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Sonnet Crescendo | Starmax 5000 board | Stuttering audio and instability

jessenator

Well-known member
So I've got a Sonnet Crescendo L2 G3 500/1 upgrade in my Power Mac 4400 come Starmax 5000 (I have the board installed in my 4400 Chassis) so I can run at the full 500MHz speed with the 50MHz board bus. There are a couple of issues I'm trying to resolve. I've got it running on Mac OS 9.0 currently with the following issues:

1) General instability

It would operate for maybe 2 or 3 boots after installation, and then I would get boot crashes when the Sonnet extension would load. I tried this on 7.6.1, 8.1 and 9.0 (I haven't tried 8.5 or 8.6)

In looking at what was on the 6400Zone, they mentioned a hacked INIT, but later in the logs it says to just install the PowerLogix INIT (according to the 6400Zone this INIT disables Speculative Addressing) and so far it's working ok. I also have the PowerLogix Cache Profiler running, which shows speculative access as off. Every so often though, the machine will just freeze, and upon reboot it will go into a weird loop where right at the Sonnet extension load I get the boot chime again, but the screen frozen on loading. Very strange and worrying :/  Now that it's been running a while I'm keeping an eye out for crazy behavior. It's most unstable after running MacBench I've noticed. That's when it went into the crazy crash loop.

http://www.zone6400.com/hack_crescendo.html

2) Stuttering audio

I've read a few other posts on this from 6400Zone. CD audio sound though is fine. The audio cuts in and out. I haven't sat down to listen to something I know, like an MP3 of a song I know well whether it's audio cutting out or actually stuttering/skipping samples. However, whenever there's some sort of screen modal active, the audio is perfectly fine... e.g. SimCity2000 the music is stuttery, but clicking on the control strip to adjust the volume, the sound goes back to normal. It's inconsistent really. It ran super smooth until I tested another game, changed the resolution and opened it back up (for some reason I thought it was resolution and refresh rate related... go figure). Now it's back to stuttery sound until a modal is opened up. The stuttering is worse than a completely annihilated scratched up compact disc. Unintelligible. 

The other game I tested,Dark Forces (v.1.2), the audio is mostly fine until it starts to use multiple sound channels/effects over one another and then it cuts out momentarily.

I tried the trick of installing USB drivers, which was suggested as a fix (I have a Belkin PCI card installed), and that didn't help. The link above says that MacOS 8.5 fixes sound issues, but you'd think 9.0 would carry that over, so maybe there's something else going on.

Also, sometimes it won't reboot from the Special menu: monitor goes black (says there's no signal) with no chime. I have to hard power off and reboot. All very strange.

Anyhow if anyone has some guidance I'd appreciate it!

 
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