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Sound not working in Siege

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First post, by Unregistered

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G'day All,
VdmSound is great. Works with practically all my old games with only minor tweaking. But I'm having problems with the game Siege by Mindcraft. The game only works if I select "No Sound" and "No Music" in the installation program. If I try running it with sound, i.e. Using the default soundblaster settings, the install program tells me that I don't have a soundcard connected or that it can't get the DMA setting to respond.
If I select to use "Adlib", the program still responds by saying it can't access the DMA, but the game will play with music but no sound effects. The game runs fast but I'm trying to get the sound to work first before I start playing around with Speedset and the like.
I've downloaded the latest Vdmsound and also Launchpad plus the update. I've tried playing around with all the soundblaster and adlib settings as well as changing the DMA polling. I have the original game on floppies but I've also downloaded the version off The Underdogs site in the hope that it was just my version, but it doesn't work with that one either.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Computer Specs:
Asus7V motherboard
AMD 900MHz
392MB RAM
Asus GeForce2 MX 32MB
Hercules MuseXL
WinXP

Reply 1 of 3, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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You picked a hard one. Start with the readme.txt from my CD-ROM:
- Special Note for 486/50 Mhz machines and Sound Blaster soundcards -

Problems may occur with Sound Blaster soundcards when attempting
to play music on a 486 machine running at 50 Mhz speed.
They included a little program to turn off the cache in the 486. You can be certain this not effective for a 900MHz AMD.

Even in DosBox, I was unable to get SoundBlaster audio to work. Even when I used it's ability to use less CPU (went down to 1 cycle), install program repeatedly complained that either the port or the DMA were not responding.

Choosing Adlib for sound and music seems to work. Be aware however, that I did experience occasional lockups and crashes.

Also, running this natively, it will be insanely fast. You can try a slowdown program, but DosBox would probably be better (I had an "Action16" executable in the startup that doesn't work in DosBox, but I removed it as it has nothing to do with the actual game).

Unfortunately, this is not one of the games that they ported to the C64 and Amiga. So, the DOS version is the only one.

If it's not stable with AdLib, try choosing "Speaker". If that doesn't work, try turning sound and music off. If that doesn't work, you're sunk.

If you are able to run it with AdLib be aware the intro slideshow seemed to lockup on me when I tried to skip it. If you have that problem just let it run until it hits the main menu.

Also, be aware that you can improve the AdLib quality by increasing it's "Synthesis" rate to 44100 Hz in VDMSound.

Reply 2 of 3, by Stiletto

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Nicht Sehr Gut wrote:

Even in DosBox, I was unable to get SoundBlaster audio to work. Even when I used it's ability to use less CPU (went down to 1 cycle), install program repeatedly complained that either the port or the DMA were not responding.

That may be a bug that Harekiet/Qbix might be interested in. All matters involving soundcard detection are usually interesting.

For the record, you can get DOSBox here: http://dosbox.zophar.net

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 3 of 3, by Nicht Sehr Gut

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Originally posted by Stiletto That may be a bug that Harekiet/Qbix might be interested in. All matters involving soundcard detection are usually interesting.

Actually, I believe that the game's programmers are at fault. I even tested this on a 486-66 with an ISA SB32AWE and it came back with the same results.

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