Privateer: Distorted Sound FX

R

RayRider

Spaceman
Hi there!

I have a problem... I managed to run Privateer/Righteous Fire (CD version) on my current PC (using either a Win98 or DOS bootdisk or MyJEMM). It runs okay, except for the sound effects. I have a SoundBlaster PCI 512 with the emulator driver running, the music works fine on General MIDI or SoundBlaster emulation, but any effect, sound or speech, results in a crackling or screeching noise. I guess the timing's wrong and it gets played too fast or something.

I noticed these problems occasionly on my old PC, too, with Privateer, WC2 and Strike Commander, but as far as I can remember, I must have been able to solve that problem back then. But right now, I can't seem to find any solution... does anyone of you have an idea?

My hardware is:
AMD Athlon 2000+
Asus A7V8X board
512 MB RAM
Soundblaster 512

Tell me if you need any more info.

TIA,
The Ray
 
This was a common problem back in the DOS days.. back then you would limit your Expanded Memory (above 32 megs I believe caused the crackle). Not sure exactly how you'd go about doing this in your current situation, but that's a start.
 
ChrisReid said:
This was a common problem back in the DOS days.. back then you would limit your Expanded Memory (above 32 megs I believe caused the crackle). Not sure exactly how you'd go about doing this in your current situation, but that's a start.
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks. If that'll work, that'd be great. Didn't think about doing that... I'll check it out and report back.

Limiting the EMS is easy, you can tell EMM386 how many MB of memory should be allocated as EMS, any other memory beyond that (within the DOS-addressable range of 32 MB) will be used as XMS. IIRC, it should look like this:

device=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM 16192

Have to take another look, it's been years since I really dealt with these matters.

Thanks again,
The Ray.
 
Okay, tried it. It worked - a bit at least. Instead of distortions, the speech effects are now cut off after the first half-second. People say "I'm n...", "Wha..." or "Ha..." and turn silent afterwards... any more hints?
 
Finally found out the rest of the problem, it's all about BIOS settings.

1) The "emulated" IRQ of the sound card must not be reserved
2) the "Plug & Play O/S" setting has to be disabled (not sure if it's really necessary, but as long as it works, I won't test it).
3) perform a PnP "configuration data reset"

It works fine for me now.
 
How can I limit the memory while using QEMM as my memory manager? I tried to use RAM ##### per the manual, but it actually breaks the memory manager itself.

I have 42megs of mem I believe.
 
You cannot limit the memory in QEMM as far as I know. Use regular emm386 instead (bootdisk or multi boot or...)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top