Yeah, I have encountered this problem as well. It happens on all of my machines (486, K6-3, Athlon) and is apparently caused by the CuteMouse driver, since the affected games and demos work fine with a different mouse driver (Microsoft, Logitech).

If it's not something integrally wrong with the CuteMouse driver, perhaps the mouse IRQ is conflicting with the soundcard IRQ. The easiest way to test would be to disable all sound in the game and see if the problem persists.

If that is the problem, then the solution would be to move the soundcard or the mouse to another IRQ. If you're not using your parallel port, disabling that in your BIOS should free up something convenient.

Is your mouse serial or PS/2, by the way?

Also, using ScummVM for the Kyrandia games makes a lot of sense these days.

hi

this is interesting to hear since i stopped using cutemouse
version 1 or 2 since they both cause obvious audio lag
for me when running Frontier: ELITE2. using microsoft
mouse instead solved the issue. in my example sound was
played via an external sound canvas module in
mt32 emulation mode and not an internal card.

i settled on using version 8.2 of microsoft mouse which
may or may not be the best option but it's worth a try.

good luck

Jorpho wrote:

If it's not something integrally wrong with the CuteMouse driver, perhaps the mouse IRQ is conflicting with the soundcard IRQ. The easiest way to test would be to disable all sound in the game and see if the problem persists.

[...]

Is your mouse serial or PS/2, by the way?

The mouse is PS/2, and at least in my case, it is not an IRQ conflict (I also tested different mice and ruled out the KVM switch).

Allright, I downloaded the latest Logitech drivers I could find (version 7.30) and installed them. It uses 27K of conventional RAM which I think is way too much for such a simple program. But anyway, tested again, and yes, the mouse works fine now! But now the sound effects in Hand of Fate didn't work anymore. I thought that might be an IRQ conflict.
So I downloaded MSD.EXE (if anyone knows a better program to check this, please tell me) and it didn't show any problems. I disabled the LPT and COM ports in the BIOS setup, checked again, nothing changed.
I checked my sound card configuration, but it seemed allright so I didn't change anything, and just hit OK. Then I got a 'WSS I/O error'. I tried setting the WSS (Windows Sound System) IRQ to something else, none of the options worked except for IRQ 11 (it was on 7 which is LPT1?? but hasn't caused any problems so far)
Then I checked Hand of Fate again, and now everything works like it should! But now I can't use the WSS anymore...?

I suppose the WSS settings have nothing to do with SBPro2 compatibility, so it's kind of strange how changing those settings fixed the sound in Hand of Fate.

Does anyone have any clue about what just happened??

My sound settings are:
SBPro2: Address 220h, IRQ 5, Low DMA 1
WSS: Address 530h, IRQ 11 (was 7), Low DMA 0, High DMA 7
The mouse I'm using is a standard Logitech 3-button PS/2 ball mouse by the way. It's on IRQ 12.

jwt27 wrote:

none of the options worked except for IRQ 11 (it was on 7 which is LPT1?? but hasn't caused any problems so far)

IRQ 7 used to be the standard SB port, even though it is indeed typically taken up by LPT1.

I have no idea what the Windows Sound System is (and why it needs an IRQ); I don't think I've heard of that before, so I can't help you there.

The Windows Sound System is normally used for sound output in windows 3.1, but there are a few (newer) games that can use it as well. This is the only way for me to get 16-bit/44kHz stereo sound from my sound card, so I prefer to use WSS in the games that support it (like Dungeon Keeper, Carmageddon, Fallout)

Why it needs an IRQ, I don't know. None of these games have an IRQ setting for WSS, they only ask for an address and DMA number. But still it doesn't work anymore since I changed the IRQ, and I can't set it back to 7 even though MSD reports that IRQ 7 is unused.

jwt27 wrote:

The Windows Sound System is normally used for sound output in windows 3.1, but there are a few (newer) games that can use it as well. This is the only way for me to get 16-bit/44kHz stereo sound from my sound card, so I prefer to use WSS in the games that support it (like Dungeon Keeper, Carmageddon, Fallout)

Interesting. I had always understood running DOS games from Windows 3.1 to be a terrible idea. If none of these games you're trying to run use WSS, certainly exiting Windows before running them sounds like a good idea.

Are you sure WSS isn't just resampling 16-bit/44kHz input to produce whatever your sound card normally outputs?

I don't use windows 3.1, only the windows sound interface provided by the sound card drivers.

My sound card (Yamaha YMF719) supposedly can handle 16bit/48kHz, so I don't think it is resampling the input to 8bit/22kHz. However I'm not sure about that. I could test it by playing a 16/44 WAV file through the WSS interface and recording the output, but I don't know of any WAV players that use WSS in DOS.
I already discovered that the card does no interpolation or low-pass filtering at all in Soundblaster mode, so it produces a lot of high frequency noise. But that might be used as an 'effect', to give the perception of treble at 11 and 22 kHz sampling rates 🤣

Carmageddon for example sounds completely different with both interfaces, you can definitely hear more distortion in SB mode (and no stereo for some reason?).

Supposedly there's also a driver called WSSXLAT.EXE (see the wikipedia article on WSS), which enables Soundblaster 16 support through WSS. However I've never been able to locate that driver.

It seems I got the WSS sound working again by fiddling around with the values and then setting them back to what they were. Dungeon Keeper's SNDSETUP.EXE asked for an IRQ address now, never seen that before. It's working fine however.

But now 3dfx games suddenly stopped working. All I get is a black screen now and the reset button is the only way out. Now I'm really confused.

I made a list of IRQ's used in my system, that might clear things up (or not). Sources are microsoft's MSD.EXE, some program called PCI.EXE, and the BIOS device listing that appears for a split second just before DOS boots up. (It's a good thing I play Epic Pinball alot or I wouldn't be able to hit the pause button at the right moment 🤣)

1IRQ -  MSD.EXE  - PCI.EXE -       BIOS       -
2----------------------------------------------
3 0  - Timer     -         - 
4 1  - Keyboard  -         - 
5 2  - 2nd 8259A -         - 
6 3  - Unused    -         - 
7 4  - Unused    -         - 
8 5  - Unused    -         - ISA Sound card
9 6  - Floppy    -         - 
10 7  - Unused    - Realtek - Network controller
11 8  - RTC       -         - 
12 9  - IRQ 2     -         - ACPI controller
1310  - Reserved  - Voodoo3 - Display controller
1411  - Reserved  -         - ISA Sound card
1512  - Mouse     -         - 
1613  - FPU       -         - 
1714  - IDE       - IDE1    - IDE controller
1815  - Reserved  - IDE2    - 

PCI.EXE did say that AGP was disabled though. But IIRC it said that before, when the 3dfx games were still working.

Ok wait, GTA still works in 3dfx mode. But when I start up Carmageddon after that, I get random pieces of GTA textures all over my screen instead of black 😕

hiya

about the only thing i can think of is that your sound
card also has an IDE port which if i remember
correctly could very well be on IRQ 10. if it doesn't
have a port then it probably still has the logic
on the chip?

i do have that card or a variant of it, some kind of
PINE card with a PT-2030 board which is believe
is generally known as an OPL3-SAX where X
stands for something or other.

from memory you utilise SETUPSA and fiddle around
with this and that disabling anything that looks
like IDE which i assume you have used already but
may have overlooked when setting up WSS?

bye

sklawz wrote:

hiya […]
Show full quote

hiya

about the only thing i can think of is that your sound
card also has an IDE port which if i remember
correctly could very well be on IRQ 10. if it doesn't
have a port then it probably still has the logic
on the chip?

i do have that card or a variant of it, some kind of
PINE card with a PT-2030 board which is believe
is generally known as an OPL3-SAX where X
stands for something or other.

from memory you utilise SETUPSA and fiddle around
with this and that disabling anything that looks
like IDE which i assume you have used already but
may have overlooked when setting up WSS?

bye

The sound card's IDE controller and all other unnecessary functions are already turned off, so that shouldn't be a problem. But when I initialize the sound card with SETUPSA /S, it does say MPU401 enabled, on IRQ 5 (same as the Soundblaster). Not sure if that could cause problems, or if it's supposed to be that way, but I can't seem to disable it.

I already figured out that it's possible to change IRQ/DMA settings without having the program check if they are correct or not. I edit the OPL3SA.INI file, which contains all the options (a LOT more than you can change with the setup program, 16bit DMA for example is supported but not listed in the program). Then run SETUPSA /S and it will just use the ini settings.
But, when I disable the MPU or change it's IRQ that way, it just ignores that single setting and enables it anyway on IRQ 5. 😒

lo

it's probably a good idea to also inspect any
possible conflicts of port addresses or
memory. i think msd can tell that since i seem
to remember using it for inspecting free
memory blocks for some reason. this is
all a bit vague but i am sure i used it
and it's normally found on the win98
install CD, but not installed?

it would also be a good idea to take your
cards out except video and then plug the
other two in one at a time to determine
which devices dislike each other. it
could possibly be your network card.

talking of network cards i have had issue
with one with EMM setup where a NIC had
a boot rom which maps to normally
free space. this is probably not related
but worth checking if it has a rom whilst
you poking around.

bye.

PS. it may also be worth searching ancient
forum posts for your hardware issue. no
doubt someone has had this problem before.
also, google probably still has the dejanews usenet
archive and usenet was actually useful in
that era so probably worth a search.

Thanks for the tips, I'll see if I can find anything.

Not sure if it helps any, but I attached the output of PCI.EXE to this post. It shows a lot of information about all PCI/AGP devices, maybe you or someone else who has experience with these kind of problems could have a look at it?
The sound card is not listed, since it's not a PCI card.

I think I found the problem..

After pulling out both cards, it still didn't work. Then I tried disabling drivers and TSRs one by one, and when I disabled UniRefresh the problem was solved. Guess I can't use that anymore, too bad, I really liked that program.

At least I'm quite sure now I have no conflicting IRQs, the sound interface and network card are no longer on the same IRQ so that won't cause any problems in the future. In the sound card drivers' readme.txt I also read that the SB and MPU401 interface share the same IRQ so now I know why changing that setting didn't do anything. Still it's strange that there is a setting for that at all if you can't change it...

Anyway, thanks to everyone who posted here!

jwt27 wrote:

Then I tried disabling drivers and TSRs one by one, and when I disabled UniRefresh the problem was solved. Guess I can't use that anymore, too bad, I really liked that program.

Maybe try VBEHz instead?

I have that program somewhere, tried it once but it didn't work as well as UniRefresh, IIRC. I could try it again, sure it's always better than nothing.