Jedi Knight DF2, Red book audio, and CD-ROM Drives \ VOGONS

Jedi Knight DF2, Red book audio, and CD-ROM Drives

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First post, by Benji

Posted on 2022-09-07, 15:26

Benji Offline

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Glad I found this forum. Building a Win 98 machine and was testing with this game. As you may recall, the game used red book audio to play the soundtrack directly from the CD-rom drive, using an analog or digital cable connected to your sound card. This works fine using any IDE drive I hook up to my Audigy 2 card, with one exception: the music audio is completely unresponsive to the volume slider unless you turn it off completely in the settings. For those that remember the game, there's a .cog script that turns off the red book audio in the opening cantina scene, but (I think due to the same problem) this doesn't work.

Developers at the time were aware of this issue: This is in the readme file:

We have found some computers unresponsive to the Music Slider in the Setup/Sound menu. In such cases, we found it impossible to turn the music off. If your computer does not respond to a change in music volume, set the Music Volume Slider to zero. Another option is to change the Windows volume by double clicking on the Volume icon in the Windows 95 Taskbar and adjusting the volume control.

I remember playing this game back in the Win95/98 era and never seeing this problem, so I am trying to pinpoint the reason. I am running all this on a P4 system w/ a P4P800...but I suspect it may be the more modern IDE CD/DVD Rom-drives I've tried...all three of I've used exhibit the same problem...but I recall that older CD-Rom drives had a volume control and headphone jack on the front. Could it be that these older CD-Rom drives allowed for volume manipulation in software whereas the newer ones did not? Only answer I can come up with at this point.

I also tested this w/ another motherboard (an LGA775 board) using WinXP and onboard audio, and the problem was still there.

Not much of an issue, but more a curiosity at this point. Anyone have any ideas?

Reply 1 of 7, by Oetker

Posted on 2022-09-07, 15:30

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Are you using an analog or digital connection to your cd rom drive?
Furthermore, if you're using wdm drivers there's the option of playing back audio digitally over IDE instead of the separate cable, this might also have an impact. I don't remember off the top of my head where this setting is located, but it's a checkbox somewhere.

Reply 2 of 7, by Benji

Posted on 2022-09-07, 15:35

Benji Offline

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Oetker wrote on 2022-09-07, 15:30:

Are you using an analog or digital connection to your cd rom drive?
Furthermore, if you're using wdm drivers there's the option of playing back audio digitally over IDE instead of the separate cable, this might also have an impact. I don't remember off the top of my head where this setting is located, but it's a checkbox somewhere.

Yeah I've tried both digital and analog connections, and setting the CD-Rom to digital playback (you can do this through the device manager). Always the same result.

Reply 3 of 7, by Benji

Posted on 2022-09-18, 21:52

Benji Offline

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Just a quick update on this: I tested on multiple configurations, using a range of CD/DVD-ROM drives and all reproduced the same problem. Tried onboard sound, same thing. Audigy 2, 4, and Live!...same result. Really weird, but it almost seems like a Win98 thing, but I don't know of any more settings to try.

Would love to try this on Win 95 and see what happens but my hardware is too modern. If anybody has such a setup and would pop in this game and see what happens in the first scene I'd be curious to hear it. As tiny a detail as this is it's driving me nuts 🤣.

Reply 4 of 7, by akula65

Posted on 2022-09-19, 11:09

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Is the game patched to Version 1.01?

Reply 5 of 7, by Benji

Posted on 2022-09-20, 17:14

Benji Offline

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Same thing regardless of the update. I've tried both ways.

Interestingly enough. I launched a PCem virtual machine and installed Windows 95 and guess what? The sound worked correctly in JK...volume was controllable and the soundtrack was muted during the cantina sequence. Strange.

Next step when I have time will be to try under Windows 98se in PCem.

Reply 6 of 7, by BEEN_Nath_58

Posted on 2022-09-20, 17:26

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Benji wrote on 2022-09-20, 17:14:

Same thing regardless of the update. I've tried both ways.

Interestingly enough. I launched a PCem virtual machine and installed Windows 95 and guess what? The sound worked correctly in JK...volume was controllable and the soundtrack was muted during the cantina sequence. Strange.

Next step when I have time will be to try under Windows 98se in PCem.

I recall Windows 98 SE on PCem had problems running the A-B-C-D sound player with AWE32 (analog connection), that the sound would get completely mute and never return (until I started the machine one day after 3 weeks)

previously known as Discrete_BOB_058

Reply 7 of 7, by Benji

Posted on 2022-09-21, 15:57

Benji Offline

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Update: Setting up a Win98 virtual machine in PCem, and it also worked flawlessly just as the Win95 machine (Slot 1 mb w/ Celeron). I'm guessing, then, the problem must be a motherboard/chipset issue from the p4 era. Oh well.

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