VOGONS

Realms of the Haunting (again) in XP - missing sound effects

Topic actions

First post, by Guest

Posted on 
User metadata

I hate to bring this up again (since I see that it's been covered at least twice before, and not in the best of threads), but... I'm having trouble with sound in RotH.

Music runs fine. MSCDEX, no problem. Speech and FMV, great. The problem is that I don't appear to be getting any incidental sound effects. Footfalls are silent. Doors opening and closing, silent. Firing the handgun or shotgun, breaking a window, killing a baddie - all completely silent.

Running a Duron 1200Mhz on Asus A7V133a mobo, 768Mb PC133 SDRAM, GeForce2 GTS 32Mb video, Santa Cruz sound (latest drivers as of 4/02), WinXP-SP1. Running a handful of miscellaneous apps in the background, mainly net related (Trillian, VNC, WiFi status monitor, etc) but none of which have interfered with any other games (VDMS or otherwise) The game is (I believe) the USA edition (ie, it supports four levels of difficulty and mouselook).

Tried this under both VDMSound 2.0.4 (with and without various LaunchPad tweaks, including those suggested in the May 03 thread) and 2.1.0beta, at various IRQs (including 5 and 7) and DMAs, with various outputs (DirectSound, Wave, etc)... By playing with settings I can get variations in audio quality and static/popping levels but - consistently, sadly - no sound effects. Was playing originally off an ISO CD image (under Alcohol 120%) but went back and reinstalled and played from the CD - no change either way. Detection of the CD is not an issue. (Also for what it's worth, SoundFX 2000 behaves exactly the same - music is fine, speech is fine, no sound effects.)

I did note Swil's thread about disabling WinXP's native SB emulation and made that change as well, just in case. No effect.

Wide, wide open to suggestions here. Also I apologize in advance if there are other pertinent threads here - I did look at all the RotH threads I could find and applied all the suggestions that seemed pertinent, but no dice as yet.

Thanks
h

Reply 1 of 3, by herichon

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

It must be awfully late - I somehow neglected to log in when I posted that last. Please reply to this one, if you don't mind, so I get the notifies.

Thanks
h

Reply 2 of 3, by Snover

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

Sounds like more a bug in the game itself than a problem with VDMSound.

Yes, it’s my fault.

Reply 3 of 3, by herichon

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

well, you might be right, but the sounds are clearly *there*, in the game, from indications in its own documentation and from reviews all over the net raving about how effective the sound effects are... and it seems unlikely that i just happened to get a buggy copy... so that pretty much leaves either a bug in VDMS (and/or SoundFX2k) or some nagging configuration problem i haven't tracked down yet.

i would be more inclined to think it a bug if i didn't get the impression from other threads that some *have* successfully run RotH in XP (under VDMS or otherwise) with full effects. so i guess i'm hoping i could compare notes with someone who has tried this and can confirm that either a) sound effects under XP just aren't going to happen due to a bug or whatever, or b) that with proper configuration, they are doable (and here's how).

so... can anyone shed light on this one way or another? has anyone either gotten RotH sound effects under emulation or exhausted the possibilites and given up? if the answer is definitely no on SFX, i'll try to play through the game without, but it's frustrating to think that it *might* be possible if i only worked out what was wrong. i really want to enjoy this game but the lack of SFX is driving me to distraction.

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to VDMSound General
Close window
Close window