Originally posted by Unregistered My VDMS settings are pretty much those supplied by Don Wells to get Silent Hunter running under XP, there's a page that describes them in detail at: ...

That actually is the kind of thing we need to see more of... Individuals concentrating on a single game (obviously of strong personal interest to them), giving detailed description of what needs to be done. Most of my "Problem Children" don't involve "in-depth" testing as I'm constantly bouncing back-and-forth between titles for testing.

Although I have to admit the "Windows XP has SoundBlaster emulation built into the NTVDM (NT DOS Virtual Machine - the part of XP that runs DOS apps), meaning that you get almost full support for sound in old DOS games", the AdLib/OPL music comments, and the recommendation of SoundFX are off...

Not sure of the actual version of Syndicate, I'll guess version 1 as I installed from original floppy disks.

Probably. People with the Gold CD version that has the American Revolt on it are still stuck due to the way that it runs the game off of the CD.

I got decent play running the Amiga version in emulation.

At one point i had the Gold CD..wish i still did for nostalgia's sake.

Anyway, I had no problems starting Syndicate right up. First time, no sound. Went back and edited the parameters in the batch file (wrong DMA or sommat) and the game fired up with sound and music, just fine. I got into the game and noticed that when i would fire a weapon the first time it would go off fine, but the second time i would get big pauses (1 sec or so) , then no sound whatsoever for a few firings, then the cycle would repeat. Hopefully this updated software will fix it a bit but I'd love to know what others have tried. Not sure what rip i have, it was a self extracting archive i got from iMesh, if that makes a difference. its 12.1 megs. If anyone has any advice feel free to IM me on aol im i'd love to talk about it

Hi all,

I've been having the same problem as many others here. Syndicate works with VDMsound, both with and without the Launcher.

The problem is the pausing - the game pauses for half a second after a sound effect is played.

I think the problem is that either the Windows XP VDM or VDMsound, or both, are unable to interrupt a sound effect that is already playing.

When an automatic weapon is fired, the sound effect for one 'shot' is SUPPOSED to be interrupted before it finishes. Think of how the Minigun SHOULD sound - each shot is 'BRAAAP' - a burst of fire is 'BRA-BRA-BRA-BRA-BRAAAAP!'

If you think about it, the pause is not as noticeable when you use weapons with low rates of fire (pistol, shotgun) because the pause between shots is too long for the shot's sound effect to have to interrupt the previous sound effect. However, the game ise rendered nearly unplayable when you use weapons with high rates of fire (minigun, flamethrower).

The explosion sound effect is a good 4 seconds long, and results in a massive pause, and occasionally a dump back to Windows.

I used to play Syndicate on a 486 back in the '90s and I know for a fact that sound effects were 'interrupted'. Only one sound effect was ever played at any time (single channel?)

I hope this info is helpful to someone. If not, I apologize for stating the obvious.

Cheers

Colin Watts

[Police! Put Down Your Weapons! BRA-BRA-BRAAAP!]

well after 2 weeks of trying to get syndicate working i got a newer version of dos4gw.exe and it ran perfectly. on to the sound i thought. it didn't take me long to find this emulator and i was playing syndicate before i knew it.

now i have the miniguns and timebombs are dropping like rain syndicate is crashing faster than i can gun down the cops.

for the record i have an unknown version of syndicate, got it from kazaar, but it think it is an early version, certanly not the american revolt but i don't know the difference between the plus version and normal. don't think its a cd versions though.

i've got a nForce2 mobo and am using the onboard sound running under win 2K pro. game play is fine normaly, a little choppy but nothing worse than my memory of this game 1st time i played it. i havent noticed the 0.5-1 sec pause when using the minigun but am experiencing crashes, especialy with timebombs.

i have turned on the debug options and there are a lot of the following errors:

@W - 01:42:01.467 - SB Controller
Attempted to read from write-only port (IN 0x226)

the adlib emulator is also active, anyone know how to turn it off to keep it out of the picture?

i have attached the debug report and am using standard settings, but i have altered my synd.bat to run the emulator and skip the intro (hey, i got lazy having to right click all the time 😀 ). my bat file is as follows:

dosdrv
@main >debugmin.txt: /iirq7 /idma1 /iio220 /c0

does anyone know what the /c0 is? i'm thinking channels and the 0 is default or autodetect, might be nice to get a few more channels....

my joystick port is disabled in my bios in case this makes any difference. i'm very keen to get this fixed and will try any suggestions and answer any questions. i've had more fun in syndicate than in any new game i've played recently (of course i'm loking forward to Half Life 2 though 😀 )

for further contact you can mail me at: reaper_not@yahoo.com. and when i sign up i'll get the board to notify me by email aswell 😀

i hope to put my version onto an xp machine sometime this weekend, so i'll keep you posted on that.

K just registered so i can get email notification of replies

That debug message is actually 'normal'.

hmm, fair enough, i couldn't see anything else in there that jumped out, the last few entries looked like the rest of em. i did got through 3 versions of dos4gw.exe untill i found one that worked. the one with my game was just too old. in the end i settled for one off an emulator site. the official word from the dos4gw.exe guys is that win2k is not supported, so maybe the sound issues are due to the dos wrapper and new OS'es rather than the sound emulation.

to test this i ran the game with no emulation and it still crashed. taking out the sound card details in syndicates batch file gave me a very fast and stable game. too fast really, i ran through 4 mini-guns b4 i knew it! so it looks like it is more to do with the way the sound is handeled by the game and whatever links it to the sound card (eg the dos wrapper and OS not the sound card itself which is where VDMS comes in)

so what do you think of my theory and how can we overcome it?

P.S. if you capture enough agents and then get em killed off (after selecting them for the team not when they are just persuaded) does the game give you any more female agents? i'd like to get 4 of em together but he game only wants to give me 3 🙁 apart from my hunch that femails are faster but not stronger, they look better, well after watching Terminator 3 they do anyway 😀 evil, cold hearted and very deadly 😀

There is a compendium of DOS/4GW revisions in Deep Thought.

Snover wrote:

There is a compendium of DOS/4GW revisions in Deep Thought.

thanks for the hint, ive got em all now and am busy finding the most stable one for my pc. 😀

my friend made an interesting point though. if it is mostly the timebomb sound that tends to push it over the edge then why not delete it or replace it for a much shorter sound? looking at the various files i think there are files with the sounds in and files mapping to the location of each individual sound. so in theory all we need to do is change where the timebomb is getting its sound from. this is where i get out of my depth but i know people have the skills to do this sort of thing, can you or can you bug someone who can?

thanks for the help anyway, i know you've been here before and are probably fed up with people trying to flogg a horse you've given up for dead long ago, i did a search on syndicate and there are a lot of threads over the years 😀 still if i can come up with a few ideas its got to be worth a go hu?

WAHOO!! I've managed to swap the sound effects around! All i gotta do now is spend some time working out which sound is which then find a good alternative for the timebomb and test it for stability! Expect a post in a few days with a new sound file attached (it will be SOUND-0.TAB, this holds the pointers to the different sounds). All I will do is point the timebomb at a different sound effect, one that it can handle a bit easier like a gun shot. Hopefully this should stop it from getting tied up.

Not bad for my first real look into hex editing 😀 I found out that bullfrog used Creative Voice Files for the sound effects, then instead of putting multiple voices in one file they put multiple voice files in one file, compressed it with RNC ProPack and made a .TAB file to point to the start of each file, which they also compressed! Now how's that for a bit of detective work:) Ahh the triumphant glow of a newbie and his first success:) I just hope all this work will actually make things more stable!

What you have accomplished so far doesn't sound too newbish to me... 😁

well, HEX is all new to me but i'm no stranger to DOS and computers in general. I'm a programmer by trade but Visual Basic is so fluffy and user friendly it hardly counts as experiance for HEX editing old DOS games 😀 All i've done so far is tried climbing onto the sholders of giants. It was a lot of clues and research, I found detailed file structures for the creative voice file on the internet and the RNC ProPack came from an old amiga site, where they used it to HEX an old football game! Once I had worked out what the .dat files were (just several creative voice files bunched together and packed) I just had to suss the .tab files. Well i noticed it was full of offsets that matched the start of each voice file in the .dat file, then i just had to work out what the rest of the gibberish meant. I worked out the next value was the size of the voice file then that just left the last value as a mystery. So i thought bugger it, i'm sure its some sort of name for each file so I just coppied all the offsets and size values from one line into all the others then ran syndicate. sure enough every sound in the game was now the same! I still don't know where the actual data starts in the .tab file, where it ends or what the 3rd bit of data means but i have enough to bodge a fix together when i nail down which one is the timebomb:)

i'm baby sitting tonight and tomorrow then moving house (fingers crossed!) this weekend but am hoping to get a fix made when the bab is sleeping.

OK, i found the timebomb location and swapped it for the flamer sound. the game still crashes in the same way. i even managed to make a silent sound effect and point the timebomb at that and the crashes kept coming (yes i did test my new timebomb sounds before i went up against the enemy agents to there 😜 ). i know it is to do with the sound cos if i tell syndicate i don't have a sound card the whole thing plays fine. VDMS is not the culprit either because i let syndicate think it had a sound card and ran it without VDMS and it crashed in the same way. it has to be something to do with the action on the screen, the crashes are only frequent when i am fighting a lot of agents with timebombs. maybe it is the ticking (alarm) sound of the timebombs that is the problem.

i could do with some help here, someone to bounce ideas off and confirm they have the same problem. i'm running win2K so anyone out there who wants to team up please post or mail me. in the mean time i'm going to bang my head against a brick wall to see what happens.

say, out of interest, how many people are following my progress? hehe it would be nice to know if i have a few people crossing their fingers for me 😀

wow, i just wanted to bump this to the top....i know its been a long time, but i've got this -

original gold cd w/ american revolt and syndicate....plays great with VDMsound until i use the uzi/minigun/timebomb.....

.5 to 1 second jerks, its really unfortunate. with soundblaster emulation off, the game runs as it should right from the box.

running windows xp, onboard nforce2 sound and latest version of VDM and the update.

if anyone has any updated info on this, PLEASE post here! the jerkies are unbearable on such a beautiful game!!!

thanks, and if you guys need any more info, post and ill get back to you.

thanks, deadlight

Hi People.

I'm a newbie in this forum and in pc's! I downloaded Syndicate from Gamebird dk or summat like that. The game runs fine but with no sound what so ever. I tried downloading vdm sound and running syndicate with it, but no joy. My PC is quite the stone age computer. The specs are intel pentium 2, 334mhz, 160mb of Ram, but I'm running windows xp proffesional 2002. Any ideas please?!

Cheers Denti