Very bad crackling sound

[Crowley]

I don't really know what to say. All the sound in ZSNES on my computer has this serious crackling going on. Everything used to be working fine but I guess this started happening after I had to reinstall Win98SE recently. I've tried playing around with all the settings I could think of, but nothing has really helped. Lowering the sampling rate does decrease the crackling, but even at 8000 Hz it doesn't completely go away. For some reason I can't enable 8-point interpolation or hi-quality lowpass. The box just doesn't get ticked when I click on it. And it appears that I cannot turn off gaussian interpolation. The box does get cleared, but when I open sound settings again, it's ticked. I don't know if it's related, but for video I can't turn on 2xSai, Super Eagle or HQ3X either, though I used to be able to use those.

System specs:

1,3 GHz AMD Athlon
Sound Blaster PCI 128
NVidia Gefore 2 MX
256 MB RAM
Win98SE

I've tried older sound card drivers, latest drivers, changing the hardware acceleration rate and sampling rate and pretty much anything within the ZSNES sound settings. Even tried version 1.20 of ZSNES, and the problem was there too. There has not been similar sound problems with any other applications.

[grinvader]

For some reason I can't enable 8-point interpolation or hi-quality lowpass. The box just doesn't get ticked when I click on it. And it appears that I cannot turn off gaussian interpolation.
(...)
I can't turn on 2xSai, Super Eagle or HQ3X either, though I used to be able to use those.

Sounds like you don't have MMX support anymore.

Erase your config files and reconfigure from scratch, keeping an interpolation (any of the 3).

[Crowley]

Thank you, that put me on the right track. I grabbed the unofficial Windows 98 SE service pack and that fixed the sound. Still can't get those graphics engines on, though. I know this is beyond the scope of this board, but any idea how I could get MMX support back? I did try another program (Exult) which also utilizes 2xSai and Super Eagle, and those worked fine there. And even though I deleted zsnesw.cfg, gaussian interpolation was still on by default when I opened the sound settings window!

[Hyos]

You have to delete both the cfg and the dat file, they both contain ZSNES settings. Do this once again and then start reconfiguring.

[Crowley]

Thank you. That fixed the remaining problems. Though gaussian interpolation was STILL on by default in the sound settings, at least now it stays off when I turn it off.

[Deathlike2]

Gaussian interpolation is enabled by default simply because it makes the audio sound closest to what the original SNES produced.

[Thalon]

Thank you, that put me on the right track. I grabbed the unofficial Windows 98 SE service pack and that fixed the sound.

Interesting: can you provide me a link to that unofficial service pack?
Maybe I could use it too...

[Clements]

http://exuberant.ms11.net/98sesp.html

[Hyos]

Gaussian interpolation is enabled by default simply because it makes the audio sound closest to what the original SNES produced.

Correct. I overlooked gaussian and thought the asker meant the graphics filter.

[Deathlike2]

Part of the "service pack" seems to include the fix for static sounds (though you still need updated drivers for your sound card)