Sound effects are noises in PAL(Chinese RPG) with Intel HDA

[Jimmy-Z]

First of all, thank you for this amazing software!

The game is probably not very well known in the west but it's the most prominent DOS game in China back in the late 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Sword_and_Fairy_(video_game)

Adlib music works fine, but various sound effects sound like white noise (with a little variation, if that makes sense), like a while after you start a new game, after some dialogue your aunt will hit you with a pan, and all battle sound effects (needs to proceed a bit further into the game).

I tried this on two of my older laptops, both with Intel HDA, both had this issue.

Then I tried this in 86box with Sound Blaster PCI 128 (ES1373) with sbemu, sound effects works fine.

1.0.0 beta 5 on a bare minimum of freedos 1.3, settings are according to readme.txt.

[Jimmy-Z]

update: I did more tinkering

• laptop is thinkpad x230, cpu i5-3210m, intel hda.
• freedos 1.3 on a usb stick.
• other popular games like doom, quake, duke nukem 3d seems to be working fine.
  • I only tested shareware/demo versions, so quake doesn't have cd music, but sound effects sounds fine.
• /K44100, no effect
• /FIXTC, no effect
• /T6, no effect
• /I5, no effect
  • as a side note, in hwinfo:
    • 5 is listed as free(LPT2)
    • 7 is used (onboard ethernet, not plugged, tried to disable it in bios/uefi setting, doesn't work)
    • 9 is used (rerouted irq 2)
• reload bios default, no effect
• /I9, worse, music still works, but sound effects is disabled, not even noise.
  • other games I tried to test doesn't support setting irq to 9.
• use himemx.sys instead of jemmex, and disable real mode support, even worse, music is gone.
  • ~I don't quite understand, this is supposedly a protected mode game~, but I could be wrong on this.
    • update: it's likely a real mode game.
  • doom, quake, duke nukem 3d still works.
• descent setup.exe, this is the only other thing I tested that sound effects also doesn't work.
  • in setup.exe, select "Test Digital Sound Card", I can hear noise coming out on the center/left/right channel respectively
    • on dosbox it's a woman's voice saying "seven"
  • in game sound effects sounds ok, however
  • I'm sure when I tested this for the first few times, it worked, but after some tinkering it now doesn't, I'm pretty sure I've reverted all settings, I don't know, maybe I should doubt my memory.
• descent 2, with a setup.exe looking very similar to 1, however, it works fine, I can hear the woman's voice saying "zero" clearly.
• /VOL9, since default volume is so low, but I can hear the "seven" in descent setup.exe vaguely covered under the noise now.
• after all these tinkering, the noise pattern is different now, and I can't seem to get it back to the "white noise" pattern.

[volkertb]

Thanks for the extensive testing, @Jimmy-Z! 🙏🏽

I know this project could do with more active development lately. I'm trying to contribute some, but my expertise doesn't come even close to that of @crazii. I hope to find more time to get deeper involved in this project in my free time, but I also hope that other developers step up to help maintain and improve SBEMU.

In the meantime, could you maybe test this game with older builds of SBEMU as well, to see if there are any regressions in this release? Thanks again!

[Jimmy-Z]

Good idea! I'll test this, maybe tomorrow.

[Jimmy-Z]

I tested 1.0-beta4 and UserBuild_2024.04.29_09-29, unfortunately both exactly the same symptom, what other versions do you think worth testing?

[volkertb]

I know it's quite an old version, but could you maybe test this with 1.0beta3? Earlier this month, someone posted a message in the SBEMU thread on Vogons, mentioning that YMF724 cards stopped working after beta3 as well. Not sure if that's related to your issues with Intel HDA, but let's see if these issues are correlated.

There are a lot of snapshot releases between beta 3 and beta 4, but ff you can confirm that it's still working with that version, then we can at least start bisecting to get to the version (and with that hopefully also the change) that introduced this bug .

No rush, though. We're in the midsts of the winter holidays, after all. Whenever you get around to it and feel like diving into it is fine. Thanks again, enjoy the holidays and have a wonderful and healthy 2025! :relaxed:

[Jimmy-Z]

Thanks for the suggestion, and happy holidays to you too! ☺️

[Jimmy-Z]

Hi, it's been half a year and I remembered this, but 1.0beta3 behaves exactly the same.

[Jimmy-Z]

Baron-von-Riedesel figured out this is a game bug and provided a workaround: https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA/issues/39#issuecomment-3067195969

After applying the workaround sound effects (digital sounds) are no longer noise, but there are some popping/cracking, which didn't appear in VSBHDA.