VOGONS


First post, by dukeofurl

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This is a bit of a first world problem.

I'm running some bin/cues of win 9x games with redbook audio on my Pentium II machine. All goes well, the music plays, except the sound effects in several games completely overwhelm the quieter volume of the CD audio and I'm stumped about how to separately increase the volume of the music or quiet the volume of the sfx so there is a better mix.

In the win98 volume mixer, I've got separate faders for CD audio vs wav audio, however since I'm using a cd drive emulator and there is no physical cable going from the CD drive to the sound card, the CD audio fader does nothing, and the wav volume fader simultaneously raises or lowers the CD audio and the sound effects in the games.

Games that themselves have separate volume faders for the CD music and sfx, such as Wipeout 2097, perform the same as the windows volume mixer. The in game sfx volume fader raises and lowers both sfx and music volume and the in game CD audio volume fader does nothing.

The drive emulator, Alcohol 120, seems to have a CD audio volume control in an options menu, however it is raised to the max level. At this max level, It's quieter than I'd like in most games... but in certain games (like Wipeout), the constant engine sound of the racing cars blocks out the quiet CD audio music tracks completely, which is surely not how it was designed to be.

I've tried daemon tools as well and had the same results.

Just wondering if there's anything else I can do to split the volume for wav and CD audio when emulating a disc drive.

My system:
Pentium II 266mhz
Win 98
Isa Vibra 16 sound card (vxd drivers)
Intel 440lx motherboard

Reply 1 of 2, by NeoG_

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The only option I can think of is to have a second sound card for the CD audio output - In alcohol 120% you can choose the audio device for CD Playback - then loop the output from that card back into the SB16 which would give you an independent volume slider for the CD audio

98/DOS Rig: BabyAT AladdinV, K6-2+/550, V3 2000, 128MB PC100, 20GB HDD, 128GB SD2IDE, SB Live!, SB16-SCSI, PicoGUS, WP32 McCake, iNFRA CD, ZIP100
XP Rig: Lian Li PC-10 ATX, Gigabyte X38-DQ6, Core2Duo E6850, ATi HD5870, 2GB DDR2, 2TB HDD, X-Fi XtremeGamer

Reply 2 of 2, by dukeofurl

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NeoG_ wrote on 2026-04-19, 22:27:

The only option I can think of is to have a second sound card for the CD audio output - In alcohol 120% you can choose the audio device for CD Playback - then loop the output from that card back into the SB16 which would give you an independent volume slider for the CD audio

That's pretty creative (no pun intended)! I do have an extra open isa slot in this system so that could be a possibility.