imperialreign on 28/1/2007 at 07:49

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Hello, all!

Sorry to bother those here with my first post being a question - but I'm at a complete loss of ideas with this one: After having TDS sitting around for over a year now, I was finally able to replace my broken PC with one that can run TDS. I upgraded the video and sound cards in this new computer which is all working great. I do have a question concerning the EAX in TDS while running an X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fatality Pro card. Seeing as how the X-Fi fully supports EAX 4.0, I thought it was odd that I can't select either of the EAX options in TDS, they're not even lit up like I could try to select them. I've gone the length of doing a clean sweep of all the audio components, pulling the card and rebooting, the re-installing everything - but that didn't make a difference. The on-board audio is completely disabled and those drivers no longer exist in WIN either, so no worries there.
I haven't been able to research any issue like this with TDS on any other forums, so maybe y'all can help? I did notice in the options.ini file that both the EAX options are set to a value of 2, which I thought kind of odd. I would figure that 0 and 1 would be the only values acceptable, and I tried changing them to 1; but TDS resets these values upon game start-up. Any ideas?

imperialreign on 29/1/2007 at 03:32

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Actually, I tried that - the 2.09 drivers or whatever from Creative . . . funny, though, as they haven't been compatible with the X-Fi I'm running. With the update drivers, I completely lose surround support, and experience intermitent audio clipping (so much so that games like Doom3 will actually hang and/or crash out). But, I've had no issues at all with the driver that's provided with the card, EAX 4.0 works perfectly fine in both Doom3 and Quake4 with the slightly older driver. I've asked Creative's tech support about this, but when dealing with them I just feel too reminded of "Cool Hand Luke", y'know?
But anyways, when I did have the update driver installed for a brief time, I still didn't have access to the EAX options in TDS. This is really baffling me at this point, honestly. I'm considering contacting Eidos support, but not sure if that would do much good, either.

Is it just me or has tech support steadily kind of globally gone down the crapper the last 5 years?

Curious, here, as I've noticed these options are set a value of 2 in the options.ini file . . . is it possible that TDS automatically recognizes the EAX support of the card? I mentioned I tried manually setting these values to both 0 and 1, but TDS automatically resets them to 2 when I launch. I doubt it, but not sure.

imperialreign on 30/1/2007 at 00:28

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Hey, man, thanks for the help so far!

I'll give that procedure a try as soon as I have the extra time to go through it, and I'll let you know how it works out.

As for the motherboard, though; I haven't found any BIOS updates as of yet, and as best I can tell on Intel's site, it's running the most current version.

Question, though, how can I completely remove directX for a re-install? I don't know of any method aside from wiping WIN off the HD and re-installing it clean. I'm willing to remove and re-install directX also, seeing as how just a re-install will stop as soon as it detects a current or older version, y'know?

Anyways, I'll keep ya updated when I get around to it.

jtr7 on 2/2/2007 at 08:09

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Man... I am SO glad there are people who can take the time to figure this crap out and post it on the 'net for the rest to find and use! Legal issues aside, it would be GREAT if there was a group dedicated to undoing Creative's mistakes, making functional stuff available where Creative overlooked something, and generally just filling in the holes Creative's left all these years, so we can just friggin' enjoy our games and music.:mad: :sweat:

:cheeky:

imperialreign on 2/2/2007 at 23:18

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yeah, no shit about Creative, right?

I was going to go through that re-install process this weekend (which actually is the same thing I had done before, but with WIN you can never be sure . . .); But, I was searching for something on the issue I was having with the update driver not working properly, when I ran across another forum where someone had a similar issue as I had, but with a completely different program. As for the issue with the update driver, Creative tech-support has been about as helpful as a clown at a funeral.

Actually, to further my irritation with Creative . . . I had originally bought and X-Fi Xtreme Gamer card (without the 64Mb on-board), and was experiencing large amounts of audio clipping in Doom3, Quake4, etc. - and when I was going through tech support with that issue, they kept telling me to clean sweep and re-install, cleen sweep and re-install; until I saw F-it, and returned the card and bought the X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fatality Pro; problem solved, but I still didn't like how much system memory the card was snagging so I bought another 1Gb DDR (I'd rather WIN and X-Fi not start their own internal flame war over resources). Creative was just useless, IMO.

Y'know . . . I'll sing their praises at times, as I've owned an array of their products, (SBPro, SB16, SBLive!, etc) but it seems they've been cutting corners a lot over the last few years. I would never have expected, too start with, an audio card that has 64Mb of on-board RAM to still be leeching that much off the system, and I still am dumbfounded that a USB webcam just being plugged in "disables" the hardware acceleration for the card :tsktsk: