My first game

[daverme]

A coupla days ago, I came across a bargain on some loose parts and, being a sucker for such things, I scarfed them up. Out of that came a new system, with these specs:

Mobo: Tyan Trinity 400 (S1854) with VIA Apollo Pro133A Chipset
CPU: Intel Pentium III 667MHz (Slot 1)
Memory: Generic PC-133 (128MB)
VGA card: Aopen PA3000 (32MB with nVidia TNT2 chipset)
CD-ROM: Sony CDU5211
Sound: Creative PCI512

The only thing I did to the system was to set the DRAM clock to the "Host" setting so that it runs at 133MHz; the default is "Host-33" so it initially ran at 100Mhz. All other settings are default.

Just for grins and giggles, I bought a copy of Tomb Raider The Final Revelation and tried it out on this machine. The game works fine with one exception: Every once in a while, I get audio drop-outs. It ALWAYS happens during the intro, usually when the EIDOS splash screen is being displayed and ALWAYS when the CORE splash screen is being displayed. Later it occasionally happens while I'm playing, which means I sometimes miss the instructions on how to meet a challenge. That really does not hinder playing the game much but I sure would like to get rid of it if can. Is this normal for games or can I do something to eliminate the drop outs?

Thx in advance,
Dave

[boran_blok]

first congrats with yer sys and game ... (I liked TombRaider a lot ..)

second :
no that is not normal at all, games are not supposed to do that .. my guess is that it is yer soundblaster that is doing crazy stuff, (it is known that current via chipsets have some probs with soundblasters, but I dunno if the older via chipset in yer sys has that problem too ...)

can you try to borrow a soundcard from a buddy and see if you can get descent sound in this way ? if you get normal sound then it is the card ... also check if you actually USE yer 3Dcard etc .. cous when I first played tombraider I left it in softwra mode (hell I couldnt differentiate my mem from my harddisk then, let alone define a difference between software and D3D) so make sure it is set in on D3D and not in software this might be causing a hog on yer processor and hinder sound output in this way ...

I hope you can solve the problem without help .. and I hope I could help you .. if not others might be of more help ...

[muno]

Might be crappy drivers, or might be that the latency of your sound card is set too low. Also, you might want to set the sound quality to best in sounds and multimedia properties.
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[JohnC]

Hi,

I have the same motherboard (actually I donated to my bro). There's an article over at www.viahardware.com (http://www.viahardware.com) about this problem with that chipset. Also, get the VIA 4in1 drivers. (Version 30a?) They'll add some drivers for AGP, DMA and IRQ control.

John