Why in the heck would you be trying to use SMARTDRV? Stop that at once! I've had no problem getting RtZ to play audio on my W2K install. Check to ensure that your CD drive has the CD audio connector hooked up correctly, and that if it's using a "CD digital" audio connector, make sure "Enable digital CD audio for this CD-ROM device" is checked.

well, the problem doesn't seem to lie with the connector cable or the enabling of cd audio in my mixer. It's not that I get no cd audio at all- the audio starts to play, but then breaks up and hangs. This only seems to occur when there is some kind of animation going on. Specifically I'm at the hardware store in west shanbar. There is the sprite of the diseased mice running around- while this is occuring my cd audio breaks up. When I step away from this scene, into a static shot of the hardware store, the music continues to play (shouldn't it stop when I exit the store?) but plays without break-ups and interuptions. Trying to turn around and go back to the bridge at this point totally hangs the game, and at that stage I must ctrl-alt-delete and exit the game.

the game runs perfectly except for this! it almost seems like a memory problem to me, but I really don't know.

hmmm.....

Unregistered wrote:

well, the problem doesn't seem to lie with the connector cable or the enabling of cd audio in my mixer. It's not that I get no cd audio at all- the audio starts to play, but then breaks up and hangs. This only seems to occur when there is some kind of animation going on. Specifically I'm at the hardware store in west shanbar. There is the sprite of the diseased mice running around- while this is occuring my cd audio breaks up. When I step away from this scene, into a static shot of the hardware store, the music continues to play (shouldn't it stop when I exit the store?) but plays without break-ups and interuptions. Trying to turn around and go back to the bridge at this point totally hangs the game, and at that stage I must ctrl-alt-delete and exit the game.

the game runs perfectly except for this! it almost seems like a memory problem to me, but I really don't know.

hmmm.....

Which audio breaks up, the VDMSound (MIDI) or the CD (with low-level support) audio?!
Does the CD play normally (no breakups) in Media Player (without the game)?

V.

sorry for not being clear, the cd audio (low level support) breaks up. Midi is fine.

The audio plays under windows media player perfectly.

Unregistered wrote:

sorry for not being clear, the cd audio (low level support) breaks up. Midi is fine.

The audio plays under windows media player perfectly.

When you get the trouble in the game, if you watch the CD drive's LED (light), does it blink, stays mostly off or mostly off (wspecially with respect to its "normal operation")?

The game may goof up when talking to MSCDEXNT.EXE, o there may be a problem with the CD around that particular point in the soundtrack.

If Colin (Snover) can confirm that music works fine for him then it's either a CD problem (dirt/scratch?) or a patch that has to be applied to the game.

V.

the led seems to be blinking at a healthy pace. Nothing out of the ordinary at least, and it blinks at the same frequency and speed when the audio is breaking up as it does when I run the audio straight in windows media player.

I don't think there is a scratch or a poblem with the cd physically, sense the music plays fine in wmp. Also, the music DOES play in game, as long as absolutely nothing else is occurring. If there is a small animation or spirte on the screen, the audio breaks up, and moving to a new location hangs the game. But as long as there is a totally static game screen and I don't do anything, the music plays.

I'm running rtz version 1.1. I think there is a version 1.2 out there some where? I tried to donwload this patch once I think but it didn't come with an exe to run the patch >:0

okay, I went out and got the v 1.2 patch, and updated zork successfully. Unfortunately, it didn't change anything, and i'm still having the same problem 😒

Let me boot up RTZ and see what happens. I could be having residual memory from Win9x, but that seems unlikely, since I distinctly remember installing the game in my NEW file system.

One of the possible reasons (though unlikely, since IIRC the drive is what does the correcting) the CD doesn't skip in WMP but does in RTZ is the use of jitter correction (that is, interpolating over lost samples -- in laymans terms, fixing scratches) in WMP. WMP might have an advanced jitter control feature, whereas RTZ is an old, old, old old old DOS game and probably does not. However, like I said, I think that the drive is what does the jitter correction. Just a thought, anyway.

Well here's an interesting one. I can't seem to get CD audio at all. (Go figure.) This could be a problem with W2K's MSCDEXNT.EXE, but it could easily be something else. I'll keep working on it.

so, I randomly tried something, and I don't know if it has anything to do with anything, but it might be of importance 😀

I ran the cdplay.exe thingy that came with zork, and used it to perform a driver test. Although it played the audio, it said, "the current cd-rom driver does not match the microsoft cd-rom extensions standard v2.1 or greater. please refer to the supplied documentation."

I don't know if that is useful or not.

any luck getting audio to play yet Snover?

The MSCDEX in NT doesn't support all of the extensions that it's DOS counterpart does. No way past this unless you use an emulator or find a programmer who is kind enough to update mscdex. 😉

Yes, Paul [Glidos] said that he would release his code that maps DOS CD audio commands to Windows to Vlad so that it can be integrated into VDMSound.