Fafhrd on 31/5/2011 at 03:50
Hey look, it's Fafhrd, with another weird tech problem!
So I've been playing Independence War 2 for the first time in an age, and a couple of days ago it's begun exhibiting a bizarre sound problem: weird crackles and pops that increase in frequency and volume the longer I play. The really horrible and annoying thing is that these crackles and pops persist after I exit the game. Even now, I can hear them coming from my headphones sitting on my desk.
My first thought on this is that the game has somehow overrun its sound buffer, causing the sound card to freak out, similar to how in Dawn of War II if you have the 'simultaneous voices' option set too high. Unfortunately, there's no option in I-War 2 to change the sound buffer size, or reduce the simultaneous voices, and there's nothing in any of the .ini files to do so, either. And this doesn't answer why these popping sounds keep going after the game exits.
I've tried re-installing the sound drivers, disabling all the alternate sound controllers (mobo's on-board sound, Video Card's HDMI sound), switching CPU affinity and priority, no go. Boot the game up, everything seems fine, five minutes later: 'Pop. Pop. Cracklepop.' I'm quite certain it's not the headphones because nothing else does this.
Any ideas?
Requisite Specs Listing:
AMD Athlon X2 6000+
Radeon 6970
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
4 Gigs RAM
Windows XP SP 2
I'll try booting it up under Vista with ALchemy, and with my luck it'll probably work flawlessly, but I'll still be annoyed that it's not working under XP.
[edit]And another weird thing (hopefully unrelated): Windows has rebooted itself twice in the past couple of days after this has happened. Could this be a case of some bad RAM?
[edit2]Windows Memory Diagnostic says 'no' to the bad RAM theory...
Muzman on 31/5/2011 at 05:14
Hmm, Deus Ex used to do this exact same thing to me, and other people too from memory, -completely different sound set up too- only I can't remember how I stopped it.
Have you tried a compatibility mode maybe?
june gloom on 31/5/2011 at 08:06
Deus Ex's crackling noise was usually a result of using the old software renderer, as I recall. Happened to me; I didn't have an actual video card when I first got the game. Same issue with Undying, actually.
Volitions Advocate on 31/5/2011 at 08:29
Try making sure your audio settings are not on 5.1 if you are running stereo
Muzman on 31/5/2011 at 08:37
The Deus Ex case definitely happened only a couple of years ago to me, and it was using hardware rendering with the latest patches and so on. There were threads about it that I found. It's a problem of legacy calls, to do with Direct X versions or something. Reducing the number of voices only delays the problem as the driver is being overloaded across the board and it gradually builds up again.
It just sounds like a similar problem and might be a place to start looking for an explanation, if not a solution since I-War is older and different and everything.
Fafhrd on 6/6/2011 at 05:51
It's started to leak into anything that uses the sound card (watched some stuff on Hulu for about an hour and it started up). I think it may just be getting time to do a wipe and re-install of my XP drive again.
Sulphur on 6/6/2011 at 06:10
Try removing the sound drivers and reinstalling them first, though. Remove 'em completely if you haven't before: use driver sweeper in safe mode, remove the card from the Device Manager. Then reboot and reinstall.
Fafhrd on 11/6/2011 at 19:43
Well, uninstall, driver sweeper, and reinstall just completely fucked me. I can get the drivers to reinstall no problem, but I can't get any of the software components to work (Creative Audio Console, EAX Console, Speaker settings, etc). Tried multiple wipes and re-installs and keep getting the same errors.
I'm about ready to give up and just get a new soundcard, since this one's pretty ancient anyway and I started getting the same problem in Vista (though rolling back to a much older and unofficial driver seems to have mostly fixed it there).
Sulphur on 11/6/2011 at 20:25
That is very odd. Every now and then, my X-Fi fritzes out on me -- can't be recognised, drivers refuse to acknowledge it exists even if the Device Manager shows it available. The first time it happened, I decided to randomly uninstall the drivers and plonk the card into another (non-dusty) PCI slot, and lo and behold, it worked fine after that. I can't imagine any reason for PCI/IRQ problems in this day and age, but there you go.
If that dun work, then I'm afraid it probably is either a messed up bunch of shit with the OS/drivers, or the soundcard's going to pot.
Fafhrd on 11/6/2011 at 22:52
Restoring the Driver Sweeper backup seems to have sorted it, and I've rolled back the driver to the one off the original Sound Blaster disc. I'll see how I-War likes that one in a bit.
