Re: need sound card advice for Beyond Good & Evil

On Mon, 13 Feb 2006 23:15:36 +0000, Trina Borras wrote:

Hi gang,

So I finally found a copy of BG&E and bought it thinking I had everything
it took, oodles of mem, better than needed graphics card, directx9
waiting, etc. But...it won't start, although it installed fine. Looking
at settings where autodetection is at work it displays geforce5600 for
graphics card but for sound card it displays "primary sound driver"
instead of sb pci which my gut feeling was it ought to (and when I switch
to that nothing happens either).

Why would you expect it to say SB PCI when you have an AWE 32?
An AWE 32 is an ISA card, not a PCI card. There is an SB 32 that is PCI,
but it's not the same sound card as the AWE.

Reading the back of the game box at that late stage I found the game
requires sb live; readme.txt didn't specify but said a directx9-compatible
sound card. Now my sound card is a sb32awe, just like the one I have in
my old win3.1 machine (which is still working fine so I'm still living in
a dos game world most of the time) and I know that's been around forever
so it wouldn't surprise me to know that it wasn't compatible with directx9
but how about sb live, hasn't it been around nearly as long, or is that
irrelevant? Is there anything you can do to make a 32awe directx
compatible?

An AWE 32 will work with DirectX 9. It just won't do 3D sound.
But I've never had a Windows game that wouldn't work because I didn't have
a 3D sound card that took full advantage of DirectX 9. I get plain old
ordinary two-speaker sound instead of the fancy spacial effects, but it
doesn't keep the game from playing.

Anyway, I wrote to Ubisoft tech support, gave them my dxdiag as requested,
and said my hunch was the problem starting the thing was that I was using
the 32awe. This is their response (it came in less than a day, bravo):

"The SoundBlaster AWE 32 is not a DirectX 8.0 compliant sound device and
is not supported for use with this game. You will have to meet all the
the requirements listed on the bottom of the box to be able to play the
game."

Do you all agree?

No. I think your problem is more likely to be due to the copy protection
the game uses. That will stop a game from starting. But good luck getting
a game company's tech support to admit their copy protection might be
causing a problem. (According to gamecopyworld, Beyond Good and Evil
uses Tages as copy protection).

There might also be a problem getting good DirectX 9 compatible video card
drivers for Windows 98.


The advice I need is should I get what is listed on the
box, i.e., the sb live, and do youall like it a lot better than the awe32
on general principles, or is there another better card also compatible
with directx9 youall prefer, such as an audigy (but would that work with
all my old win95 games) especially anyone who has this game?

An Audigy will give cleaner sound quality in Windows than an SBLive. But
unless your speakers are good you may not be able to tell a difference.
The SBLive won't produce sound in some DOS games (eg certain Sierra games
like Gobliiins). But it does work with most DOS games. Since you currently
have an ISA sound card, there wouldn't be a problem with your motherboard
not supporting NMI. (The SBLive can't support DOS sound on motherboards
that don't support NMI, but any motherboard with an ISA slot would support
NMI).

Since you have Win 98, I'd say to stick with the AWE if you want to play
DOS games on the computer.

I don't know
if it matters but I am running win98 on my "new" machine, also I don't
plan to "upgrade" to another os.

Do you have Win 98 first edition or Win 98SE?
The specs require SE.

I am playing win95/98 games on this
(I'll probably never run out of same as I was collecting them for years
when I was using win3.1) only. Let me know if you need anymore info and
thanks in advance for your wise counsel. Yours,

Or not so wise counsel.

Trina

.

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