Blood on Win2k-SP4 => doesn't work... Any advice?

[Berserker79]

Hi,

sorry to post a very common question, but I didn't find any help in older posts...

I'm trying to run Blood (with Plasma Pack) on a Win2k SP4 machine. My soundcard is one of those cheap AC97 codec equipped cards integrated on my motherboard. I've followed all of the steps described on the "How to play Build engine games...", but the game will not work. Once I launch Blood from the supplied shortcut I get a "Fatal Error" message from Windows: "Unhandled exception encountered while loading".
Pressing the OK button on the error window results in Blood starting, but as soon as it gets to the "Loading sound system" (or whatever it is) I'm taken back to Windows.

I've followed all of the steps suggested, installed all the software and patched my Blood executable. Set up the card from Blood setup.exe (setup reports "Sound Blaster non responding", but I was able to leave the settings and manually edit blood.cfg to select max bits, voices and mix rate as suggested). Din't work anyway...

Any suggestion? Thanks in advance.

Berserker79

[Berserker79]

Kept on trying and I got some small result, but still I can't actually play the game. Here's what I did: created a new VDMS shortcut manually (didn't use the one from the website) and tried various options to see if the game would run. After some tests I found that setting the sound card to SB 2.0 , enabling both EMS and XMS (both to 16384) seemed to work. However while the demos play smoothly once I start the game it will crash after 10-30 seconds, sometimes even a couple of minutes.

I tried to change IRQ from 7 to 5 and experiment with diffent combinations of values for mixing rate, bitrare and max voices: nothing seemed to work. If I disable sound FX the game runs correctly (with music alone) and I can play as long as I like, but without sound it's not much fun...

I enabled logging for SB and what I find in the log file after the game crashes are the same lines repated over and over:

@W - 00:27:40.242 - SBController
HandleTransfer: DMA updates too infrequent (unable to keep up with desired transfer rate), requesting boost
W - 00:27:40.242 - SBController
set8BitIRQ(): an IRQ is already pending

The set8BitIRQ function is called for some time, then another HandleTransfer, then it starts all over again until the game crashes.

Oddly enough I still can't understand fully why my first tests resulted in the "Fatal Error". I thought it was NOLFB, but when I loaded it (with SFX disabled) the game ran fine. I tried every type of SB as well and found out that all kind of SBs (SB comp, both SB Pros and SB16) are good to start the game except they all crash in the end. I also tried to run Blood with the shortcut supplied on the website, setting everything like my custom shortuct and that one works too now, no Fatal Error. So far there are only two options I changed that could explain why I'm not getting the Fatal Error anymore: XMS set to 16384 and MIDI emulation set to "General Midi" rather than "Other".

Another funny thing is that while I supplied the -nocd option, when starting Episode 1 the game hangs with a "CD-ROM read fault R/A/F".However when the game loads it clearly states that "CD-ROM not enabled". Does this have to do only with CD audio tracks? Anyway enabling in the VDMS shortcut the MSCDEX emulation and placing the Blood CD in the drive solved the problem and starting Ep1 showed the intro movie correctly (except sometimes when SFX is on the game crashes during playback).

In the end I can't still get Blood running fine: nothing I've tried so far solves the sound problem fully.

BTW, until the crash the sound is rather good, I mean, there's no crackling or other noise of some sort...

[Lord Molder]

Well you have done a bloody good job of sussing it out anyway!! If anyone could figure it out it sounds like you could.No chance of buying an el-cheapo pci sound card? Is there a way to turn down hardware acceleration on your onboard {unlikely to help anyway} the DMA seems to be a major part of the problem {as far as i can tell} it could also have something to do with Win 2000 {im a great help aint i!! }

[Berserker79]

Haven't thought about the sound acceleration tip thing: modifing that setting always brings some interesting effects, so I'll give it a try.

Also tried installing Win98SE on an old PIII-500 laptop, but I'm not very lucky: onboard Yamaha card plays music, but no sound in Blood if I ran the game from the Windows DOS box. Starting in pure DOS doesn't help either because the sound card seems "inactive" under DOS (oddly the Yamaha DOS tools report the card working under DOS, but Blood doesn't detect it...). Looks like buying another soundcard for my pc is the only solution.

BTW, I also tried to run Blood with DOSBox: the game starts fine and I can get both sound FX and music... Unfortunately my pc doesn't seem to be powerful enough to get a smooth emulation: less than 13000 cycles has Blood crawl rather than run, 25000 and over seems too much for my system (AMD xp2500+, 512Mb RAM).

Thanks for the suggestions anyway.

[Lord Molder]

No worries! Ive got an old Soundblaster 5.1 i could send ya if you live in Australia?

[Berserker79]

Not muck luck... I'm in Europe...
Found out they sell a cheap SB Live! at about 25$ near home... I might try to get that card: even if it will not solve my problems with Blood under Win2k I think it will sound better than my built-in card anyway.

No luck with the sound accel thing...

[Lord Molder]

I got a Soundblaster 24 bit 7.1 the other day and very happy with it,it has pretty much the same features of the standard 5.1 but i can record at 96 K with it

[AcidTrip]

i got my blood running without istalling the bloodsblivefix.zip..
did everything else except that one