VOGONS

SB16 CT2830 - Beneath a Steel Sky is very very super mega quiet. Other games are fine.

Topic actions

First post, by foil_fresh

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Beneath a Steel Sky is simply too quiet. I can barely hear the speech if my mixer is turned up 100% and still can't hear the FM music.

The audio setup program is not very useful - I have a choice of Soundblaster/Adlib or just Adlib. Both options are very quiet. The intro scene is just as quiet (the FMV).

I've looked for a patch on patches-scrolls but there seems to be nothing there. The in-game volume for music is turned up and that doesn't make a difference (it goes from 90% to 100% so nothing much to expect there).

Every other game is fine. Games like Doom, Blood, Duke3d are all blasting loudly and healthily. It's definitely not a mixerset issue as loud means loud in these games I mention.

I had this problem the other week on Win98SE, now I'm running Win95. The audio problem is the same whether in W95 or reboot-in-dos mode.

my blaster variables - 5/1/5/220/330
tried with 7/1/5/220/330 too, same result.

Pentium MMX 166 / 128MB ram / Shuttle-HOT591p (MVP3 chipset)

Any ideas? Thanks.

Reply 1 of 1, by foil_fresh

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

i have made some? progress...

here's what I found over the last few nights: my SB16 is a bit noisy. so I can hear a distinct hiss when the output gain is turned up as well as the master volume. this isn't so bad, it's within a reasonable level for me. now when I load beyond a steel sky, i can hear a little click and then the hiss disappears. i had a feeling that when the exe loads, it somehow resets all of the creative mixerset settings to a complete default (or different levels entirely).

i tested this theory out by loading win95 and opening the game to hear the same click and disappearing of noise. my windows volume sliders are at about 90% for master, midi (fm) and wave.

when the game was running i made sure i could hear the feint music and speed, then I alt-tabbed, and instantly upon moving the windows sound volume sliders to another position (lets say from the original 90% to 85%) and i could hear the gain pop back in again. i was excited, i alt tabbed back into game and heard the volume for speech and midi was at a reasonable level. hooray?

now win95 is a bit iffy with this game or so I've read, and it crashes a lot. something to do with EMS. i edited the sky.bat pif and changed it to not use EMS or XMS but all this does is now it takes longer to crash. so GG. i dont believe there's any way to open the creative volume mixer while a game is running in DOS so i'm all out of luck.

tl;dr BASS executable or the audio engine inside screws up/resets volume settings too low on SB16 CT2830 in windows and DOS. it's worked fine on my awe64 and the ymf744. weird.

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to Sound
Close window
Close window