Zup wrote:

using YouPax drivers.

May be your issue?

Try opening up dxdiag, and turn down that accelleration in the sound tab and see what happens.

Yeah, seems pretty obvious. I don't know these "YouP-PAX" drivers, but from what i can gather from the web, they are made for Audigy and X-FI cards (there seems to be a modded version for XBLive, but the original drivers are for Audigy and X-FI). I've played both NOLF's on XP with a SBLive and the kx Project drivers, and both games ran perfectly. I'm using the kx Drivers because i'm too lazy to install the original Creative driverset, and the kx Drivers always worked quite well for me.

It seems that the game works in Linux perfectly (after cracked). I'll guess I'll play it in Linux for now...

YouP-Pax drivers enables a SB Live! to use the Audigy apps. "Official" drivers from my CD don't work well with XP, and updates from creative sometimes screws with some apps bundled with them (i.e.: the drivers works, but surround mixer or Soundfont loader crashes). Until now, these drivers worked well with any other games, and I didn't remember if I played the game with XP or 98.

kx Project drivers

This sounds interesting... Where can I get these? I'm experiencing some problems with the original creative pack.

http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/

Back to the topic: yesterday, I tried with my logitech headset thingy (actually, the headset that came bundled with SOCOM II for PS2) and it worked well. And after disable and re-enable the SB Live in the device manager, the game works well.

So it seems that it's driver related, after all...

This is the first I've heard of YouP-PAX. I've never felt the need to run an Audigy-only app, but do they offer substantially better performance and/or compatibility?

As I said, for now the driver works. It's more than I could say with the SB Live! original driver.

My problem was that I couldn't load soundfonts nor play with the DSP effects, because most times the programs didn't work and I had to reinstall drivers.

The driver of the kx project didn't appear to have utilities for that, and I don't know if they will work with Creative apps. On the other hand, if anyone want ASIO support, the kx driver is the choice.

EDIT: If you don't need ASIO and you don't have problems with your system, I would stick with the official drivers.

I have a slightly different problem. The game seems to work otherwise well, but the speech in cutscenes and dialogues skips i.e. it jumps to the next line before the last one is finished. I tried to play in WinXP Pro, tomorrow I could give Vista (32 bit) a go since I have both.

My system specs are:
E6400 DualCore @ 2800 MHz
Abit AW9D-Max (i975 Express chipset)
2 GB RAM
Ati HD4870 512MB
SB X-Fi Elite Pro

Any help is greatly appreciated.