Exult Forum

Hi,
I have a little trouble getting the sound to work under Linux
If I play the game with sound I get a repeating noise, as if the soundcard plays some random bits. It's quite annoying, noise silence, noise silence .... and beneath the normal sound effects or music. The game is playable, but only without sound.
I've downloaded some sdl-demos compiled them and run them, they work perfectly (with sound)....
A friend of me also has Debian, and approximately the same software/hardware configuration, he has no such problems with exult, it works perfectly.

It does not matter if I switch off sound or music or speech, if only one of them is switched on(in exult) I hear this noise. But no error or warning is posted by exult.
I have no idea where the noise comes from, exult is the only program which makes such sounds ("cat foobar.txt >/dev/dsp" doesn't count).
I compiled exult by myself, I installed the exult-debian paket ... nothing works.
I copied the game on my ext2 fs, and on a vfat fs ... nothing.
I installed the sound files which are optionally ... nothing.
I removed the PCI-networkcard and the PCI-scsi-card ... nothing.
I killed every other process ( but X, xterm and bash) ... nothing.
I even run exult as root ... nothing works.
{The noise sounds only if exult is running, of course }
The windows version works perfectly on my system, but I don't like win.....
Has anybody any idea where the error could be? thx

my system configuration:
intel celeron @ 100/850Mhz
creative soundblaster live value
(other pci devices: scsi-card, creative riva tnt2, 3com network card)
(motherboard: Abit BE6)
Debian Linux (woody) with kernel 2.4.18
sounddriver(emu10k) compiled into kernel
X-windows 4.02

(sorry for my bad english)

From our mailing list:
---------------------------
Joseph Morris wrote:
I also have an SB Live, and today I've been getting dropouts every second
or so in Exult, and random bursts of noise. Eventually I discovered that
the problem was that ALSA (which I normally use for sound) had stopped
working and it was using the kernel OSS drivers instead.
Once I got ALSA working again, Exult was perfectly happy.
---------------------------

Same problem here? We do seem to have a bug with the kernel OSS driver that doesn't show itself with ALSA. Furthermore I heard that ALSA is supposed to be the default instead of OSS in future Kernels.

The problem sounds like mine, but:
Neither my friend (the one with the working exult) nor I, has the alsa packages installed.
He has the OSS driver from kernel 2.4.16, I have the same with kernel 2.4.18.
I don't belive that the Emu10K1 driver has changed so heavy between those 2 kernel versions.
(Besides there exists no alsa-devicedriver packages in debian for kernel 2.4.18 at the moment.
It's quite some work to compile kernel, alsa-modules and install both. I'm not shure this is worth the trouble.)

The problem is we have no idea what is going wrong. So unless you want to play without sound I'd suggest getting ALSA to work...

it's an argument

So you're saying that you get noise even when Exult isn't playing anything? I'm afraid I've no idea what could cause that.

I'm running the old SuSE 6.2 Linux with a 2.2x kernel, and, I'm pretty certain, OSS drivers, but have never seen this problem.

Are you using Timidity for the music?

Jeff, see the Mailing List post by Joseph Morris from the 13th of April "[Exult-general] Exult sound problems".
Seems there is a problem with Debian 2.4.18, OSS, Exult...

i am confirming that there is a sound problem with exult when i use the oss drivers for sblive in debian (woody and sid). there is periodic noise in both sfx and music. the alsa drivers work ok.

finally... I got it working with alsa
thx for advise

Great!