Sound issues

Hey ya'l, I'm new and if this is in the wrong place, please direct me as where to be. I just installed arcanum, and everything is fine but my sound. I get nothing, and I've spent about an hour and a half looking at every site and board on google, and can't find any help. I see that the game doesn't take kindly to some sound cards, though being bad with tech, I do not know if that is the problem, and if not, how do I go about fixing things. From what I can tell, I believe I have a legacy sound card. Any info would be greatly appriciated, thanks in advance.

 

Using XP or earlier? If so disable hardware acceleration, it can be found under sound in the control panel.

Otherwise, only other thing I can really recommend is a different driver - try to find one from your manufacturer first, but failing that your card *most likely* shares a chipset with other sound cards from different companies, sometimes their drivers will work as well.

What sort of sound card do you have?

 

I am using xp, and the card is Realtek, although I may be mistaken. I have looked in my control panel, and I have two options for sound issues. One is the sounds and audio devices, and the other "Realtek sound effects manager", though I cannot find anything about hardware acceleration in either. I am quite ignorant about both hardware and software, which I know is a serious handicap in this endevor. I am still at the moment unsure if my card is legacy or realtek, or if one is a driver. Thanks for the reply though, im going to keep digging around.

I just found hardware acceleration under graphics, and it seems to me, albeit I might be wrong, that it only effects the visual and graphical areas, which I have absolutely no trouble with. The were no such settings under my sound options.

 

You can also set hardware acceleration under the 'sound' tab in dxdiag (start->run, type dxdiag and hit enter).

Realtek would be the chipset manufacturer, 'legacy' in your case is just describing an older piece of hardware using an older driver on a newer system (basically).

Another thing to do would be to update DirectX; XP by default ships with 8.1 which is enough for Arcanum, but occasionaly they do release bug and compatability fixes. Get the update here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

I don't have XP on any of my systems so all of this is just off the top of my head, but you could also try updating your driver through microsoft - go to control panel, then to system, click on the advanced tab (I think) and select Device Manager. Under sound cards, find yours, right click, select properties followed by the driver tab and click the "update driver" button. With older devices you'll be lucky if M$ has a newer driver, but it doesn't hurt.

Do you have onboard sound? Bellow or above the USB ports on the back of your computer should be a couple of audio ports - practically every motherboard in the last decade or so has had onboard sound. You could try plugging your speakers/headphones into those as well. The green port is probably the one you want to use; though it's not overly important as you can change those in your Realtek manager in the control panel.

This might be an obvious question, but I take it you can actually hear sound everywhere else (i.e, in windows)?

 

I can hear sound with ever other game I have ever used. This is a fairly new PC (09) and my Drivers are, so far as I can tell by using device manager, "the best fit for my pc" or something another like that. I have read a few things indicating Arcanum has some hardware conflict issues, though no mentioning of my problem. Seems nearly everyone else either can't get the game to run, or they only hear audio with no visual...which is the opposite of my problem. Maybe a touchy piece of information, but I am running the game of Dameon tools...would not having the CD cause a lack of audio?

 

Very unlikely, the real issue is most likely a compatibility problem with your sound card and windows XP.

If you can post your system specs (motherboard model/sound card in particular) I may be able to figure out a solution.

Otherwise, upgrade to windows 7. XP is 9 years old now and getting pretty long in the tooth; 7 is a massive improvement over vista in almost every way as well.