Sound Problems

[667DLH]

Hi!
I have a PC with a Soundblaster PCI 128 Card.
The sound of DM is not working, and there are just strange noises.
Can anyone tell me what I have to do?!
Thanx!

[Sundeep Nandra]

I get that with my Sound Blaster PCI64 card....and can't find any way to sort it out. The game slows down whenever the sounds are played (and they sound terrible!). The only way I can play is without any sound. Sorry :(.

[Daniel Gustafsson]

Do you run it in Windows or DOS?

You will never get good sound in DM if you run it in Windows.

/Daniel

[Ken]

I get the same problem too. I have run the game via windows and in dos only mode, tried every configuration. I too can only play the game without sound. I am not a novice PC user, some sound cards just don't work with the game.

Ken

[Lionel]

On my PC, DM only run with PC speaker sound only.
I don't think it will work with my SB Live =((
The speaker PC sounds are not very well, but it run !

[Wilco Lobregt]

I think I know what your problem is. I had the same problems, but when I installed the dos sound drivers (running dos mode), the problem was solved.

[Sundeep Nandra]

Using the DOS drivers of my Sound Blaster PCI64 card, under DOS, the game still has terrible sound...although at least it runs at it's normal speed..where as in Windows the sound is even worse and changes the speed of the game. Annoying :>.

[Michael Grof]

Hello,

I can probably answer this neverending sound-problem question. If not the solution, then at least the reason of the problem.

Few years ago, I was developing SoundBlaster emulator for AdLib Gold sound cards. DM was one of test programs I used to check correctness of the emulation. The main problem is that DM does not use any advanced feature of the sound card, it uses the card only as 'dumb' digital/analog converter. The sound code is basically the same for the speaker and for SoundBlaster - high speed system timer just feeds individual samples into the device. New versions of SoundBlasters (PCI, Live) are NOT hardware compatible with original SoundBlasters (SB2,SBPRO,SB16,SBAWE), the new cards use Ensoniq chipsets, unlike Creative Labs custom chips in old cards. So the new cards support only advanced playing techniques, and only those techniques are emulated for old cards effectively. Although designers probably tried to emulate even that ancient 'direct D/A' mode, it is surely VERY tricky and the emulation has probably terrible overhead, making the computer running like turtle once the game starts to emit samples at 10kHz rate.

With my knowledge, I can probably patch the original game to play samples using advanced method (DMA/IRQ), thus making it possible the simulated SoundBlasters to work, but it probably will not happen before my old poor AWE32 will die <g>

Michael

[Ken]

Hi people,

I have had the same problems with sound. I have tried everything spoken about here, nothing works. The funny things is, the game and sound work perfectly when run via an Atari ST emulator for the PC.

Ken