Hypothesis on Sound problems

[Gatt]

Alot of the reports I'm seeing are coming from people with Onboard Sound, who report that the game plays fine when they have sound off, but doesn't with it on.

 

Here's my theory.

 

Onboard sound shares the System Memory with the processor. I.e. If you have 256megs of Ram, it's shared between the processor and the Sound Card. This is in contrast to a stand alone sound card, which has it's own reserves of memory it uses exclusively.

 

Now. We know/suspect that KOTR2 has a memory leak, meaning that it when it loads something into memory, it doesn't always remove it when it's done using it, eventually filling the memory up completely and causing a crash.

 

What I believe is happening is that the combined load of the Memory Leak, with the Onboard Sound tapping into system memory, it's overfilling the memory quickly causing the game to be unplayable for those with Onboard Sound. If it's the Sound Files the leak isn't removing, then it would occur even more rapidly, as not only would the CPU's slice of memory be filling up, but identical copies would exist in the Onboard Sound's slice of memory as well.

 

Support for this idea is in the "Working Systems" thread where at 512mbs of memory or less people are crashing/hanging/aren't able to play. But one user with an Onboard Soundcard who has 1gig of memory can. Double the memory is harder for a leak to fill.

 

How to fix it?

 

Tough. Very tough.

 

Three options I can think of off the top of my head.

 

1. If the Bios has options that would restrict the sound card's access to memory, it might be sufficient to get things working, at least for a while.

 

2. Before trying to play, unload *all* other programs from the background that aren't necessary. Virus scanners, Chat programs, P2P, Sound Utilities, anything that appears in the area next to the clock on the toolbar remove. That'll free up some more memory, maybe not enough, maybe enough. Go into the control panel, and try decreasing how much memory Windows uses to Cache, it's a gamble as it could create a whole new problem, or it could just slow down load times somewhat and stabilize things since more memory would be present.

 

3. If you can get it to work for awhile, save and exit often. That should force the clean up of the junk being left in the main memory.

 

Odds are good though, if I'm right and that's what's causing the problem, if you've only got 256megs of memory and onboard sound you may be screwed. Also, onboard video cards would be equally bad as they would also be sharing main memory leaving very little for the processor to work with.

 

Anyways, if possible, some of the onboard sound peeps try testing #1 and #2 and test to see if that helps. Might be able to track it down and pinpoint the cause. If we can pinpoint the cause, Obsidian can fix it quickly.

 

**DISCLAIMER: Do NOT try changing settings in Bios unless you understand what you're doing and are comfortable with it. If you haven't yet learned how to make Bios changes, you may make your system unbootable. If it turns out to be Bios settings that need changed, I'll walk you through it later with precise instructions, PLEASE don't try to experiment now if you aren't comfortable**

[adrich81]

I agree with you about the sound problems being with onboard soundcards, but that's about it. The game doesn't exhibit any signs of a memory leak, mainly performance slowing to a snail's pace after playing for a while or on exiting, as far as I've seen.

 

I also think you're confusing onboard sound cards and onboard graphics cards. Onboard graphics chips share system memory, while a full graphics card has its own memory. Sound cards do not have onboard memory. The difference between onboard sound and a sound card is that a sound card does not depend on software and cpu to work (it has it's own hardware to do things that onboard sound has to do with software).

 

The best solution to sound problems until a patch is released is to lower sound acceleration in control panel to basic (or even none) and run the game with software sound forced with EAX off. You may also have luck with newer or older sound card drivers.