Sound Woes...

[RenHoek]

Recently replaced my aging AMD K6-400 system in my cabinet with a celeron 1.2 gig / Asus TUSI-M motherboard.  I am running Windows 98.  Can run all of the games that I am interested in, but have been experiencing some odd sound problems using the onboard AC97 sound (C-Media CMI 8738).  Seems to happen more in older games (burger time, robotron), sound is occasionally garbled.  Running latest drivers for all components, Running Mame 0.59 Windows / PPro.  

Has anyone ran with a similar configuration? How did you address the sound issues?

Also, I have several other PCI sound cards that I can use - SB PCI128, SB Live! Value, Turtle beach montego PCI.  The motherboard has no ISA slots available, so I can't use my trusty SB16 ISA.  Would I have better luck with one of these?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[JustMichael]

Also, I have several other PCI sound cards that I can use - SB PCI128, SB Live! Value, Turtle beach montego PCI.  The motherboard has no ISA slots available, so I can't use my trusty SB16 ISA.  Would I have better luck with one of these?

Well there is one way to find out... try them.
Normally onboard sound is whatever chips are cheapest so more often than not the sound isn't that great.

[Howard_Casto]

Umm integrated sound is bad, umk.  ANY soundcard is better than a mb-integrated chipset.  Integration is bad, whatever genius decided to start integrating sound/video on motherboards should be shot!

I  hate to keep going on this, but here's the thing.... I've been working on computers for about 5 years now.  Lets say you have a 2$ el-cheapo sound card and a fancy motherboard with integrated sound blaster 5.1 live!.  You would think that in compatability terms the creatvie sound blaster would be more likey to work with wied software.  You would think wrong however, becuase that crappy 2$ sound card may sound like crap, but win can physically see it in a pic/isa slot and therefore can handle it better.  When third partys integrate things into thier hardware they have to make their own custom drivers, which obviously are never going to be as good as the drivers made by the original manufacturer of that chipset.  

To make a long story short.... never buy anything with integrated anything. If you have a integrated mb, disable the card(s) in the bios and go out and buy real cards for it.

Ok, I'm done.

[slug54]

I agree with Howard Integrated sound  is bad!
I just got my computer components installed in my cab
Intel motherboard Intel p3 - 850 cpu with integrated
yamaha audio. I would get garbled mushy sound  in many games like asteroids berzerk scramble and many others. So I watch the frame rate when the bad sound happens, It drops from 60fps to 42fps and even 39!
Disabled the onboard audio poped in the trusty  
ISA  sound blaster AWE 64  and I get rock solid
60/60 fps in all the games I was having problems with and nice clean audio. It appears that with the better sound cards the system can off load the sound processing to the card and off the cpu chip.
                   Pop in your SB live or pci128
                        and it's Game On!

                                 Slug54

                               

[Frobozz]

Yea, we got 2 MAME machines in the house, one with a SB Live and one with AC97 Integrated.  The SBLive is rock solid with MAME, the AC97 stutters on larger games such as the Neo Geo and CPS-2 titles.  

Only integrated chip I have EVER seen that worked is the new onboard video chip from nVidea.  But there are some reasons for that:

1) nVidea knows how to do serious graphics (no arguement there).

2) nVidea used to do core logic chipsets for motherboards, and still understand things like memory systems and clock utilization better than most core logic chip makers.

3) nVidea is really good with writing drivers.

4) The chip isn't considered a "bargain integrated chip", it's premium; and the pricetags on boards they're installed on reflect this.  Also because of this, it's rare to find it since most people shopping for performance systems buy seperate video cards anyway.