Ultima 9 with G400 and Win2k

[gross012]

Hi,
This time I have a problem with U9-Ascension. I just bought the game in a shop around the corner selling the us-version from Nov99. I heard of a lot of problems with the game but that the version 1.18f makes the game running as well as other games. That was a mistake. Using no fix the game works fine as far as I can see. But there are to many bugs concerning the "flow of the story", 3D bugs etc. So I installed the patch. But now I can only play a few seconds or minutes. Then the sound hangs repeating half a second. So it´s time for a reset.
I´m using win2k with SP1 on a i850, 192MB Ram and a g400 with 5.11.017 beta. Certified drivers don´t help (I tried 5.03.025).

Any ideas?
S.G.

[Gurm]

Two suggestions:

1. What sound card are you using?
2. Try the newer drivers (5.14) for the video.

But I doubt it's a video problem. It's most likely a sound problem.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Rik]

Try changing the line in the 'options.ini' that says 'CrackleOffset=1' to read 'CrackleOffset=0'.
This worked for me and cured my sound-related lock-ups, and I'd be interested to see if it can do the same for you.

[gross012]

I assume its a graphic problem, because the readme file of the patch was about graphic performance (Next line from patch.txt)
- Made additional D3D improvements. D3D is now native to DirectX 7.
That makes me suggesting (bad english?) that the improvement is more an elementary thing than just fixing some minor bugs. And larger corrections concerning sound system were not mentioned in the file.

[gross012]

i´m sorry, but 'CrackleOffset=0' didn´t fix the problem. I installed the 5.14.033 drivers but without success. But now even the unfixed game stopps after a few seconds or directly with hanging sound.
So I decided to deactivate the sound card in the control panel. Starting again leaded to the same as I was before. The game stopped directly, when starting the 3D-Engine. But this time I saw a lot of green and a few pixels in other colors. Reset and trying again leaded to the same problem again.
Applying the patch and starting the game leads to an black screne and a short peep from my pc-speaker. Pressing ESC or Enter brings me back to my Deskop. But in the readme file from U9 they said, that they would support Win2k (At this time it was a beta)

[gross012]

Hi,
I´m using a Terratec DMX with the drivers from win2k. No Terratec drivers available. I´ll try the certified drivers when I come back home. But if it´s a sound problem, why do all the other games or sound programs run without any problems?
Oh, and i´ll have a look in the options.ini ('CrackleOffset=0').

Thank you so far
S.G.

[Raptor^]

Originally posted by gross012:
I´ll try the certified drivers when I come back home. But if it´s a sound problem, why do all the other games or sound programs run without any problems?

Why do you assume its a graphics problem if everything else runs fine?

The sound looping does point to a sound card problem. These problems show up sometimes when the people that programmed the game did something in a different / peculiar way that the driver wasn't expecting (there are many different ways of acheiving the same result in DirectX). This is why companies have to update their drivers (sound/gfx/whatever), to cope with people doing things in new, interesting and probably stupid ways


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