First post, by Kahenraz
- Rank
- l33t
I did some tests using a PCI Yamaha YMF744 today using the latest WDM driver version 5.12.01.2228. While the output of the device was fine and the XG synthesizer was nice, other features were lacking or problematic. It's well known that WDM drivers for popular sound cards such as the Aureal Vortex and Creative Sound Blaster series do not provide legacy sound devices (Sound Blaster Pro compatibility, Adlib, etc), and VxD drivers must be used instead. This is also the case for Yamaha's drivers.
When doing testing, I found that some games didn't have audio at all. This was suspicious because audio was indeed working elsewhere. The best evidence I was able to find is that this card, drivers, or some combination of the two, does not support hardware buffers. This can be demonstrated using the sound test in dxdiag; after testing the software buffer it will report an error about hardware buffers being unavailable.
One example of this is Incoming, which had no sound effects. It is a Windows game and uses the DirectX 5 API. I didn't do any further testing, since this combination was found to be unsuitable for my use case.