How To: Getting Sound To Work In MKII (Windows XP)

Posted by Skizelli on Monday, March 29th, 2010 @ 12:37 AM
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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I found this old tutorial I created on how to get sound to work in Mortal Kombat II for PC on Windows XP and thought it might be useful to somebody out there.

Getting DOS games to work in Windows XP can be a pain in the ass, especially when trying to get sound to work. Here’s an application that’ll fix the sound issue on Windows XP. It’s called VDMSound. VDMSound is an open source (licensed under the GPL) emulator of legacy sound card devices, designed to allow video games and other applications written for MS-DOS to run on the Microsoft Windows NT/2000/XP/95/98/Me operating systems. It emulates Adlib and Sound Blaster cards (Standard, Pro and 16), parallel port DAC, and an MPU 401 MIDI (UART-mode) interface. It also provides joystick support. By default, XP tries to emulate DOS audio using A220 I5 D1 T3 P330. This obviously isn’t working with MKII, or else you wouldn’t be reading this. So here’s how to fix it:

1) Download and install VDMSound 2.0.4

2) Download and install VDMSound 2.0.4 “Update 2″. Extract directly over the VDMSound 2.0.4 files (typically residing in C:\Program Files\VDMSound) and overwrite all.

3) Download and install VDMS LaunchPad 1.0.1 and run install.bat

Press any key to close the window that follows, then locate your MK2.exe and right-click on it. You should see two options listed in the context menu near the top called “Run with VDMS“. One has a musical note icon next to it and the other one doesn’t. Select the one with the icon. When ran for the first time, this will bring up a configuration wizard with the choice of using the default configuration or a custom one. Let’s choose default for now. Continue by clicking “Next“. On the next screen leave everything as is, with “Remember my settings” checked, and click “Finish“. This will start up MKII. By default, VDMS uses A220 I7, so make sure these are set accordingly in the game by hitting F10.

Presto, it works!

I got my custom configuration to work without playing the horrible MIDI music. Disabling the MIDI emulation located within the custom settings will not do this, however. If disabled, your system will take over. So simply uncheck “Dev” (Device) below “Output” located under the MIDI tab and change MKII’s sound to Roland LAPC-1. Also of note, once you create a configuration of any kind, it will create a shortcut in the same directory as the game’s executable. You may edit this later by right-clicking on it and selecting “Properties” and then “Advanced“.

VDMSound is not compatible with Windows Vista/7, making the project obsolete. The current version (2.1.0) remains the final version.

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3 More Firefox Tweaks

Posted by Skizelli on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 @ 7:38 PM
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Here’s some useful Firefox tweaks I found on the web. As always, the source is listed below.

Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses for its cache feature

Here’s how to fix it:
1. Type “about:config” (no quotes) in the address bar of the browser.
2. Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewer”
2. Set its value to “0“;(Zero)

Increase the speed in which Firefox loads pages

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter.
(Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.)

2. Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.

This means it will make 10 requests at once.

3. Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer.
Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0“;.(Zero)

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages faster now.
Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by Right Click –> New– > Interger or String

network.dns.disableIPv6: set “false”
“content.notify.backoffcount”: set “5“; (Five)
“plugin.expose_full_path”: set “true”.
“ui.submenuDelay”: set “0; (zero)

Reduce RAM usage to 10mb when Firefox is minimized

This little hack will drop Firefox’s RAM usage down to 10 Mb when minimized:

1. Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2. Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3. In the box that pops up enter “config.trim_on_minimize”. Press Enter.
4. Now select True and then press Enter.
5. Restart Firefox.

Source: http://gnoted.com/3-hacks-for-firefox-double-internet-browsing-speed

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Firefox Tweak: Disable Link Focus

Posted by Skizelli on Sunday, August 24th, 2008 @ 5:02 AM
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Call me anal, but I personally hate how Firefox wraps dotted borders around selected links. Here’s how to disable it:

  1. Type about:config in Firefox’s location bar
  2. Find the string: browser.display.focus_ring_width
  3. Set the value to 0

That’s it.

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Photoshop CS3: Removing Apple’s Bonjour

Posted by Skizelli on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 @ 12:39 PM
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Adobe Photoshop CS3 uses Apple’s Bonjour Technology (which is crap) that makes it easy to connect to Version Cue servers. But I don’t want it on my system, so here’s how to uninstall it:

  1. Start > Run
  2. “C:\Program Files\Bonjour\mDNSResponder.exe” -remove
  3. Rename mdnsnsp.dll to mdnsnsp.old
  4. Reboot
  5. Delete Bonjour folder

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