No stereo sound in Thief 2. M-audio delta 44 musician's soundcard

io organic industrialism on 23/8/2008 at 12:54

Does anybody else have experience with playing Thief with an m-audio soundcard? I am a musician so having this card is a priority over any gaming experience. However I recently started playing Thief 2 again and I noticed that you can't hear footsteps coming from the left, or right, they pretty much just sound centered and the only way to figure out the location of a guard is to listen to how loud or quiet the steps are, not where they are coming from.
This card does not support EAX so I am not able to enable that. Funny thing though when I do the stereo test "Left... Right" in the options menu, it works, I can hear it come out of left, and then right... In game it just doesn't seem to work ...

:erg:

CaptSyn on 23/8/2008 at 14:19

I'm not familiar with your soundcard, but since it's not meant for gaming, there's a high chance the Thief games simply can't support it because of a lack of Sound Blaster compatiblity, which is the industry standard for gaming. Plus the Thief games are rather old.

If you have onboard audio as well, you can enable it. You would then set your default audio hardware to the onboard sound in Windows in Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices > Audio tab. (I'm assuming you use XP)

I've used onboard C-Media audio with my old Audigy without any problems. All software will use your default audio hardware automatically, and some apps and games allow you to choose what audio hardware to use.

Of course, you will need another set of speakers, unless you want to swap them out all the time.

I wouldn't recommend using splitters to connect one set of speakers to 2 sets of audio hardware though. Might get some nasty feedback issues or power problems.

If you don't have onboard audio, then my advice would be to pick up either a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 pci card (if you can still find them), or a basic SB Audigy. Both cards can be had for next to nothing.

(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829102010)
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829102003)

I think Walmart still carries the SB Live 5.1 pci card.

io organic industrialism on 23/8/2008 at 15:18

Yeah I've got onboard. I used it for a while before I got this soundcard. And several inputs on my mixer, which means I could output it to the same speakers and headphones. Guess I will just have to do that :erg:

Muzman on 28/8/2008 at 00:12

I've had this happen before, but it was Thief 1 while using my old Yamaha. That had Sensaura and was great with T2, but with T1 it was as though mono sometimes.
I had to turn off hardware acceleration all together. It might be the same sort of thing.