Duke Nukem 3D

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Revision as of 08:04, 1 March 2013 by Leilei (Talk | contribs) (I don't recall 90's sound cards supporting 11,025,000Hz)

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First person shooter based on the 2.5D Build engine, developed by 3D Realms and released in 1996. For gameplay on modern computers, using a source port is recommended. The DOS version is known to have problems with Creative Labs cards.

When using an AWE32 or AWE64 card in Win9x and selecting the appropriate mode in the game, the music will come out garbled on the first try. This is possibly related to the particular implementation of the EMU8K synth on those cards and can be fixed by running a MIDI file before starting the game. This problem is not present in MS-DOS.

Furthermore, on all Creative cards starting with Sound Blaster 16, when using an external MIDI synth and appying sound FX frequencies over 11025Hz, sound playback can stutter, while potentially missing parts of the MIDI music. Most cards from other brands should not have this problem. This issue was even acknowledged by 3D Realms in the help file for Shadow Warrior (1997), where it suggests the following:

To fix this, first try selecting WaveBlaster as your music device, even if you don't have a true WaveBlaster.
If this doesn't solve the problem, make sure you are picking 8bit 11Khz sound in the Shadow Warrior setup program. 
Picking values higher than this can sometimes cause problems.

Finally, on Creative PCI cards such as the Sound Blaster Live!, the game will crash if you attempt to enter a sewer or another area with an echo effect. Ken Silverman's page provides a patch to fix that for the original DOS releases.

Unofficial video modes

Although not selectable in the setup program, there are several special video modes to use, found under the [Screen Setup] section. Several are vendor-specific 320x200 modes, while there's also two specialized 3D glasses modes.

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