Hello!

I can't tell you what might be the cause of this, but as a lifelong Wing Commander geek, I can tell you categorically that the speed of your system is not the issue and a Pentium MMX won't be necessary. Something else is certainly at play here.

I would recommend you join us at the Wing Commander CIC and post in the tech support forum there, those guys know the game mechanics inside out and will surely be able to help you, if nobody can here of course.

Thanks! I'll try on that forum.
It's the weidest thing this. When I enter the berths, for example, sometimes I get an instrument, that's not supposed to be there, play a hanging note at channel 11 for 1 or 2 seconds . It happens on both my Sound Canvases (SC55 mark 1, v2, and SC55 mark 2) and indeed, even with the processor speed lowered by disabling the internal cache. And sometimes the music in the berths just plays perfect. So speed doesn't seem to be the problem. I tried using softmpu and a mpu-ipc-t , just to be sure it's not related to the UART-mode of the AWE64, but the problem persisted.

For hanging notes: https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Hanging_note_bug

Some versions of the boards have the bug, others not.
There is a thread about updating the DSP on SB16 to fix it, not sure it could be done on AWE, or if it solves your issue.
The Soundblaster DSP project

If he tried on MPU-IPC-T then that's the real deal. He's not using the SB card's midi port... unless the both the MPU and SB's MIDI port are mapped to the same address (e.g. 330).

Thanks for the replies. Indeed, I connected the Sound Canvas to the MPU-IPC. My AWE has DSP version 4.16 by the way, so that shouldn't have been the problem. I also tried an SB 16 without MPU enabled (via jumper) next to my MPU-IPC-T just to be sure, but the problem remains. So maybe there is something in the Pentium 2 architecture or chipset on the motherboard that causes this? If I understand the DosBox options file correctly, DosBox emulates Pentium 1 .

PII-233 has the CPU multiplier unlocked and can be changed in the BIOS settings of the ASUS P3B-F, try lowering it to 2.0x to see if it addresses the issue with the MIDI music. The L2 cache will be disabled with that multiplier by default but the performance impact with DOS games is minimal.

BTW, DOSBox doesn't accurately emulate CPUs, all the instructions are performed in 1 cycle which no real x86 CPU has.

Edit: I see that you slowed down the computer by disabling the L1 cache and it didn't work. Have you tried adjusting the "8-bit I/O Recovery Time" in the BIOS settings?

I did. I changed both 8-bit and 16-bit recovery from the default 1 busclock to 4 and 8 busclocks. No luck. I can't change the multiplier that much by the way: it's greyed out in the bios if I choose "Manual" for the cpu speed (maybe because the cpu is officialy a 350 mhz PII). The lowest possible bus speed is 66,8 mhz. I tried disabling snoop ahead and host bus fast data ready and set sdram MA wait State to slow. Still no luck. It's only WC3 that gives this problem. Tried other midi-cables too. I'll try my Yamaha MU128 on it and another motherboard with a VIA chipset later.

"BTW, DOSBox doesn't accurately emulate CPUs, all the instructions are performed in 1 cycle which no real x86 CPU has"
-> hmmm, interesting.

Hello everyone,
Sorry to bump this, but this still has me confused. As stated before, in WC3 DOS, the general midi instruments are mostly played correct in game, but some instruments go wrong and not always. Example: on the flight deck on part 8 most of the time "Violin" is played, while the correct instrument is "Pizzicatostr".
I've tried a variety of motherboards (intel chipsets and VIA), processors (133 mhz, 166mmx, Pentium II-400 and III 700), soundcards (ESS1868f, SB 64Gold, Sb16, Sb512pci, Wave Blaster daughterboard) and External midi devices. All give me problems producing the right midi instruments in game.
The strangest thing is that the WDM-driver of the ESS in Windows 98 / ME if perfect for midi. No problems. But, of course, there is no good dos sb-emulation when using WDM-drivers (lots of popping sounds in the game). So why are the WDM-drivers producing the correct midi and pure dos and VxD-drivers not? And is there a solution to this problem, or is this a bug in Wing Commander 3 and did no-one notice it?