All Games Sound Problems!! Please help

[LazyD]

I installed scummvm and tried to run Sam and Max with speech, Monkey Island 1 cd, and Beneath a Steel Sky with speech, all have sound problems.

The sound flickers and is garbled, the music and the speech (where present). I have tried playing with different settings, but I don't understand what I'm doing really, and none of the settings have worked anyway.

However with Sam and Max, when the audio driver is set to windows midi, the music plays fine but the speech is still garbled. Changing to microsoft midi on Monkey Island 1 does not alleviate its music garbling and jerkiness.
The music and sound effects of Beneath a Steel Sky work ok from the default settings, but the speech is messed up as usual.

I have previously used this installation file and game files on another older system and everything worked fine. I have also updated scummvm to the newest version, identical problems.

My sound is on board and I think is called a, C-Media AC-97 Device. I have a ATI Radeon 9550, 512mb ram and 3ghz P4.

I just don't understand since scummvm worked perfectly on my old far inferior system.

Any help much appreciated, thanks !!!

[Nemesis]

C-media is a crappy soundchip. Try updating these drivers or better buy a nice sound card like Creative Audigy 2 or 4.

[Kirben]

Open a Command Prompt or MS-DOS Prompt and set the SDL audio driver to WaveOut:
set SDL_AUDIODRIVER=waveout

Then start ScummVM via that command prompt or ms-dos prompt.

[LazyD]

Hey Kirben, thanks so much!

It works now, amazing, you rule.

I just typed that line into dos promt and then started it in dos and hey presto. It still doesnt work in the normal way by opening scummVm in windows. But thats no problem at all. I do wonder why though, is it too complicated to explain? Why did it work fine from windows on my old computer?

Anyway, hours, weeks, perhaps years of fun await me reliving the old games and playing ones I haven't completed yet!

Cheers Kirben!

[clem]

A condensed explanation from Kirben's and Nemesis' post as an explanation:

- your soundcard drivers seem to be incompatible with SDL (the library responsible for the gfx and sound output in ScummVM)
- SDL tries to autodetect where to send the sound data to the operating system but fails somehow
- by entering the set SDL_AUDIODRIVER line you tell SDL to use a more compatible way to play the sound
- hence it works afterwards

hope that's somehow accurate (or at least entertaining to see I'm making a fool of myself again)
clem

[LazyD]

Ok thanks, by library you mean like General midi etc? Is SDL a common library like General midi?

In regards to Kirben's solution to my problem, I am wondering if there's a way I can set this permanently because currently I have to type this each time I use scummvm, which again is no great problem but it would be nice if I didn't have to. I'm guessing it reverts back to how it was before because the sdl setting is for just the specific dos session in which one enters it? Maybe I can make a dos shortcut on the windows desktop to it so I don't have to command prompt either? Anyway I'll give it a go and see what happens.

Thanks everyone!!!

[clem]

SDL is more like a platform-independent version of DirectX

you can create a batchfile (with a name like scumm.bat) with the lines:

set SDL_AUDIODRIVER=waveout
scummvm.exe

and put it in the scummvm directory, should set the variable each time you run that batch file.

clem

[LazyD]

Hey Clem, thanks a lot.

I made the batch file as you suggested now everything is tickedy boo. Cheers, and thanks to kirben too.

Your signature is the thing Chomsky came up with right?

[clem]

Your signature is the thing Chomsky came up with right?

yeah, he made it up to show that grammatical stuff doesn't need to make sense

*linguistics nerd*