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sound will not work in most games

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khiloa

khiloa

Open Source Senior
​
Joined
Jul 15, 2004
Location
/usa/sc/florence
In commercial games (I have doom 3, neverwinter nights, and enemy territory among others) the sound works fine. However in any open source game the sound causes some kind of hangup. Games do not show any kind of error, but they do not start up. If I use an option like --disable-sound they all start right up with no problem. I have remerged sdl, sdl-mixer, the games themselves (supertux, frozen-bubble, a few others), alsa, and a few other packages and that has made no difference.

Any idea what is causing the hangup?
 
Are you using ALSA or OSS? What do the games require? Older software requires back compatibility with OSS set up through ALSA.
 
I'm using ALSA. The sound used to work perfectly fine until I took a break for a few weeks then decided to fire up SuperTux and it would not start, that is when I discovered it. I upgraded a few packages sometime in those few weeks which is when I guess something happened.

BTW I am not using any sound daemons.
 
It might be that some of the games don't work with alsa and instead require oss, in which case alsa must be set up to emulate oss.
 
Wolfenstein:ET uses OSS, so it shouldn't be a problem if that works. Maybe it's the other way around and all commercial games use OSS (wider availability) and the non commercial ones use ALSA (better technology)
 
Before you open SuperTux or other normal games, check
Code: 
top -u yourusername
in a console, and make sure the commercial games aren't running. If they're still running,
Code: 
killall -9 commercialgameprocessname
On my computer, UT2k4 never actually closes itself when I quit, so I have to manually force-kill it to get sound in any other application. You might also want to try setting up dmix. What soundcard (or chipset) do you have, and I might hbe able to give a dmix config?
 
Nope, the other games all shut down okay, they are not running when I try to start the normal games.

I have posted on the Gentoo forums about this a few months ago and it seems like noone has any idea what the heck is going on.
 
What kind of soundcard?

I ask because I have had so many problems with any card OTHER than emu10k1 cards that I now have a collection of them. ;)

May do nothing and be of no help to you, but that's all I got, man.
 
It is builtin audio.

I will look through the guide on how to install ALSA and see if I find anything that looks fishy.
 
Alrighty then. ;)

I too have had numerous problems with various onboard audio setups in linux.
Between the difficulty of setting them up and then the loss of cpu cycles due to sound processing, I just gave up after months and months of trying different things and STILL getting lower game performance(fps) and having sound troubles.

Seriously, while I hate answers that say "Buy this and your troubles will go away" in this instance, I think it's true, and the best option.

IF you can find one, an older creative labs card (SB Live! any 16bit version) will most likely have the emu10k1 chip and can be had for $10 or $15 USD.
The GOOD new Creative cards still use the emu10k1 I think, but are expensive.
The newer "budget" SB cards are the 24bit ones and they use a different chip.
They also suck.

You may find another answer that works out for you and if you do, please let me know!
I tried for a long gorram time....
 
However, up until about 2 months ago everything worked perfectly, so I know it can and does work, it just decided to stop. :argue: :bang head
 
Try unmuting every single channel on alsamixer. Maybe they are using different output channels.
 
I solved it, and now I feel like hurting myself. :bang head

I had to change a few of my groups around back in the summer sometime and I must have forgotten to re-add myself to the games group. I did that just now and everything works just fine. :bang head
 
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