When I launch some games (Flight Sim 98, X-Wing Alliance, Star Trek Armada) the games run great but there is a really bad crackling/popping/static sound with the audio.

If I use the Diamond 1.07 or 1.08 drivers for the 3DFX card (It's a Diamond Monster Fusion) it clears up the crackling issue but some games (like Star Trek Armada, mentioned above) just CTD when loading into the game, so I'm guessing there's an incompatibility issue there.

Have tried adjusting the audio hardware acceleration and it makes no difference.

Onboard audio (SIS) has no crackling but it does have an obnoxious high-pitched whine that I'm chalking up to the board being a Cap Apocalypse board and needing a recap.

Has anyone else had these issues or have any ideas that I can try? I could just use the Diamond drivers and say "Forget Armada" but it's one of my favorite games, and the crackling/popping audio in most other games is extremely annoying when using the generic 3DFX Voodoo Banshee drivers.

Thanks in advance!

Reply 1 of 4, by ramp4ge

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Little bit more info, I did finally get the 1.04.00 drivers to download and tried those and still have the same issue unfortunately.

Reply 2 of 4, by zapbuzz

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this sounds like a case of shared resources between audio and other devices sometimes you can manually re-assign them to non shared. The quickest way to see the shared resources is with the system information app in windows. You would need to use device manager to manually re-assign resources if permitted.
Also, your system might be struggling to keep up bandwidth with your sound card and maybe your motherboards built in one would be better.

Reply 3 of 4, by swaaye

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My guess is it's PCI bus contention caused by the video driver and you are seeing different behavior between video driver versions. The motherboard chipset/BIOS are probably partly at fault. K7S5A isn't exactly known to be trouble-free. It's possible there's a registry tweak for the Banshee that could reduce bus activity, which might be the cause of differences between the video drivers (look in the driver INF).

Reply 4 of 4, by cyclone3d

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Look at the IRQ assignments shown on the POST info screen. Pretty good guess that the sound card is using the same IRQ as something else.

You will want to move the sound card to a different slot that doesn't share an IRQ if possible.

Also, if there is a PCI latency setting in the BIOS, set that higher. 32 is probably the default. Change it to 64 if so.

This was a known issue back in the day where the motherboard mfgs blamed Creative and Creative blamed the motherboard mfgs.

It is possible that motherboard chipset drivers can make a difference as well.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

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