Alpha Centauri 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire => The Theory of Everything => Topic started by: bvanevery on July 19, 2019, 06:28:45 am

Title: Windows 10 solving audio problems
Post by: bvanevery on July 19, 2019, 06:28:45 am

I recently updated my Windows 10 system to the October 2018 update.  I'm now running Windows 10 Pro, Version 1809, OS build 17763.615.  I also had the same issue on Version 1803.  I'd get these really bad buzzes in my audio.  It was on some kind of period while the game was playing, like every 8 seconds or so.  Most annoying.

My venerable Dell Latitude E4300 laptop has funky old IDT 92HDxxx HD Audio hardware that's not well supported on Windows 10.  Microsoft installs a fairly generic driver and that's what causes the buzzing.  In general, 1803 did a lot of nasty realtime delay stuff to the system.  I hope 1809 is better.  Anyways, I could not find a driver more recent than what Dell had on their Support site.  I could try to install things in a Compatibility mode, but it just wasn't working out.  I think the Microsoft generic drivers may have been reporting themselves as having version numbers much greater than the installer could be happy with.  I could have gone through yet more heroics trying to find better drivers, but it was becoming painful.

I stumbled upon some community support entry, that disabling "eSATA support" in the BIOS had solved someone's problem.  That worked for me!  Some kind of hardware level interrupt conflict.  eSATA is a now somewhat obscure connection technology, that had some lifespan back in the day, but isn't important now and I never used it.  So I personally wasn't missing anything turning it off.

The game did lock up my system after that.  After rebooting, I used Device Manager to uninstall my audio drivers.  Then I clicked on the audio icon on my desktop, since it was muted.  That triggered some kind of troubleshooter, which ran for a bit, then declared it had fixed stuff and I needed to reboot.  After the reboot, the game works normally with perfectly good audio.  Mission - Accomplished.  I hope!