red_avatar wrote on 2021-02-02, 10:08:
The only problem I ever had with Beneath A Steel Sky was the fact that the sound was very very quiet. I had this on every system I tried but they all had either a SB16 or a AWE64 so always Creative. I had to lower MIDI music and set wave volume to max and 4x the sound to make the speech loud enough on my 5W speakers back in the day. For the rest, I never had any problems getting it to run but I often saw it mentioned in magazines as a game that people needed help getting to work.
yeah i havent had issues running it but DAMN the sound is so quiet! I know what is happening tho, BASS has it's own memory manager which seems to wipe out whatever volume settings that mixerset sets, reverting all volume levels to default (which is pretty low on all my creative cards i've tested as well as my YMF744). i need to turn up the line-in volume on my main pc which the PC is routed through, which means I get heaps of line noise and interference with the mouse etc.
I have tried running it in W98 to confirm my suspicions, alt-tabbing and then using the windows volume mixer to change the volumes again but it doesn't work properly in w9x at all - seems to crash within a minute of playing. maybe that's the weirdness the older complaints are about.
I haven't tested it on the ESS card I'm running in my 486 atm - that is fairly loud by default so I'll have to give it a try. (edit: tried it, NOPE)
I've looked for patches to no avail, maybe there's a way to run a volume mixer in high memory or something so it doesn't get touched? i don't know enough about memory management to test it tho.