XP on OSX: Inconsistent Sound Crackling, Cut-out, Pointer Issues

Discussions about using Windows guests in VirtualBox.
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saulosaurus
Posts: 3
Joined: 14. Jul 2022, 14:15

XP on OSX: Inconsistent Sound Crackling, Cut-out, Pointer Issues

Post by saulosaurus »

Host: MacOS 12.4, Guest: Windows XP Home 2002 SP3
I've been trying to set up a system to play older Windows games on my MacBook.
The problem I've been having is that Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill and the built-in 3D Pinball game will run fine for a moment, then the audio crackles and stops after an inconsistent amount of time. However, Neverhood and Winamp play audio with no issues at all. The system sounds also play fine. I've also noted that attempting to "install DirectX" from the Neverhood and Nancy Drew CDs always results in an error, so I suspect the issue involves DirectX.
The audio "death" also effects other running programs: Looping the Winamp test file and starting 3D Pinball causes the audio as a whole to "die", only coming back after closing both programs.

There is also an inconsistent pointing issue: In Nancy Drew, the pointer always lags to an unplayable degree, where in Neverhood the pointer only sometimes lags, changing on each program start.
Thanks for your time,
Saul
saulosaurus
Posts: 3
Joined: 14. Jul 2022, 14:15

Re: XP on OSX: Inconsistent Sound Crackling, Cut-out, Pointer Issues

Post by saulosaurus »

Update: Neverhood's audio also breaks eventually. I have tried re-installing the guest additions and disabling the preview window in the virtual box manager; one of these made the mouse movement in Neverhood smoother. The manager also crashed and I had to restart it at one point; Perhaps this is some kind of memory leak?
I know the pointer is an input issue because Neverhood has an animated cursor that doesn't freeze.
Nancy Drew has a non-animated splash screen which plays music but all audio stops after that.
Could it be a CD drives issue? Both games come as CDs and stream data from them.

Update Again: I made a fresh VM and install of Win XP and took some notes: Neverhood works 100% both pre- and post- GA install. ND:SCK only works after GA install (something to do with DirectDraw) but still has no sound. 3D pinball never had any issues. The pointer issues and "crackly cut-out" sound issues must be irrelevant to the GAs; However, the DirectX Diagnostic tool attached to the installer for Nancy Drew: Treasure in the Royal Tower indicated no issues except for a missing or undetected audio driver; this must be why the ND games have no audio (cutting off cleanly, no crackling).
The virtual Intel 8201AA AC'97 controller has drivers according to device manager; could they just be incompatible with older versions of DirectX?

Update Yet Again: using the built-in dxdiag program indicates no issues with DirectSound or DirectMusic, except that the sound card does not support hardware buffering. The ND game issues appear to be localized to that game engine only, so unless anybody has any ideas I'll assume that this is a ND game engine problem and not a winXP/VirtualBox problem.

Update Update Update: The "crackling-out" bug still occurs on Neverhood in this new install, only it takes several minutes to appear and progress now. It may happen with 3D Pinball too; I haven't checked. I also found another bug where pausing the system during the game causes a forced change to 8-bit color (only changing back from system settings), and causes the music to crackle out soon after. Perhaps it is a memory leak of some kind? Can anyone help troubleshoot
Khun_Doug
Posts: 25
Joined: 26. May 2022, 20:16

Re: XP on OSX: Inconsistent Sound Crackling, Cut-out, Pointer Issues

Post by Khun_Doug »

Did you ever find a fix for this problem? I am encountering a very similar thing with a Windows 10 guest on a Windows 11 host. I just installed VB 6.1.38 and built a virgin Windows 10 guest, added the VB GA software. I tried playing some streaming music and the sound is unusable. The static/crackling that you mention. I also noticed that the music seemed to slow down and the pitch changed slightly. Eventually the sound just stopped working.

I have a powerhouse host with a Ryzen 5950X CPU, AMD RX 6800 XT GPU, 850 watt PSU, and an Asrock X570 Creator motherboard with 64GB of RAM. The one thing extra I have is an Asus Essence STX II sound card for high res vinyl rips.
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