Occasional Hang ups and a question about Aopen sound card drivers

[Cardinal Fang]

Howdy folks!

I'm having some problems with CM hanging

occasionally.

Here's my system.

AMD K6-2 500

64M RAM

Voodoo 3 2000 w/ the latest WHQL drivers and DirectX 7.0a

Aopen AW724 sound card.

The game runs fine but then I suddenly hangs. Sometimes I can still scroll but I can't access anything. Other times the screen freezes. Usually I can ctl-alt-del out of it.

Sometime it happens a few minutes into the game sometimes I can play for half an hour or more.

Since the video drivers are up to date I suspect the sound card drivers. However I've no idea how to load the new drivers for the card! I've downloaded what I thought was the latest drivers from the AOpen web site but when I ran it all it did was create a directory called AW724 on my C: drive. When I looked in that directory there were a bunch of files but only two executables. One seems to start the AOpen tools tray (which doesn't help me) and the other starts a program that wants to download the latest driver. This crahsed a couple of times and the one time it started to download something I swear it was downloading the file I'd orignally downloaded. BTW the file I downloaded was over 5 megs and I would've thought that the drivers were in there. Can anyone help me?

Is the sound card the likely culprit? I'm hoping that I've missed something painfully obvious and simple.

Cardinal Fang

No One Expects The Spanish Inquistion!

[Schrullenhaft]

Not sure of the exact solution for you. Are there any .inf files in the directory you extracted to ? If there is an .inf file then you can usually install the drivers by going to Control Panels > System > Device Manager tab > click on plus next to Multimedia and select your primary sound device, you may have several items listed (which will probably all need to be updated) > double click on the item or click the Properties button > Drivers tab > Update Driver button > Next button > select "Display List.." radio button > Have Disk button and point to the directory where your updated files are. You will be given a list of drivers there (from the inf files). Select the same device as you are updating (though with a newer date). If you see nothing here then you will be unable to updated your drivers this way. Supposedly this should start updating your drivers, but sometimes it doesn't work completely because an installer is expected to be used.

Your sound card is based on the Yamaha 724 chip, which is quite common. If the AOpen drivers don't work for you, then you can download the v. 1040 drivers directly from this link to Yamaha (download the yamaha_dsxg_driver.exe file for Win9x):

http://www.yamaha.com/lsi/dindex.htm

With the Yamaha driver your card will no longer be identified as an AOpen AW724, but as just a Yamaha sound card. Some utilities that came with your sound card may change or not work.