Ess0968 Audiodrive Drivers For Win2k

Rokiyo

<div class="IPBDescription">Having trouble finding an updated driver</div> Ok I'm having a few problems with NS on this particular rig, sound being the problem I'm currently trying to fix. Following Monse's thread I hunted around for newer drivers. The currently installed ones are the ones that came with win2k and were last updated in 1999....

The creative labs sight only carries drivers for 2 different ess chips (both in the 1xxx range), and the official ess site tells me that it wont be creating new WDM drivers for win2k and xp seeing as there are already compatible drivers included on the install CD...

Google searching leads to endless streams of linux programing code, music created by the band audiodrive and copious amounts of drivers for every single ess chipset other than mine.

Computer Specs:
PII 350Mhz
128Mb Ram
16Mb 3Dfx. Interactive Voodoo Banshee
ESS AudioDrive (Device ID: ISAPNP\ESS0968_DEV0000)
~10Gb Harddrive
512kbps Adsl

I've been doing a few bios tweaks and I'm using 3rd party drivers for the voodoo card. The CPU is running at 400Mhz atm.

The problem ingame is that sounds that occur to my left and right play very loudly, and sounds that happen in the centre (behind or infront of me for instance) barely play at all. The side effect of this is that I cannot hear my own attacks, footsteps, voice communication or any other player that is doing anything directly infront of or behind me...

If anybody knows where I could find a driver that would help remedy this I would be pretty grateful (even a generic or 3rd party one would be great if it worked)

Thansal

umm,
do you have suround sound, head phones, etc?

one quick fix is that that most sound card come with tech that alow you to rebalance the sound. 9i know creative products do)

you might wana find that and play with it....

other then that, well my net conn is borked somewhere right now so I can't google <!--emo&:p--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/tounge.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='tounge.gif'><!--endemo-->

wey

Try to disable "3D Deph" in the volume control.

Rokiyo

Hmmm still having no luck. I can't find any specific sound card settings to speak of, however I did fiddle with the windows sound settings in the control panel. Win2k thought I was running a surround sound setup when all I have is 2 desktop speakers.

However even after correcting that I still had no luck.

Further investigation told me that I had a strange half mono kind of thing going on here. Basically there is one 3.5mm plug coming out of the back of the sound card, which separates into to 2 standard audio/video plugs which connect into the corresponding white and red plugs in the back of the left speaker. Then another cord with the same plugs has been run from the output on the left speaker and into the input of the right speaker.

I'm guessing the intention was to get actual stereo sound happening but this is not the case... Basically the left speaker is mixing the 2 channels and playing them, and then feeding the mixed signal out to the right speaker so it plays the same sound. In line with this theory is the fact that I can open up the volume control and it doesn't matter what I do with the little balance bar, both speakers will continue playing the same amount of sound as each other... Also in NS sounds that's occur to my side play equally loudly out of each speaker, and sounds that occur infront of or behind me play equally quietly (or silently)....

I'm gonna have to talk it over with this computer's owner to see WTH is going on... Thanks for the help so far and if you have any ideas (other than splitting the cable coming out of the computer and plugging one half directly into each speaker, which I've already thought and will be trying soon) please post away. I'll report back here when I have something more to report...

Rokiyo

Ok I've just tested it with a headset and the sound was perfect, so it's definately a problem in the way the speakers have been connected to the computer...

Thanks for the help anyway.