Ignore the error with Vdmsound. Continue and thou shalt hear sound. 😀

I have ignored the error with VDMSound, and still get no sound (effects).

Let me clarify, though. With VDMSound, midi music works fine. So I can play the game and get music, but no sound effects. (For instance, with Longbow, I don't hear the opening arrow shot).

But without VDMSound, I get both sound effects and music.

Just to clarify some more 😀

With Freddy Pharkas and VDMSound, if I just ignore the error, I DO get sound effects.

So thanks for pointing this out, DosFreak!

But as far as Longbow is concerned...with VDMSound I still get the music but no sound effects. Without VDMSound I get both.

I guess I should be happy, but it bugs me that I can't get the sound effects in Longbow to work with VDMSound. I guess I must be doing something wrong.

Hmmm, Have you patched VDMSound with Update 1

There, I registered 😀

And, yes, I have installed the VDMSound update (as well as the Launcher).

This is very weird. Nicht Ser Gut has done a lot of work on these, we'll see what he says. Colin has too, maybe he'll pop in.

BTW - with old Sierra games, keep an eye on:
NAGI - http://www.agidev.com/nagi.html
(FAQ here: showthread.php?threadid=167)
and
FreeSCI - http://freesci.linuxgames.com/

Also try the Windows version.

See these threads for reference:
showthread.php?threadid=83
showthread.php?threadid=274
showthread.php?threadid=348
showthread.php?threadid=477

Also try searching our forums for "Sierra", "Pharkas" or "Longbow". 😀
If you find something that helps, let us know which thread had your solution. 😀

Stiletto wrote:

This is very weird. Nicht Ser Gut has done a lot of work on these,...

File it under "magic" or "radiation affected". Sometimes there's no rational explanation.

When DosFreak said Ignore the error with Vdmsound he was probably thinking of the glitch where some Sierra games couldn't "initialize" the audio, but ran fine if you just ignored the message. However, I only remember that being true under DOS/Win9x.

Keep an eye on NAGI and FreeSCi as they seem to be the best solutions. Unfortunately, that still leaves a number of titles without a fix.

If you have the CD's for these games, definitely search for the Windows versions. They need a little "tinkering" themselves; but the results seem to be much better.

One other thing, these games that suddenly started working in XP where they wouldn't in XP: they weren't set to use an IRQ of 5 were they? XP's built-in emulation uses IRQ 5, while VDMSound uses IRQ 7.

Unregistered wrote:

Anyone have any idea why these games would work ok with WinXP's Soundblaster emulation, but not with VDMSound?

Well, "Run with VDMS" the configuration programs for the games just in case they save the IRQ (5 for XP but 7 for VDMSound). BTW, most games give the "Unable to..." error because of fast computers and updated versions of the drivers are available from Sierra (see the old compatibility list files).

V.

Every time I tried to get the game working, I ran the configuration program first. If I was trying to get game working with VDMSound, I ran the configuration program with VDMSound. When I wanted to run it without VDMSound, I ran the configuration program without VDMSound.

I know that the initialization errors are due to fast computers, and the Gosierra patch seems to take care of that.

Like I said, I guess I should just be happy that I got them working, and I am. It's just that like Nicht Sehr Gut said, there seemed to be no rational explanantion for the way I was getting them to work, and that really bothered me...especially after playing around with them for a couple of hours.

Thanks for all of your input! 😀