music skipping prob...

[Lunaryn]

Final update, most likely. This is definitely an SMP issue as setting the POL process affinity to only allow execution on one CPU fixes it. For anyone else seeking to deal with this issue, there are two ways to do this: temporary and permanent.

Temporary: Once POL viewer is running, right-click the taskbar and select Task Manager. Go to the Processes tab and look for pol.exe. Right-click pol.exe and select Set Affinity. Uncheck all but one of the CPUs listed and click OK. The skipping problem should stop.

Permanent: Note that this involves modifying the pol.exe executable. You should back it up first in case of problems, and you will need to repeat this after any POL Viewer updates most likely. This article explains how to use the MS tool imagecfg.exe to set the process affinity mask on an executable. I got this executable off of my Windows NT 4.0 Server disc. I unfortunately do not know of a place it can be downloaded from. I'll see if I can make a binary patchfile of some sort for the modified pol.exe.

Edit: Okay, in a somewhat odd development, I've discovered that the problem is not with SMP per se, but with the sound running on CPU1. If it's only allowed to run on CPU1 and not CPU0, it still skips. I am forced to wonder if this is not, in fact, some kind of hardware bug that's only exposed by Creative's drivers combined with the way in which FFXI produces audio...