bad noise problem

[Legio X]

I really love CM (best wargame ever) but... I've a sound problem!

Every 40/60 seconds, when I'm issuing orders, I hear a short and loud (very loud because I love to play with full sound on), very disturbing, "white" noise, like a disturbing frequency on a radio.

My specs are: athl 1000, mother abit, 256 ram, asus geforce 2mx (with 6.50 tnt drivers), sound blaster live value (last drivers), w98, dx 8a.

Do u have a solution?

Thanks and greetings from Roma, Italy.

P.S.- I haven't this problem in any other game.

[Schrullenhaft]

I'm not sure what this sound is, but have you turned off the ambient sounds and see if it still occurs ? I've heard of problems with some chipsets (VIA) and the SB Live cards, I'm not sure if that would be the case here, especially since you don't see this problem anywhere else.

What ABIT motherboard do you have ? Have you downloaded the appropriate chipset drivers (VIA and/or AMD) ? What version of the SB Live drivers are you using ?

VIA 4-in-1 v. 4.32:

http://www.via.com.tw/jsp/en/dr/driver.jsp

AMD Driver Pack v. 1.20 (at top):

http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bin/

Do you know if your sound card is sharing an IRQ with another device, like your USB ports or video card ? If it is, then you may need to physically move the card to a different PCI slot to get the IRQ assignments changed (but it isn't as simple as that though). Sharing an IRQ with USB probably won't be a problem unless you have a device on the USB Bus, in which case it can be a problem.

[Legio X]

Ok, I've turned off the ambient sound and the noise doens't occur anymore! But I like hearing birds songs before the battle...

Maybe this noise could be some particular ambient sound that goes mad for some strange reason?

I've a mb abit KT7a, with chipset VIA APOLLO KT133A. I had the version 4.26 drivers, so I followed your advice and upgraded to 4.32... but the "ambient" noise remains.

I have a SB LIVE VALUE (not the more recent 5.1), and the latest driver, on the creative lab site, is the SBLW9XUP.EXE (without number, updated the 5.5.00... ) Do u know some more recent driver?

Yes, the soundcard shares irq 9 with usb ports, but I don't use them anyway while I play.

So, is there a way to turn on again ambient sound?

Thanks anyway for your help.

[Schrullenhaft]

I haven't run into this problem myself. The biggest audio problem I've run into with the SB Live in CM is the "electronic sounding fire" while panning around.

The ambient sounds are large files (10-25Mb) which could have a problem when anything shares the IRQ with the sound card. However there would probably have to be devices attempting to use the IRQ while the sound card is playing back the file. In your case, since there isn't anything running on the USB bus I wouldn't have assumed that there would be an issue sharing an IRQ with USB.

I'd guess that something may be 'querying' the USB bus looking for a device and that ends up interrupting the SB Live playing back the ambient sounds (which are always playing/looping). All of the ambient sounds are over a minute in length, so I wouldnt' assume that the problem is the looping of the ambient sounds (since your error occurs before they need to 'restart').

You may want to play with your 'Hardware Acceleration' settings for audio in either the DirectX control applet (C:\PROGRAM FILES\DIRECTX\SETUP\DXDIAG > Sound tab > DirectX Features) or the Multimedia control panel (Control Panel > Multimedia > Playback section > Advanced Properties button > Performance tab). Increasing or decreasing this setting might help.

Though this won't simulate the problem fully, try playing back the larger WAV files and see if you get any problems (most likely not, since the problem is possibly due to several sound streams being played simultaneously).

[ 08-08-2001: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[Legio X]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Schrullenhaft:

All of the ambient sounds are over a minute in length, so I wouldnt' assume that the problem is the looping of the ambient sounds (since your error occurs before they need to 'restart').

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Ok, I think this is exactly the problem.

Sorry, I didn't know ambient sounds were so big looped samples, so I hadn't ever timed exactly the noise occurrence (40/60 seconds in my previous message was just an approximate time, to mean not every hour).

Now I timed it, and in a scenario the noise occurred exactly every 1 minute and 30 seconds... exactly the 5007.waw time (15.585 kb).

I tryed playing .waw ambient sound out of the game (very nice ambient music ), without any noise problem, so I guess the noise occurs every time the loop starts again.

Do u have some fast fix for it, before I start randomly messing audio settings?

Thanks

[ 08-08-2001: Message edited by: Legio X ]

[rleete]

Legio X, I have virtually the same hardware as you. I had a similar problem with a scanner/printer on USB. If you aren't using the USB ports, disable them in the bios. If you use them, but just not when playing CM, make sure whatever is plugged into them is turned off. Or, if it's convienient, just unplug from the ports. Also, if you're using speakers plugged into both the sound card and USB, that can add noise when polling the IRQ's.