Deus Ex sound problems

Gray on 27/11/2005 at 15:10

I have problems with the sound in Deus Ex, but all my other games work just fine. Specifically, it's the voices: they start off just fine, but chops off the end of everything, and after a while what little voice is played sounds distorted. It gets progressively worse until no voices are heard at all.

<A HREF="http://storm.campus.luth.se/~gray/tmp/DeusExChoppySound.mp3">Here</A> is an example.

Here's the machine specs (a laptop) off the stickers:

Acer Aspire 1362LMi
AMD Sempron 2800+
NVIDIA GeForce FX Go 5200,64MB
512MB DDR RAM

This is what Everest tells me I have:

--------[ Windows Audio ]--------

midi-out.0 0001 0066 Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth
mixer.0 0001 0068 Vinyl AC'97 Audio (WAVE)
wave-in.0 0001 0065 Vinyl AC'97 Audio (WAVE)
wave-out.0 0001 0064 Vinyl AC'97 Audio (WAVE)

--------[ PCI / PnP Audio ]--------

VIA AC'97 Enhanced Audio Controller PCI

I'm running WinXP and all drivers and DirectX are up to date.

I've owned Deus Ex for several years, but have been unable to play it yet. On my old machine, the graphics didn't work, and on my new laptop the sound doesn't work. Really quite annoying.

Zerker on 27/11/2005 at 18:19

Well, it's probably that crazy onboard sound card you have... I never trust them. Why don't you try some sort of (http://www.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=1&subcategory=204&product=10769) PCMCIA sound card?. I'm sure if you get them locally, you can return it if you have problems... most places are good about Hardware returns.

Doing some google searches brought up a post at (http://forums.viaarena.com/messageview.aspx?catid=17&threadid=61469&enterthread=y) VIA Arena which sounds promising. It looks like you may have the wrong drivers?

Other notable posts:
(http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/forum/showthread.php?p=95202#post95202) Softare Tricks and Tips

And my (http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22Vinyl+AC'97%22+problems&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official) Google Search itself.

Hopefully something there will help.

Gray on 27/11/2005 at 20:24

Quote Posted by Zerker

Well, it's probably that crazy onboard sound card you have... I never trust them.

Neither do I, but it's a laptop, so I'm sort of restricted by what I have. PCMCIA cards aren't really an option, money wise.

It's odd in the sense that all my other games work just perfectly (SS2, Thiefs, KOTOR, Cossacks, Neverwinter, Diablos et al), but Deus Ex simply doesn't. If it was a hardware problem I assume it would be a problem in other games as well.

I've tinkered with the in-game sound settings, but by changing the sound quality all I get is some delay until the problem occurs. It sounds fine but cuts off, then it distorts, and then it doesn't work at all. The timespan from start to fail seems to be longer on a lower quality setting.

Thanks for the links, I'll be sure to check those out.

Gray on 1/12/2005 at 20:21

Well, I updated my drivers, but since Deus Ex was the only app with sound issues I had little hope that would actually work. It didn't. So I checked your links, googled a bit on my own checked the Eidos forums and various hardware related sites, but couldn't find a solution. I fiddled with starting the game in safe mode, and using all sorts of different sound settings, but still nothing helped. And now I frankly my patience has run out and I'll just leave the problem unsolved for now, and report back later if I manage to find some fix. It's probably some quirk with the onboard soundcard. Still bothers me a bit I've owned this game for a long long time and still can't play it.

Thanks for your time and effort, though.

dvrabel on 2/12/2005 at 01:10

Did you try adjusting the sounds hardware acceleration level in some mysterious dialog box the location of which escapes me.... Perhaps in dxdiag...?

Drat on 2/12/2005 at 01:30

I've head of problems with Deus Ex on laptops running XP. On my brother's laptop (when it was operational), Unreal ran a bit too fast (and somewhat jumpily), as did Deus Ex (which is, of course, unreal-based). The speech also gets chopped off at the end. I can't rememember if there was sound distortion though. Been a couple years.

I searched around and didn't have much success in fixing the problem. I had access to another machine to play it on anyway.

Ultraviolet on 2/12/2005 at 02:22

I was going to suggest turning down or off your sound acceleration in dxdiag, but that pesky dvrabel beat me to it.

Gray on 2/12/2005 at 23:34

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried turning it off, which helped slightly. Meaning, the increasing garbling and distortion appears to have disappeared (or delayed until it appears), but the speech still cuts off about halfways through every line.

I'll fiddle a bit more. Thanks for giving me new hope.

Aekeron on 4/12/2005 at 17:33

Not that I know my way around Deus Ex very well, but have you tried playing around with the codecs you have installed/activated? Try either updating the ones that the game uses for it's speech or disabling the ones you've got installed currently.

Gray on 4/12/2005 at 23:04

I haven't really done much reasearch into codec updates. Is there anything in particular I should do?