Delay in sound on Windows 95 Guest when playing games

Discussions about using Windows guests in VirtualBox.
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zofia
Posts: 2
Joined: 29. Apr 2021, 23:07

Delay in sound on Windows 95 Guest when playing games

Post by zofia »

I recently setup a guest VM for windows 95. I managed to get everything setup and working on it however, when I go to play a game (I've tried two now) there is a 1-2 second delay in any sounds or music. For reference I am trying to get "Barbie Ocean Discovery" to work.

Originally, I was getting no sound at all however I resolved this by going into DXDIAG and turning off sound acceleration.

For reference, my setup for this VM is:
- 256gb of memory, 2 core processor, 64gb of video memory
As far as settings these are the ones I think might apply to this:
- Enable I/O APIC is checked, Enable PAE/NX is checked, Acceleration is Hyper-V, Graphics controller is VboxVGA, Audio controller is Soundblaster16

Some of the things I've tried so far:
- I have tested this same VM image on two separate PCs with varying degrees of hardware.
-- Both are intel and have at least 16gb of memory, 1660ti video card, 8 core processors, windows 10
- Have adjusted many of the settings I've listed above including: processor count, enabling/disabling most of the features listed
- Ensured that on both PCs the Intel VM is turned on in the BIOS
- Tried two other games: Dune 2000 and another Barbie game and both had the same issue
- Of course I have looked on this forum and many places for more information but none of them seemed to help

I would say the only thing I haven't done is tried the Intel ICH AC97 audio controller. I haven't because on another forum post about this issue someone mentioned that it doesn't work properly for windows 95

Anyways that's where I am at, any help would be greatly appreciated!
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39156
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: Delay in sound on Windows 95 Guest when playing games

Post by mpack »

I think you need to do some research on what Win95 was. Nearly all of your settings changes are at best irrevelant and potentially counter productive.
  • 256GB of memory. GB? Do you mean MB? Win95 is a 16/32bit OS. It can't use more than 4GB RAM, and in fact 256MB would have a huge allocation in its day. 64MB or less would be typical. My first XP PC only had 64MB RAM, and that was after the Win95 era, after the Win98 era, and after the Windows 2000 era.
  • 2 cores. Win95 is not a multi-core OS. It has no idea what to do with a second CPU core.
  • 64GB graphics RAM. GB again? You can't even select that in the settings slider. 64MB is way more than it would have had back in the day.
  • IO-APIC. I'm not certain that this option even existed in the Win95 era. I certainly remember struggling to find unused IRQ numbers back in the day when there was only 16 (and in the DOS era before that, when there was only 8). Turning this on could certainly cause problems in Win95.
  • Enable PAE/NX is irrelevant, since Win95 knows nothing about either feature.
  • Hyper-v para-v API enable (not Hyper-v acceleration - Hyper-v certainly doesn't accelerate anything). Is only relevent to Win8.1 and later, and some slightly older server builds of Windows. Anything older than Win8 is not even looking for a hypervisor API to talk to, which is the only purpose of this setting.
  • VBoxVGA: there are no Guest Additions for Win95, so it can't use any of the graphics chipsets you can configure. The only "graphics" available is basic VESA, i.e. extended BIOS graphics. It will be slow, especially at higher display sizes.
  • Soundblaster16: this at least is a correct setting. This existed since DOS days. AC'97 didn't exist until (wait for it...) '97. There would be no native support for this, though it's possible that drivers will exist somewhere - note that the driver model changed radically for Win98, so '98 drivers are unlikely to work.
If you want stable performance you can't just go flipping switches at random, you need to create a recipe that would match a typical PC of the day. The default template already does that, so you should be very reluctant to change it significantly.
zofia
Posts: 2
Joined: 29. Apr 2021, 23:07

Re: Delay in sound on Windows 95 Guest when playing games

Post by zofia »

Thank you for your reply, I really appreciate it!

As for the amounts, my apologies I meant mb instead of gb, used to the modern world sizes ya know?

I am a bit at a loss though because I didn't make any adjustments when I first set the guest up. However, when I set it up without any changes whatsoever, I was getting no sound in the game. To make sure it wasn't the setup itself, I found a Youtube video of someone using a Windows 95 VM for the exact game and their sound worked just fine. Also - I just tried two other games: Dune 2000 and another Barbie game but no sound on those either.

All the changes I made that I listed below were suggestions made by either other forum posts on this site or through other videos I found. My apologies if they didn't make sense, I was under the guidance of others because I don't know Windows 95 that well.

Do you have any suggestions on where to go from here? I went ahead and started over from scratch making no adjustments whatsoever but now I am getting no sound in games at all. I know sound works because in Windows itself when I go to test like the little audio chimes, I can here them but, when I go into dxdiag and go to test the sound there, I am not getting anything. Thats why I turned off Hardware Sound Acceleration level in the first place there because that was the only way to get sound in games.

Thanks again!
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39156
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: Delay in sound on Windows 95 Guest when playing games

Post by mpack »

Well, let's start with why it needs to be Win95? Win95 is buggy as hell.

In many ways Win98 is just Win95 with the worst bugs fixed. It would also mean you could use AC'97 audio. Still no GAs though: VirtualBox doesn't support anything in the WinDOS era, and nothing older than NT4 in the NT era.

Thinking about your SoundBlaster problem (no audio with standard settings)... Did you install the DOS level driver? I don't recall ever owning a soundcard in the Win95 era, but it was a transition period as far as drivers are concerned, so perhaps Win95 expects drivers to have been installed first at the DOS level, where they would load before you boot to Win95. It would certainly do no harm. The SoundBlaster strategy was that you didn't talk directly to the hardware, your app talked to an "Int xx" (don't remember, probably extended Int 21h) API, making the app hardware independent. If Win95 follows the same route then it will only be able to use the sounding if the SoundBlaster TSR driver is installed in DOS first.

Another thing to try (maybe try it first) is to ask Win95 to search for new hardware ("Add Hardware" from the control panel IIRC). Because Win95 also predates plug and pray. You can't expect hardware to just work.
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