XP's "Enable Digital Audio" Streams the Digital Audio over the PCI bus so the cable is not necessary.

This is not your problem. Your problem is most likely the fact that NT's MSCDEX driver does not support the necessary functions to enable your CD audio. You can verify this by trying your game under real DOS and seeing if it works or more simply loading up Connectix Virtual PC and seeing if it works under there.

DosFreak wrote:

This is not your problem. Your problem is most likely the fact that NT's MSCDEX driver does not support the necessary functions to enable your CD audio.

It's being worked on. Remember our MSCDEX Research thread here?
showthread.php?threadid=280

Well, have patience... I know I am finding it hard to be patient, too! 😀

XP's "Enable Digital Audio" Streams the Digital Audio over the PCI bus so the cable is not necessary.

Err, no. It sends audio through the "digital CD" cable. Without it it'll send it through the regular Audio CD cable, or, if it can't find that, THEN through PCI, I believe.

Noooo, priority is PCI. That is one of the new "features" with XP. Digital Audio over the PCI bus...without the Digital cable.

You learn something new every day. 😀

And in 2000?

Thanks for the tip to use connextic virtual pc. It just needed Dos 6.2, mouse driver and CD-drivers and it was good to go.

The game works now perfectly, and even in window 😀

Fisu: See this thread and join in the testing... 😀
showthread.php?threadid=490

Snover wrote:

And in 2000?

Nope. 🙁 Only works in XP.

DosFreak wrote:

Noooo, priority is PCI. That is one of the new "features" with XP. Digital Audio over the PCI bus...without the Digital cable.

[vladr: edit, changed PCI to IDE, silly me. I really need to get some sleep one of these days...]

AFAIK when Windows is configured for "Digital audio" it actually uses IDE *only*, otherwise the drive will output on both the analogue and digital lines (but not IDE) and it's up to you which of the two audio lines (digital or analogue) you plug into your soundcard (assuming that the soundcard supports digital input). So when "Digital audio" is enabled Windows will "rip" the CD on the fly for you by reading the sectors and playing them through DirectSound, and when "Digital audio" is not set in Windows then Windows will let the play/stop commands go through to the drive, which will then read the sectors and convert to analogue (+ digital for drives that also have digital audio output) and it's up to whatever you plug the audio (analogue and/or digital) in to mix this with whatever else is playing on that whatever device. So there is no priority or anything like that AFAIK, it's either IDE (and Windows does all the work, like playing MPEG2 in a software DVD player and going through DirectX which in turns sends the stuff to your TV/display), or it's not IDE and then the CD drive does all the work, and all is hardware-mixed on your soundcard (like playing the same DVD movie in a standalone DVD player that outputs composite, svideo etc. with no Windows or DirectX involved).

V.

vladr wrote:

AFAIK when Windows is configured for "Digital audio" it actually uses PCI *only*,...

Thanks for the full explanation. Ugh. Too much tech info. You make brain cry. Need ibuprofen.

Originally posted by Nicht Sehr Gut
[...] Too much tech info. You make brain cry. Need ibuprofen.

Yesssss!!!! Mission accomplished! 😁

I have another theory about this, let me explain:

I think that when you check "enable digital audio" (this checkbox is available in both Windows 2000 and XP in the Device Manager, under the properties page of the CDROM drive) Windows just enables an API or something similar that allows applications to play back Audio CDs through the ATAPI bus.
I didn't say "PCI bus" because most new chipsets have an independent bus for ATA/ATAPI devices that bypasses the PCI bus (intel uses Hub-Link, VIA uses V-Link, nVIDIA uses HyperTransport and SIS uses MuTIOL). They did this in order to alleviate the saturation of the PCI bus when you have many cards installed.

However, even when "enable digital audio" is checked, you can still play back music using the analog output of your drive.

I could confirm this with Exact Audio Copy, using it as a CD-Player. I checked the "enable digital audio" checkbox in Windows Device Manager, and then I went to Exact Audio Copy and pressed the PLAY button. Then the music started to play through the analog output.

How do I know this? Because I opened my computer, disconnected the analog audio cable, and the music stopped! Then I re-connected the cable and I could hear the music again.

This happened both with EAC configured to use "ASPI interface", and "Native interface for NT".

Greetings.

That's weird. Why, then, is CD audio choppy when that isn't enabled and NOT choppy when it is?

Sorry, I must have been drunk or something. Replace PCI with IDE in my previous message. Thanks for waking me up, Leolo. 😀

I can imagine that under certain circumstances "Enable digital playback" would do nothing. Or it could be that "Enable digital CD audio" only applies to MCI (high-level API, where play/stop commands can be "intercepted" by Windows), whereas what you tried (ExactAudioCopy or whatever) went straight to the device and did ioctl like mscdexnt or nero (thus bypassing Windows' "hooks").

You should also be able to watch your CPU go one notch up (the drive is very likely reading at 1x only) when digital audio is enabled, as opposed to not having digital audio enabled. Also, altering the Wave (not master) volume in Windows' mixer should affect "Digital output" music, but not the analogue or digital audio (via digital audio cable that plugs stright into the soundcard) one. To get the "Digital audio" effect you'd have to use a simple program that goes through the high level media control interafce (MCI) API and doesn't talk directly to the hardware. In Win2k you'll find a cheap CD player in Acessories/Entertainment. Media player may also do (although v8, or even v7, *is* capable of ripping CDs, so it's not as innocent as it may look in terms of "not talking directly to the hardware" -- via the driver, of course, but still, not via MCI which dwells in user-land...).

V.

Hi Vlad,

Thanks a lot for the technical info. I did try what you suggested, and you're right: normal CD-players behave just like the cheap win2k cdplayer.
It seems that only special programs like Nero and EAC are able to talk to the drive in a "low-level" fashion and therefore bypass whatever that "digital audio" checkbox says.

To Snover: That is really puzzling! In my experience, it's always been exactly the opposite. When "digital audio" checkbox is selected, some drives will play back choppy sound because they aren't capable of accurate DigitalAudioExtraction.
But those issues were always resolved by unchecking "digital audio".
You must be having problems with the analog output of your cd-rom drive or with the input of your soundcard.

Greets.

I use the digital CD cable, not the analogue CD cable. 😀

I suppose I could try reinstalling Driver and seeing if it acts up...
the problem was that the controls would cut out for a few milliseconds every few seconds which made it EXTREMELY difficult to play... it wasn't the sound being choppy.

If your disks are so badly scratched that the drive has problems with it, maybe it's time to make a copy before they get completely destroyed..?

Hi Snover,

Ah! then maybe you should try the analog port to see if the problems disappear (if you haven't already).

I remember a year ago, when I bought a Terratec DMX XFire 1024 sound card. I tried to plug my cd-rom to the sound card with the SPDIF cable, but I had enormous troubles. The card wouldn't recognize the correct frequency and played the sound at 32 kHz instead of 44.1 kHz. The music was horribly distorted also.

After exchanging a few emails with their technical support, we came to the conclusion that the card was broken. I returned it to the store but they didn't have another Terratec at the moment, so I ended up with a SB Live! Value, which has worked perfectly since then.

My only complaints about the SB Live! have been regarding its awful history of horrendous drivers. However, I have recently switched to kX drivers, which work a whole lot better. And now I'm happy 😀

http://kxproject.spb.ru/

Cheers.

Too bad kX doesn't support EAX, or I'd be there yesterday.