"Bumpy" sound in 17th C. music when a province is selected

[unmerged(6777)]

I'm guessing that this may have something to do with one of my system components...

Playing a fantasia game, music in 16th C played perfectly. When I reached 17th C and the new music kicked in, it plays along happily until I select any province, at which point it "skips" and re-plays about a 1/4 second of track a few times before resuming. This is particularly annoying when jumping around to check on a few provinces at once. Of course I have a lot more things going on - as do the other countries - so it may be simply a case of not enough horsepower...

As per your sticky:
Compaq 17XL262 Laptop
running Win XP 4.90 build 3000
Intel 600Mhz processor
256MB RAM
~1.3 GB free space on drive
the laptop has 600x800 "monitor" driven by RAGE MOBILITY-M1 AGP MACH64 Version 4.00 (but I also plug in a 21" IBM monitor when at home and I experience the same problem either way)
sound card is ESS Allegro-1 PC1 AudioDrive
drive is Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-C2402

I think all of my various drivers, Direct-X, etc. are all up to date...and I habitually shut down all non-essential background programs (virus scan, etc.) before playing.

This may be un-resolvable but thought you should know...

 

[viper37]

Hi,

try the latest drivers for your sound card under Win XP:
Allegro 1988
Allegro 1989

I once had problems similar to yours under a beta version, but I don't remember if it was under patch 1.01 or one of the later ones. All I know is with that with the latest patch, this problem is solved for me (I have a different sound card however). 1.02 will be out for the public very soon (by next week at the latest) and if you still have the problem desptite the patch and the new drivers, than post again and we will try something else.

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Thanks

Thanks.

Seems to have somewhat resolved the problem. The repetitious "skipping" has disappeared but I still get a bit of a "bump". I'll be interested to see if 1.02 further clears that up...

I was also thinking that a good judicious pruning of my hard drive and a thorough defrag might be in order, but I'll save that for tomorrow.

 

[viper37]

defrag will never hurt

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Damn. It's back again so I guess that didn't work.

I defrag'ed on the weekend and had a lovely time playing a full 300+ years with great sound (except for the slight bump mentioned above).

Yesterday evening I started a new GC game as England. For the first 50-60 years I had completely smooth sound...not a bump to be heard. Then the bump started to creep in, until now (~1515) it is so bad I had to turn off the ambient sound or I would have had to go and throttle someone.

In this most recent case, it now happens not only on province selection but also when I scroll the map, hover the mouse over any pop-up descriptive thing, etc.

What you're probably going to ask, and I won't be able to tell you until tomorrow, is whether having shut down and rebooted the problem will go away since I was at it until almost 2:00AM and had to be into work for 8:00 (yawn).

My guess is that somewhere, somehow, WinME is having problems handling the DMA. It may be related to having the OS on a different partition that is limited to 1.2GB swap space. Since I played quite happily for hours (no CTD) I guess maybe the swap was full and Win was having trouble keeping up with all of the various tasks as well as shuffling around swap data?

I've frequently noticed that ME has problems handling memory-flushing functions when you're keeping it busy with other tasks. I wish, as in the Win3.x and earlier versions, that there was a "flush" or "purge" command for memory (both RAM and swap) but I've yet to find one other than to reboot.

I'll let you know if the reboot helps here, but if you have any other suggestions I should consider when I'm looking at it tonight, I'd appreciate it...

 

[viper37]

Go to sound&multimedia in the control panel and push the slider for hardware acceleration to the extreme left.

You will also notice there (playback) "Sample rate conversion quality". Reduce this to "Good" and it it's already there, increase it to "Best".

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Okay. Did that.

Played last night for about three hours from the point in the game where I left off and had no problems. The real test will be this weekend when I'll probably do a marathon session.

Wondering if my Direct X driver it too recent (8.1 build 4.08.01.0881), or if the lack of a decent size independent video RAM in my laptop is the root casue...or whether my memory idea from above is more probable. I think I'll run a system monitor to track my memory usage and CPU usage for a bit while I'm playing to see if ME is "flushing" correctly or not.

Thanks for your help!

 

[viper37]

I don't know what's causing the problem, but I doubt it's DX 8.1

I had a Monster Sound II card before and it was working fine with the latest patches. I've upgrade to a Sound Blaster Audigy last week-end and I had to do this trick to get the sounds (I only get the music).

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Return of bad bumping...but only after about 12 straight hours of play and then becoming progressively worse over the following 4 or 5 hours until I couldn't take it any longer (yawn). I did quit back out to desktop somewhere in there and then restart but no change. Eventually I gave up and shut down. This morning everything was back to normal.

I'm guessing memory issue somewhere. Next time it happens I'll ALT-TAB out to desktop and check my DMA usuage...I was too stupified to think of it last night.

 

[viper37]

first, do you have patch 1.02?

Second, in the control panel, sounds&multimedia, check the audio tab, than "advanced" on sound playback and performance. Try hardware accelaration at full (note: it is possible you will lose all sound effects this way, if this happen, revert back to "none".) and "Sample rate conversion quality" to the extreme left (good).

 

[unmerged(6777)]

Yep. I downloaded V1.02 the first day it was posted. I got the impression that it took much longer for the sound problems to appear after that, but once they do they are just as bad as with 1.01 (I think).

Tried your recommendation but haven't been able to put in the consecutive hours of game play over the holidays to find out whether it helped. I'll probably get the chance this weekend so I'll let you know how it goes.

Once again...thanks very much!