dukeofurl wrote on 2024-12-11, 21:07:

-I've tried using both Daemon tools and alcohol 120% for running CD images from the HDD. Each works great, except... if the game has redbook audio, then the game will run full speed until the audio starts playing, at which point it will slow down to a crawl and stutter frequently while the redbook audio plays perfectly. My theory is that the P233mmx cpu is not fast enough to run the game as well as deal with the overhead of reading the redbook audio from the disc image, in which case there is no particular fix I can do here. Does that sound right?

Sounds about right, and your doing well. Majority of people don't even have redbook working in Daemon tools.
On a real CD drive Redbook would go direct to the soundcard using the audio cable, meaning the rest of the PC only has to deal with processing the data.
It's a pretty big ask for a P233 to have to deal with both data and constant stream of uncompressed audio.

dukeofurl wrote on 2024-12-11, 21:07:

-The overwhelming majority of dos games seem to run very well via the Win98 dos shell, but notably, Blackthorne runs extremely slowly, like 50% or 25% as fast as it should. This gets fixed by rebooting the system into DOS where the game runs correctly. Given how popular Blackthorne was, curious if this is really how it behaves for anyone with Windows 9x, or if its related to my system in some way (my video card is an S3 Trio). I looked around a bit for patches but did not see anything. A few other games, like Apogee games such as Biomenace and Stargunner, periodically have a slight stutter as they scroll that doesn't exist in dos. Just curious if there are any settings to tweak somewhere that might help that out, too. These games run on 386s so it shouldn't be a matter of not having enough horsepower on my machine to run them, just imperfect dos compatibility while in Windows I guess 😉

Again sounds about right, I'm not familiar with the exact games you mention but even in Windows 3x days windows drivers would get in the way and maybe cause issues.
It's not due to horsepower, more that in dos software has direct access to hardware. In windows you have another layer that gets between the 2.

Can't help with the sound question, I know what you mean but have always just used the default mixer programs.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-12-11, 22:47:

Sounds about right, and your doing well. Majority of people don't even have redbook working in Daemon tools.
On a real CD drive Redbook would go direct to the soundcard using the audio cable, meaning the rest of the PC only has to deal with processing the data.
It's a pretty big ask for a P233 to have to deal with both data and constant stream of uncompressed audio.

To be fair, the redbook audio works only in win9x software and dos games won't play it on my machine via the disc image tools no matter if I've enabled the analogue audio option or tweaked other drive and CD audio playback settings, but doing some furious searching through the forums and elsewhere, it seems this is a very common situation, at least when using VXD drivers and isa sound cards. I guess it's moot for me anyway since it would make my game run poorly on this system even if it worked. We need a hardware solution for disc drives, like floppy drive emulators, so we can run a cable to the soundcard and cut the CPU out of the picture like the drives of the day 😀

dukeofurl wrote on 2024-12-11, 22:59:

Sounds about right, and your doing well. We need a hardware solution for disc drives, like floppy drive emulators, so we can run a cable to the soundcard and cut the CPU out of the picture like the drives of the day 😀

Well there are hardware options out there, or due soon. But I suspect none will support images of disks with copy protection. I have a TattieBogle IDE simulator and it was able to play CD audio in the DOS games that I tried on my Pentium MMX system. But it only supports bin/cue and Iso formats. Formats that can store copy protection data aren't supported.

chinny22 wrote on 2024-12-11, 22:47:

On a real CD drive Redbook would go direct to the soundcard using the audio cable, meaning the rest of the PC only has to deal with processing the data.
It's a pretty big ask for a P233 to have to deal with both data and constant stream of uncompressed audio.

Yes if you remembered to hook the audio cable up. By Win98 though, the digital audio path was available and you needed about 400Mhz or so not to get the stuttery mess that is "authentic" with a 233Mhz CPU if you had a real drive and didn't hook up the analog audio cable. I think you could play an audio CD by itself though, which is what ppl did to test their CD Audio was working... and doing nothing much else, it worked, so they thought it was fully working ... but then in a game or multimedia app, problems.

Though depending on the intensity of the game, I think ppl ran across this thing until CPUs were well into the gigahertz, if they were near min recommended CPU for the game, particularly when OEMs started saving the 25 cents on the cablein late 90s. Then a couple of years later, they were saving 25c on the cable, and 5 cents on each of the soundcard headers and header on the optical drive, so you were screwed for adding it if you wanted to.

edit: I said by win98 but I am not sure if the feature came in with SE

I can play CD audio no problem/no skips from a disc image when using Windows CD player software. So I can confirm the pentium 233 is at least good enough to do that.

I came upon this optical drive emulator last night. It looks pretty promising as a hardware solution. It looked in the image of the board like it might have the CD-ROM audio cable pins, but I guess the description says you need to buy a separate additional small PCB in addition in order to have that functionality. Still pretty good though! I'll have to add it to the wish list https://www.zuluide.com/

This thread is worth keeping an eye on a few options are becoming available for optical emulation.
Gotek like Optical Driver Emulator - Is it possible?

dukeofurl wrote on 2024-12-11, 21:07:

-I've tried using both Daemon tools and alcohol 120% for running CD images from the HDD. Each works great, except... if the game has redbook audio, then the game will run full speed until the audio starts playing, at which point it will slow down to a crawl and stutter frequently while the redbook audio plays perfectly. My theory is that the P233mmx cpu is not fast enough to run the game as well as deal with the overhead of reading the redbook audio from the disc image, in which case there is no particular fix I can do here. Does that sound right?

Haven't noticed performance issues with Redbook audio with Daemon Tools with a PMMX233, more to the point I've played through Hunter Hunted on a 180Mhz (60 * 3 FSB) IDT Winchip C6 without issues, which is less powerful than a P133 - the bigger issue is you can't control the music volume in-game, you'll need to do it via Daemon Tools itself.

If something uses the goldilocks most used integer instruction mix that WinChip was designed for, it may be faster than a PMMX at same clock, but if it's FPU heavy or uses rarer integer instructions, that's when it's driving with the handbrake on. So stuff that was released prior to the WinChip was has a good chance of having "voted" in the selection of it's hardware implemented instructions, so be quite fast on it, while stuff that was released after is using all Intels fancy new instructions so might be real slow. So I would say it could have been twice as fast as the Hunter Hunted min spec P90 CPU, so plenty of cycles available for the audio still.

DEAT wrote on 2024-12-17, 06:26:

dukeofurl wrote on 2024-12-11, 21:07:

-I've tried using both Daemon tools and alcohol 120% for running CD images from the HDD. Each works great, except... if the game has redbook audio, then the game will run full speed until the audio starts playing, at which point it will slow down to a crawl and stutter frequently while the redbook audio plays perfectly. My theory is that the P233mmx cpu is not fast enough to run the game as well as deal with the overhead of reading the redbook audio from the disc image, in which case there is no particular fix I can do here. Does that sound right?

Haven't noticed performance issues with Redbook audio with Daemon Tools with a PMMX233, more to the point I've played through Hunter Hunted on a 180Mhz (60 * 3 FSB) IDT Winchip C6 without issues, which is less powerful than a P133 - the bigger issue is you can't control the music volume in-game, you'll need to do it via Daemon Tools itself.

Well that's interesting. I'd love for there to be something I've overlooked, but I feel like I've tried every tweakable setting in daemon tools with no performance improvement. Some of the games I was testing out were Raiden II and the windows version of Ignition. Do you have the analogue audio option checked in daemon tools?