Your OS install is hosed. Wipe and reinstall Windows. 😜

(Man, my new job is starting to get to my head, since that's our recommendation for almost everything 😜)

Originally posted by Unregistered The graphics seem smooth also yet, my whole system will just automatically crash without giving my warning when playing these games.

If your whole system is crashing, something is wrong well beyond the scope of the games.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

I'd almost say you had something directly accessing your hardware (a no-no in XP), but it would prevent VDMSound from working and probably wouldn't crash your whole OS.

Honestly, this sounds like something nasty at the OS-level. You still have Compaq support?

System could crash easily if direct-IO driver was running and the game(s) touched the SB hardware, triggering an IRQ that the sound driver may or may not be able to handle gracefully. MIDI and AdLib would work flawlessly, of course (AdLib conditional on having a real OPL chip on the soundcard, of course).
V.

Originally posted by vladr System could crash easily if direct-IO driver was running and the game(s) touched the SB hardware, triggering an IRQ that the sound driver may or may not be able to handle gracefully.

But if this were the case (direct hardware access) wouldn't VDMSound fail to work at all? He said they ran OK, then crashed later...Hrmm...

He mentioned that MIDI music was working fine, which may work with direct io in some cases. In any case, upon reading the original post again, I see it happens with games that don't necessarily use the SB (=> no IRQ's), so yeah, direct io is probably not the correct explanation. If these games onlyuse MIDI (not AdLib, no digitised sound effects) then I'd have to know more about the crash (BSOD? which DLL/.SYS?)

Nicht Sehr Gut wrote:

But if this were the case (direct hardware access) wouldn't VDMSound fail to work at all? He said they ran OK, then crashed later...Hrmm...

The crashing occurs about 5 minutes into the games. I should also mention that its not vdm sounds complete fault. The games crash also just running them regularly at their dos prompts. I have new pc games(medal of honor) and emulator games(mame) and so forth that run flawlessy yet my computer doesnt seem to like these classic agi and sci games?

Originally posted by Unregistered The crashing occurs about 5 minutes into the games. I should also mention that its not vdm sounds complete fault. The games crash also just running them regularly at their dos prompts.

That means it's not VDMSound at fault at all.

I have new pc games(medal of honor) and emulator games(mame) and so forth that run flawlessy yet my computer doesnt seem to like these classic agi and sci games?

It sounds like the problem here is with DOS titles in general. Do you have any other DOS titles that you can try in XP?

One other thing to consider is that laptop displays work differently than a standard CRT. That could possibly be causing trouble as well. You might consider hooking the laptop up to a CRT and try playing the game on the CRT display and see if you still get these problems.