I spent several hours messing with various settings and discovered the the problem seem to cure itself. First I tried all the different IRQ/DMA/etc. settings (no luck) then I went into DxDiag and turned off sound hardware acceleration. This is when the problem disapear. I had previouly turned off digital filtering in game and when I went in I turned it back on and the sound improved further. I then played the game for sometime and acidently quit (forget how to get back to the game from the main menu- Esc- Duh!) when I went back in the static had returned. I then left and restarted my computer. When I went back in the static was gone. Later when I was playing and I loaded a Quick Save (can't beleive they existed back then!!) and the static had returned. Upon its return I remembered having a similar problem in GTA Vice City where everything suddenly for no reason would become staticy, I discovered that if I Alt-Tab'ed the static cleared. Since I remembered this I decided to try it with Virtual PC but discovered it dosen't minamize so I quit VPC and came back in to discover the static was gone.

Now I have solved the mistery of the static but occationally it still skips and the videos still have problems but I fear these are unfixable problems because I remember having them back when I first played Crusader on my 486. No matter the problems are trivial and with subtites I really dosen't matter.

Sorry to have posted a question and then solved it myself but I tried many things (including the DMA/IRQ/Etc. stuff) and I must have open the game at least a dozen times before I posted.

If anybody knows how to combat the remaining anomolies please do tell but if not, no matter, thanks anyway.

I managed to fix 90% of the remaining problems. I still have the occational skip over 1/4 of a word but it is easily understandable.

I fixed it by using winimage to make an .iso of the crusader cd, and then loading the .iso into Virtual PC. I asume the problem had something to do with my CD-Rom drive or the dos drivers I am using, but its gone now.

Once again sorry for making a post and then answering it myself but at least the next time someone else has a problem like this they can look here.

I have isolated the source of the "1/4 word skip" that I expirence durring music and videos and have found that it has to do with use 16-bit sound.

I was reading through some of the Virtual PC docs and I discovered that virtual PC emulates Sound Blaster 16 it is set up so that DMA 1 is 8-bit sound and DMA 5 is 16-bit sound. (I know the numbers are right but i'm not sure if "DMA" is right it could be another of those settings all I remember is that its the last setting- it's late). When I set the sound to be SB16 or AWE32 (not AWU- my bad) and set the DMA on 1 poof no more skip. Unfortunatly since that makes the sound 8-bit it gets staticy and the quality goes down, the static not horrible by any means, but it's there.

My real question is why would it have a problem with 16-bit? It almost seems like some sort of buffering problem because the skips seem to occur at regular intervals. I probably way off in my guess but it's my best one. But the question still remains why 16-bit? And also my firend (as mentioned in post above) reports no skips or static (I was wrong about him using an audigy 2 acutally its a SB 512- different system)? Im not sure if hes running on 8-bit or 16-bit, I'll have to ask. But I just don't get it; what is it is my sound hardware too new, too old, just incompatible in general, crapy in general, or what? And why a split skip every 10-15 seconds on 16-bit? If its too slow why does the SB 512 (significantly older) have no problem?

If anyone has any thoughts on any of this please feel free to speak up, I just feel so alone in my monolog (I can't spell ok) and wonder if anyone is actually listening. Well at least I haven't gotten yelled at for doing something didn't know i wasn't supposed to do...yet.

DosFreak seems to be the one to ask on this:
showthread.php?threadid=526&highlight=Crusader

Personally, I'd just chalk it up to VPC's poor SoundBlaster support (and no, they're not likely to fix it).

I've experienced the same behaviour with VPC. Sound development was never really a big focus with the Connectix team......it's doubtful that it will be so for the Microsoft team. Your best hope is of course DosBox......unfortunately Crusader is currently unsupported in Dosbox.....

Yes, I had the same experience as Paradox. It is sad because otherwise Virtual PC would be a good solution for many games which either don´t work in DOSBox or work very slowly there and also for some Windows games which don´t work in XP (BTW: after Microsoft acquisition is VPC cheaper). My experience with VPC and Windows 98SE in it: Good results with many adventure games (it is genre I prefer so I tried lots of them) except of that sound skipping. Sometimes is sound perfect (no skipping at all), sometimes with very rare skips (the game is rather playable then), sometimes it skips horrible so it is completely unplayable. All this often happens in the same game without its setup changes, just at different time (when the game was closed and started again later). I tried many settings in VPC (similarly as Paradox) but found no rule in this behaviour and now it seems to me completely accidental. The Win98 restarts did not solve the problem, shutting down VPC and start it again also did not help. No luck with installing Win95 in VPC, no luck with the Windows XP restarts. I created ISO and run the game from it and skipping disappeared, than I run VPC other day and skipping was there again. With disabled DirectX acceleration sometimes is skipping there, sometimes not. It also does not depend on the computer power, the same results were with 1Ghz and 2.5Ghz machine (the sound card is SB 5.1 Live!). I would very much appreciate solution to this really annoying problem if somebody could find it.

It's on my list of games to investigate. 😀