When it comes to finding a fast, stable, and feature-packed Socket 7 motherboard, you’ll often end up with one of the excellent ASUS boards. The ASUS P/I P55T2P4 is a true retro classic, and the slightly newer ASUS TX97-E is also a solid choice.
However, there’s one board that many retro enthusiasts tend to overlook: the ASUS SP97-V. Surprisingly, this motherboard ranks very high in DOS performance. I personally own two of these boards and I’m very satisfied with them. That said, there’s one thing I’ve noticed on both units that I’ve never seen on any other motherboard before.
This issue affects only the MS-DOS version of Rayman. If a PC speaker is installed, a buzzing noise occurs during gameplay. I uploaded an example of this phenomenon on YouTube.
It doesn’t matter which sound setting is used or whether the game CD is inserted. At first, I thought it must be a driver issue or something related to the game version. However, after running several tests on different PC systems and editions of the game, I noticed that only PCs with the ASUS SP97-V were affected. When I swapped the motherboard for a TX97-E, the issue disappeared completely.
I’ve never encountered anything like this before, but if someone happens to face the exact same problem, here’s your answer.