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NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2025 14:12:00 +0000
From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: AMD weighs in on HD versus 4K
Date: Sun, 08 Jun 2025 10:12:06 -0400
Summary: Copying or reuse for AI training or data sets not allowed
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On Wed, 04 Jun 2025 12:24:43 -0500, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>On Tue, 03 Jun 2025 10:49:45 -0400, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
>Spalls Hurgenson wrote: 
>
>>On Sat, 31 May 2025 19:38:39 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
>><spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I'm not sure I'd recommend a Creative card, though. I suspect my
>>>current issue is with the card itself, and not some Windows thing. I
>>>had a similar problem with another Soundblaster; it just stopped
>>>outputting from one of its ports (fortunately, my motherboard on that
>>>computer supported 5.1 so it wasn't really an issue). I think there
>>>are some real issues with the quality of the components on Creative's
>>>offerings.
>>
>>Update:
>>
>>Fortunately, it turns out to be 'just some Windows thing', in that it
>>was software that caused the problem and not a hardware failure. It
>>turns out there are /at least/ three places you have to enable 5.1
>>speakers to get it to work in a game:
>>
>>     1) in the Soundblaster driver software app
>>     2) in the Windows "sound settings" applet
>>     3) in the game itself.
>>
>>I'd configured the latter two, but had forgotten the first even
>>existed, and for some reason it had toggled itself to 2.1 mode for
>>some reason. 
>>
>>Computers. Go figure.
>>
>These days, it's almost always a software problem, simply due to the
>odds. There are just so goddamn many bugs. QC is a lost art, as is clean
>code.


It isn't /always/ a software issue. I jumped to the conclusions that
it was a hardware based fault because I have had Soundblaster cards
fail on me before. (IIRC, one of the capacitors that fed into that
jack had died). Still, I wasn't entirely sold on the notion which is
why I kept tinkering. But the software diagnostics for checking actual
sound output are extremely limited (pretty much along the lines of,
"Do you hear sound coming out of this speaker?"). Ultimately, I was
going to boot into Linux and check there, and then I discovered some
random Creative Labs applet sitting buried in "C:\Program Files" and
that solved it.


>I'm surprised when I diagnose a hardware error in this era. It happens,
>but I always exhaust all software options before I start running hardware
>diagnostics, and rarely get to the point where I have to run it.*

As much as I love riffing on Windows, I don't really think I can fault
Microsoft for this issue as much as Creative. They were the ones who
insisted on having some soft of toggle that overrode the Microsoft
sound API that determined number of speakers. Hardware vendors are the
worst with the shit they pull with their drivers and software.