Did you try disabling sound hardware acceleration completely?
Yes, I did. However, when I'd disabled it completely, mein gott... the issue actually worsened. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" /> It was like the hymn of a million crickets.
Did you go through the sound tests in dxdiag's Sound tab?
Yes, and my computer passed all of them.
A few people have had sound problems on multi-core systems, which in a couple cases could be fixed by setting the game to run on a single core. HyperThreading in a single core P4 CPU (if you have it enabled) probably isn't going to have the same effect, though.
see;
Sound errors with static - maybe fix found! Yes, I saw that thread before but decided against trying the solution 'cos it could cause even more issues. Thanks for the link, though. :P I might try that out later. ^^
I assume you are shutting down all non-essential programs (especially anti-virus) before starting the game?
Well, all of them except for uTorrent, to dl some demos and well, indie games. And mmm... let's see: WinThrottle I use to reduce the cpu speed 'cos it gets kinda hot here.
If you set the sound effect and ambient volume levels to zero, does that get rid of (or reduce) the distortion and background noise?
Hmmm... nope.
If you do resort to reinstalling the OS, do you have a spare drive / partition you can use? If not, at least make a full backup of your current system. If the problem isn't something in the OS or a conflict with something else installed, it could be a pain to loose all the changes and tweaks made to your system without it even helping (not to mention wasted time re-installing everything else).
Hmmm... nope 'cos this hard disk has Linux installed too. Yeah, well... it's not like this o/s has a lot of stuff installled, apart from Firefox and a few others.
Are you familiar with Linux? I got the game going a couple years ago without having used Wine before, or Linux much, though with stability problems. IIRC Xanlosch also had stability issues at the time, though I think only occasionally. More recent versions of Wine may work better.
DD on linux /
Xanlosch's guide Oops... now that you mentioned "Linux", I recall that it's on this pc but it's considered a "failed installation" because I accidentally corrupted it(the typical newbie Xorg error). =P I still haven't got around to reinstalling it. Plus, Windows has been on this pc for quite a few months and given that games often install protection like Starforce which mess around with your pc, I thought I'd reinstall it sooner or later. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />
[color:"orange"]My hard disk died at least 3 times when I was playing this game, back in 2002 and 2003.[/color]
Ouch. The hard drive in my first PC died at the start of a long-overdue backup, and the replacement (which I had to pay to have cross-shipped, to try to get data recovered off the original) had more than 50% bad clusters (not that it mattered much, since there was physical damage to the original, and nothing could be recovered). The second replacement only lasted a few months, but the one after that lasted almost a year (there wasn't anything important on it either time, since I didn't trust it). The final replacement still works, AFAIK (it is in a system built from spare parts, which I don't think has even been turn on in quit awhile).
Yeah, hard disks these days are quite fragile. They just don't last as they used to. I remember my old Maxtor hard disk which worked for almost 10 years. It was kinda slow but we even managed to install Photoshop CS on it and tortured the poor thing into oblivion. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/devil.gif" alt="" />
