No sound in X-COM Apoc CE on Win98 SE.

[Mazdek]

I keep this old Dell Optiplex XL 575 around to play X-COM on. Just finished a "superhuman" game (and I only use lasers, are you sure the difficulty bug was fixed??) and decided to skip to Apoc instead of TFTD. Installed it from the Collectors Edition CD assuming thats the most up-to-date version but I could get my original CD if needed. The intro won't play at all but can start a game, go into combat, etc etc so I think all is well, I just have no sound. I've got a genuine SB 16 in here too, and the sound test passes fine. I don't quite understand why there's no sound in game. Any suggestions?

 

 

btw, hi all! I've not been around since the days of Aftermath, and not even much then. I don't have Aftershock yet 'cause my gaming machine died in November. Getting a new mb next week so I'll hopefully be catching up soon.

[Bomb Bloke]

When you run the setup program, does it automatically detect your sound card, or doesn't it see it at all?

[Mazdek]

The setup program sees the card fine, detects its resources correctly, and plays the test siren nice and loud.

[NKF]

They haven't really changed anything for the Collectors Edition for the most part, except perhaps changing the label of the CD or the region screens for the main menu.

 

One thing that I'm reminded of was when I was trying to get my sound card on my old Win95 machine to sync up with Apocalypse. I set it to the exact factory settings and got the siren to play just fine. However, the game itself wouldn't run. So, instead, I chose a sound card one step down from my card and that works just fine. My sound card's and old 16-bit Sound Blaster Pro, and this works great with all my other games. However, Apocalypse doesn't seem to like it, so I selected the plain vanilla "Sound Blaster" instead and it worked like a charm. Give that a try and see how things go.

 

- NKF

[Mazdek]

I'll give that a shot. I think I tried it when I was first setting it up.

 

One thing I'm noticing when I start the setup program (to configure the sound), its not remembering what I last set it at. Does anyone know where the sound config is saved, could you tell me the file name and location and contents? I wonder if for some reason mine isn't being saved.

 

Note that this machine (still) doesn't have DirectX installed on it, think that might matter? Its supposed to be a DOS game so I didn't bother, don't have alot of disk space left on this massive 200 meg drive.

[NKF]

It could be that the file has been set to read-only?

 

There's a config file in the sound\ directory. You can check if that's being updated or you can check the file attributes to see if it's read-only.

 

- NKF

[Bomb Bloke]

You don't need DirectX for this game.

[Mazdek]

It could be that the file has been set to read-only?

 

There's a config file in the sound\ directory. You can check if that's being updated or you can check the file attributes to see if it's read-only.

 

- NKF

 

 

....

 

 

ok this is very strange. The file was not read-only, but niether was it being updated. I opened it in Notepad and wrote "hi" in it, saved it. Ran setup again, it still didn't update (yet did comment that the soundcard was not compatable with the current config.) So I renamed the file and re-ran setup. Now when I start the game the intro movie works. And the sound. .... but wtf was wrong with that file?