WC2 Native DOS Sound Blaster Pro Problems (And Speed Question)

sgupta

sgupta

1st Lieutenant
Hey all,

So just finished WC1 (plus SM1 and SM2) and now I'm ready for Wing Commander 2.

I've sort of got it working, but I'm having some sound issues and wondering if anyone has any ideas. This is on an actual DOS rig (Pentium being slowed down with SLOWDOS) with a genuine Sound Blaster Pro.

When I run "WINSTALL", it generally seems to work fine...I set my Sound Blaster, and then one of two things happens. I go into the game, and audio seems to be working, but as soon as I get to digitized speech, I either hear nothing or the game hangs. In cutscenes (such as the speech in the intro), it tends to hang, while for wingmen, they message you, but you hear nothing, and sometimes it hangs.

On the other hand, sometimes it works perfectly (and appears to keep working fine for that particular play, though I've only experimented a little so far).

Also, occasionally after I experience an issue like this, if I run "WINSTALL" again, it says it can't detect my card as a Sound Blaster and asks for everything manually (IO 220, IRQ 5, DMA 1), and so far when THAT happens, the game seems to work fine on the next play. But I can't even reproduce that happening in WINSTALL and there doesn't seem to be any common variable I can find.

Is there any way to try forcing manual sound settings?

Any other ideas or suggestions?
 
My DOS days are long over, but could you please share some additional information?

Do you have such issues also with other games?
Did WC1 run fine for example?

Do you have other cards installed?
 
Thanks for the interest and help! I just recently got back into DOS myself.

Wing Commander 1 ran fine (but no digital speech in that one). Also, the sound card's digital speech testing program works great. No other cards are installed at this time - I do have a few I could try if I can't get this one working, though.

I did find a sort of workaround, albeit an annoying one. If I keep starting the game and going through the intro to speech, and the speech doesn't work, I can ALT-X out, run WINSTALL, hope it doesn't detect my card (if it does, try it again), set the manual settings, and it seems to work.
 
(Oh, and the speed question I was going to ask was how to tell if it's too fast or too slow, but autopilot speed and cutscenes look pretty good and next setting up seems just a little too fast, so think I figured that part out.)
 
Just some hints:
I think the SB-Pro has jumpers.
Is your software configuration the same as the jumpered configuration?

Do you have the parallel LPT port enabled?
Maybe disabling it in the BIOS helps...

Edit:
disabling everything that's not needed may help (eg COM2, ...)
 
Thanks for the assistance. =)

Yes, the SB Pro does have jumpers, and they are set correctly. (I could try some different settings though.)

As far as the BIOS, I took a look some time ago and disabled some stuff, it's fairly bare-bones and I don't remember about ports. I'll take a look, though - good call.
 
Welp, BIOS didn't help much. BUT...progress!

Before this sound card, I had an old YAMAHA OPL3 based card that worked fairly well for WC1, but it had a slight joystick drift issue.

Decided to give that card a try, and so far, it seems like my issue is fixed, AND no joystick drift in WC2. =) I'll be a happy camper if that holds true, but I've already had more success than the SBPro for whatever reason.
 
You said you're slowing down dos... Are you also booting to dos or are you just going into dos mode from windows? I seem to remember some newer (aka win95 etc) versions of windows being able to override IRQs and reassign them to avoid conflict. I'm just guessing here obviously but it could explain why it's working one time and then not the next.... But I guess if you switched cards it doesn't really matter anymore.
 
Booting to DOS 6.22. No Windows even installed. I would still love to know why it's doing it, but yeah, the problem's fixed for now using a different card and driver (both SB compatible, but the Yamaha driver is much different). For what it's worth, I did find an old (official Origin/EA) troubleshooting guide that mentioned if the game hangs without speech in the exact place it was hanging (the emperor holding up his paw to address his son in the beginning), it's usually due to an IRQ conflict. I had tried a different IRQ on that card with the same mixed results, and that wouldn't easily explain why it was sporadic, so I don't know how it's related though. Good thought on the Windows dynamic reassigning, however, even if it isn't what was happening in my case!
 
Does your PC have PCI slots? If so, have you reserved the IRQ, Memory and IO spaces associated with the card in the BIOS?

PCI supports dynamic reassignment, and if you have ISA cards like an SB Pro, you need to tell the BIOS that it can't use those resources when allocating them to PCI. Obviously, IRQ is one of them (PCI consumes 4 IRQs and its likely it's being used as PCs didn't have too many to begin with, especially in DOS). PCI also supports IRQ sharing (because well, you can run out so quickly - a lot of PCs actually were bursting because you only had 15 interrupts and most were already taken).

You may even have to go into the manual of the motherboard (Good luck!), which may mention which 4 IRQs are reserved for PCI.

And you may need to do stuff like disable the parallel port or serial port - I believe the default SB IRQ unfortunately was shared with one of the ports.
 
Hi Worf; thanks for the interest!

Yes, indeed it does have PCI slots, though this particular card was ISA as you suspected (of which it has a single slot). There was a place to reserve IRQs in the BIOS, but it didn't seem to make any difference (I did try it). Parallel port was already disabled. I didn't see much else you could reserve, but you may have hit upon the issue. Fortunately no need to find the motherboard manual (if I could find a copy; this was an old discarded PC) since the Yamaha sounds just as good and is working great so far, but always interested to hear theories about this stuff (and I may need the SBPro for something else in the future). =)
 
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