Sound Cutting out randomly?

[Zigmidge 0]

This is truly puzzling.

While playing ofp at totally random times my sound will just stop working. As if everything's muted in ofp. Other sounds (icq or irc running in the background still make sounds) will work but ofp just totally cuts out. It only happens in-game (never in the main menu) and it'll be totally out of my control when the sound will return. It lasts on average 20-30 minutes but it's quite annoying.

I'm running win XP pro on a p3 800EB. I've got the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers and everything was updated in terms of drivers and support. I didn't see anything like this on these forums so i decided to start my own topic for it.

The wierd thing is, it's almost like this is a degradation thing itself. It happened in all ofp versions ( 1.2 all the way to 1.42) and it happened in win98se, win2K and winXP.

Any ideas?

[tlx 0]

Please post some more specs like what soundcard (drivers), other cards (drivers), which VIA chipset & Mainboard, DirectX version etc.

[Zigmidge 0]

Here's my DxDiag.txt link. it's got all the information in there to the T.

It's a VIA VT82C694X chipset.

Hope that helps.

[tlx 0]

Is that sound device a card or onboard sound?

[Zigmidge 0]

It's a card.

IBM ESS Solo

[tlx 0]

Ok. I see it's running Microsoft native drivers which aren't a good choice from my experiences. Alas i could not find any XP drivers for this card/chipset at http://www.esstech.com/. I think the drivers in constellation with OFP may cause this mute phases. I had trouble myself with soundcards and OFP which seems to be a bit strange when it comes to sound. Since i couldn't get it to run after dis/reassembling my box couple of times i bought a new card which fixed my crackling issue. This might sound ridicilous but chances of getting things changed on the implemented DirectSound interface are rare. That's what BIS made us to - addicts

[Placebo 29]

I too had the same luck as tlx trying to find you some new drivers, have you tried playing around with the hardware sound and eax options in Opf? alternatively you can try lowering the hardware acceleration a notch or two in windows: control panel/sounds and audio devices/ in the "volume" tab click advanced, then click the performance tab, you're finally looking at the hardware acceleration sliders, try playing around with that

[Placebo 29]

If all that fails have a look in tlx's sound problem thread here and read up on the pci latency setting stuff, changing that setting from 32 to 64 seems to have solved my own sound problems

[Zigmidge 0]

Thanks. I'm checking up on that thread now.

I've already messed with the EAX/Hardware Acc. settings in OFP to no avail.

I found a few "modified" drivers at www.driverguide.com but those didn't change anything.

It just feels to me like it's that copy protection thing that's interfering with this or something.

[Zigmidge 0]

Update:

Thanks ALOT. Your thread put me in the right direction. Apparently, windows uses an ACPI controller that automatically controls almost every hardware setting. stuff like dma, irq controls and whatnot.

ANYWAYS, i had about 6 or 7 devices (sound card inclusive) ALL sharing IRQ 9. Changing the IRQ priorities in the bios didnt' change much because ACPI overrode all that once windows booted up.

So i uninstalled ACPI and set my computer as "Standard PC" and assigned all the irq's myself.

Once all my hardware was tested and working i went back into the bios and lowered the PCI latency from 32 to 16. Didn't seem to affect anything that much but i'll leave the latency as it is for a few days and then set it back to 32 to see if anything's different.

Thanks alot guys. ;D

[Zigmidge 0]

2nd update

Everything's tweaked, everything runs alot faster now but it's still happening.

Doesn't do it as much as before in SP, but it only takes maybe 30 seconds of gameplay in multiplayer before it starts up again.

I must say it's rather annoying coming so close and having your solution quickly stolen away from you.

[tlx 0]

I also tried with assigning IRQs with my old card but didn't go that hard way to disable ACPI though, since you tend to loose features like Standby etc. After placing the old card into a "not-shared" slot it got its own IRQ assigned which it also kept under XP. This did not however affect my crackle problem. I also played around with the PCI latency timers and did not have luck as Placebo . With my new Audigy i also fumbled with the latency and all interrupts BIOS could deal with . However it turned out to solve my problem was no the Latency but the HW Acceleration enabled in Flashpoint. You need to quit and start it up again to get it really enabled. That's why i first thought messing with PCI Latency had solved it. So my idea is that OFP is using some routines which conflict with some sound device drivers to say it gently. You may also update other drivers like network card which gave me quite a frame-rate boost.

[Placebo 29]

Sorry you two haven't had much luck so far, if it's any consolation though I too read that it was best not to use the ACPI setting, so I changed it to standard pc, rebooted and XP would no longer work, kept stopping before the end of boot sequence with an error message about a missing file, so I had to install XP all over again

[Zigmidge 0]

Heh, well disabled ACPI works nicely for me.

I've got a bit more details on my problem now that i've messed with a ton of things.

It seems to only happen when i'm using a land based vehicle, and most of the time it happens when there are other external sounds affected by this vehicle (ie: crushing people, running over trees). I could also be in a ground based vehicle and have ANOTHER one in a totally isolated spot on the island crush something and it will still happen.

Now, i'm alt-tabbed out of ofp right now after the sound disabled itself and nothing, not winamp, not media player, not even midi is making any sound.

Anyways, i'll try a bunch of new methods. It'd be nice if BIS would mail me back with any insight into my problem. It's been 3 days since i e-mailed them with no response in sight.

[tlx 0]

Placebo, never satisfied me if another person had bigger problems. Thanks for trying to brighten me up anyway . I'm fine now with my Audigy, except OFP sound could be brighter. But with MediaPlayer etc. it's awesome in Trebles/Bass.

[Mister Frag 0]

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (placebo @ Jan. 18 2002,21:21)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">Sorry you two haven't had much luck so far, if it's any consolation though I too read that it was best not to use the ACPI setting, so I changed it to standard pc, rebooted and XP would no longer work, kept stopping before the end of boot sequence with an error message about a missing file, so I had to install XP all over again <span id='postcolor'>

That is because NT/2000/XP install a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) that is specific to the computer architecture, and if you do something as drastic as changing the way crucial resources like IRQs are managed, the OS will no longer know how to interact with the system, and fall flat on its face.