smsmith@hpuxa.acs.ohio-state.edu (Stephen M. Smith) (03/28/91)
Thanks to all of you who responded! I got over a dozen email
letters from 386-33 owners.
My problem was (is) that my Soundblaster would not work correctly
with most of the games I had. Symptoms included buzzing, screeching,
missed notes, and tinny music. The severity of the problem depended
on the game I was running. Ultima VI was the worst. Wing
Commander sounded OK (usually) though now and then there were
sustained notes that could only be remedied by exiting to DOS and
restarting the game.
About half of the 386-33 owners who emailed me said they had the
same problems with the same games. One person said that I should
just forget about running a SB on a 386-33 because everyone they
knew who had a SB in their 386-33 had problems with it.
Those that experienced no problems were usually not running the
same games as I was, so I realized that different software had
different effects.
One very informed person posted an article in response to mine
(you may have read it). This person, in summary, said that the
problem had to do with the drivers written for the particular
game, and that the fault was Creative Lab's because they sent out
the wrong info to the game developers. Apparently there are timing
problems with faster machines, and the drivers need to be written
so that they will work correctly on 386-33's.
This explains why some games work OK and others don't. Here again
are the games I'm running:
Ultima VI: Screeching, tinny music, missed notes.
Krynn: same as Ultima VI
Secret: same as Ultima VI
Wing Commander: OK 99% of the time; occasional sustained buzzing.
My major concern, and the motivating force which led me to post
my query to the net, was that I thought it could be a hardware
problem; so I wanted to take care of it as soon as I could while
everything was still under warranty.
Temporary solutions:
1) Run system at a slower speed. Works fine.
2) Turn memory cache off. Works fine.
3) Run application with QEMM loaded. Helps to slow things down
a bit so that the screeching goes away, but Ultima VI still
sounds funky.
Conclusions:
It's a software problem which hopefully will be ironed out as new
games are developed. Now I just configure my system so that it will
be OK for the particular game I'm playing: Turn cache off for Ultima
VI and SSI games, and no change needed for Wing Commander.
Stephen M. Smith \ + /
<smsmith@hpuxa. \+++++/ " #*&<-[89s]*(k#$@-_=//a2$]'+=.(2_&*%>,,@
ircc.ohio-state. \ + / {7%*@,..":27g)-=,#*:.#,/6&1*.4-,l@#9:-) "
edu> \ + /
BTW, WYSInaWYG \ + / --witty.saying.ARC