LinuxQuestions.org - ALSA+SB-Live!+Wine(X)+Starcraft=stuttering sound

I didn't know if I should have posted this in the gaming forum, but since it is more of a hardware (drivers, actually) problem than anything else, I decided to post it here.

I recently tried to run Starcraft (after a very long time) and noticed this issue: The sound stutters, much like if the last sample stays in the buffer and then only when playing another sound will the sound be "unlocked" just get stuck again a few samples later. I noticed this since today and the odd thing is that in systems with pretty much an identical setting (except for the sound card and ALSA version) and these systems did not show any problems whatsoever... what may be the problem?

The (choking) system:

Software
Fedora Core 2
Kernel 2.6.7 with CK patchset applied.
ALSA driver version 1.0.5a
ALSA lib, utils, oss & tools version 1.0.5
Wine version wine-20040408-1fc1winehq (pre-compiled rpm for Fedora Core 1)
WineX version winex-3.2.1-1 downloaded from transgaming when I still had an active account.

By the way, recent builds of wine don't seem to like programs which require the CD in order to play/use it, is there a workaround?

Hardware
AMD Athlon XP 2200+
512 Mb DDR 2700
ECS K7S5A Pro MoBo
Sound Blaster Live! Value sound card (onboard sound disabled)
ATi Radeon 9500 NP 128 (driver v. 3.9.0)

Software configuration.

I think it may be relevant to post how did I configure two key aspects: the kernel and the ALSA drivers. For the kernel I have compiled in PREEMPT and REGPARM, no sound drivers are compiled whatsoever (as modules or otherwise), only sound support is compiled as a module (soundcore). Only ACPI is compiled as the PowerManager and I have compiled into the kernel APIC and IOAPIC (my system tends to feel faster and more stable with this setting than without), the rest of the hardware is confiugred according to what I acutally have in the computer (mainly as modules) as are the filesystems.

I have compiled the ALSA driver like this:

Code:

./configure --with-cards=emu10k1 --with-oss=yes --with-sequencer=yes

And this is how my modprobe.conf file looks for the ALSA settings:

Code:

# ALSA portion

alias char-major-116 snd

alias snd-card-0 snd-emu10k1

# module options should go here



# OSS/Free portion

alias char-major-14 soundcore

alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0

        

# card #1

alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss

alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss

alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss

alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss

alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss

Has anyone else noticed these kind of problems with recent ALSA drivers for the EMU10K1 chipsets?

Thanks in advance for any input.

PS: The alsa-project.org page seems to be down (I've been unable to connect to it in the past couple of days, I get a connection refused), because I wanted to browse the archvies of the mailing list to see if anyone else has arleady posted something like this.