I have an older PC running Windows 98 SE and it plays other CD-ROM games just fine with the proper video and audio drivers. However, I'm having a persistent problem with Sim Theme Park (or Theme Park World, as it is known to some). When I start the game and skip the intro videos, immediately the sound and music start skipping and because of this, they both play "faster" than they should. IE, the advisor's voice skips as well and he finishes talking, but his speech animation is still running.
I've had this problem running from a physical DVDRAM drive as well as Daemon Tools Lite, both set as drive D. I've re-installed the game with both setups and updated DirectX from v8.0 to v9.0c but the problem still exists. I checked sound playback under dxdiag and all sounds play back normally from a software buffer, but I also get a message saying that sound hardware buffering is not supported on my system (sounds cannot play from hardware buffers). I don't know if this has anyhting to do with the issue, but I can toggle the sound and music in-game and noticed that when I turn either of them off, there are small sound pieces left over that are still playing for about half a second after I click the buttons.
It seems like this is a sound buffer issue... maybe this game just doesn't work properly with a software sound buffer? This game doesn't use CD audio, and my computer can play back CD audio without problems. I have my sound drivers properly installed as well. Here are my system specs:
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz
128MB RAM
Avance AC'97 onboard PCI sound with SoundBlaster emulation
Silicon Integrated Systems onboard PCI VGA video
80GB 7200RPM IDE HDD
This game also has problems running on Win2K and up, so it may just be a game issue; but I believe it has run fine under Win98 in the past.
