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Please help - unusual timing/sound issue

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First post, by zalbar

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Dell Inspiron XPS gen 2 (same as inspiron 9300, i915 chipset)
Pentium-M 760 Dothan 2.0 GHz (centrino)
1GB PC4200 533MHz (sodimm 512MB x2)
geforce 6800 go ultra 256mb
onboard sigmatel C-Major audio
WinXP Pro SP2
Princess Maker 2, Cannon Fodder, any soundblaster/adlib game

Every game I have tried so far that uses soundblaster or adlib emulation has a sound skip about every 8 seconds. This does not seem to be the typical sound stuttering one gets when they push the emulation faster than the CPU can handle.

I've tried windowed, fullscreen, and different rendering methods. No effect.

Dosbox versions tried: 0.63, 0.64 CVS

None of the settings I have tried involving sound quality, SB type, core emulation cycles/frameskip have had any effect at all except of course when I get it up past 30k or so where the CPU can't manage and normal stuttering sets in.

The audio driver is up to date, and I've tried various levels of acceleration etc.

What I haven't been able to try is a game that uses only general midi or some other sound than soundlblaster/adlib. If someone can suggest an obtainable game for me to test, that would be great.

If anyone can recommend some sort of monitor that might help me figure out what could be occurring every 8 seconds or so, that would be good too. This only effects dosbox, no other programs or VDMsound or anything like that. It feels like some sort of timing issue.

I've tried cancelling the load-sensitive CPU dynamic clock speed stuff for centrino, forcing it to stay at 2.0GHz. No dice.

This is a vanilla install of XP, not done by dell, and I've only loaded drivers and left the supportware/bloatware behind.

Thanks guys; I've tried to take the suggestions for submitting an issue guide and basically fill in the blanks so as not to omit anything.

Zalbar

Reply 1 of 5, by Kaminari

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Mmm, I have a friend who's experiencing similar audio skips every 30 seconds or so with DOSBox on his Pentium M (1.7GHz) notebook...

Reply 2 of 5, by zalbar

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Interesting. I did a search for Pentium-M users and didn't see any other users specifically mentioning a problem like this, though I found a topic where one other Sigmatel user was having unspecified sound problems.

Update: Tested a game with LAPC1 sound and it does NOT exhibit this problem - I believe it is confined to soundblaster/adlib emulation.

Thanks again,
Zalbar

Reply 3 of 5, by HunterZ

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You might try playing with the buffer size settings in your dosbox.conf to see if that helps. Are you sure you're not running anything in the background that would be hitting your CPU, sound card, or other hardware every 8 seconds?

I was going to suggest checking for newer sound drivers at Sigmatel's web site (that is, if you're using the ones from Windows Update or Dell), but it seems they're wusses and won't put up their reference drivers for download. If your motherboard isn't a custom Dell part, you could try your motherboard manufacturer's site. Failing that, I'd look at Dell's site, and then Windows Update as a last resort.

Reply 4 of 5, by zalbar

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I found a few things which affect the problem.

increasing block size and adding a ton of prebuffer dropped the skips down to about 1 every 20 seconds.

Then I found that reducing sample rate conversion quality in my audio control panel improved it.

Switching audio rate to 44.1 khz in audio settings improved it a lot.

The combination of:

sample rate conversion: medium
44.1 khz
4096 block size
prebuffer 10 (default)

seems to have cured the problem about 90%.

So.. maybe sigmatel has crappy rate conversion performance when trying to deal with dosbox SB emulation.

Some sound cards have a native sample rate of 48khz - if I find out this is the case with the sigmatel, I might try changing to sample rate to match in dosbox and see if that helps too.

When I figure everything out, I'll leave a post that makes sense..

Thanks
Zalbar

Reply 5 of 5, by kc8oye

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I realize this is an old post. but I figured I would share..

The SigmaTel Audio sound card is a PIECE OF CRAP!!! it SUCKS!! it's DRIVERS SUCK!! DosBox does NOT play nice with it at all!!!

I use my sound card with my ham radio stuff, and the SigmaTel sound card will not work for ham radio because it's sample rate conversion is so terrible.

I reinstalled my windows XP SP3 setup onto a new drive.. couldn't figure out why dosbox audio for my morse code practice software was crackling, skipping, and experiencing really odd timing issues.

instead of a nice clean dah-dit-dah.. i was getting dah-diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit-dah or dah-didididi-dah.
took me a while to realize that I had switched my sound cards around (I have two of them) I switched to using my Creative Labs Audigy SE for the ham radio stuff and my onboard SigmaTel for my general purpose card.. well that works fine.. except DosBox doesn't like it 🙁

wish I could spare a PCI slot, I'd shut that sigmatel pos off back off and put another creative labs card in there...

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