Quote from DEVIL 007 :

I have some feeling that Vista might end like Windows Millenium.The biggest mistake in MS history.

that's my hope but it would be much harder because ms marketing now is the most aggressive than ever, when companies buy workstations the hardware resellers put hardware+windows preinstalled at cheaper price than only hardware and there's no deal...that way windows on workstations will be hard to die...

Quote from filur :

Not really, ASIO has had DirectX drivers for over 7 years. With reasonably simple content such as LFS' engine sounds a budget card/chip should easily be able to run with latency well under 20ms.

There's also http://www.asio4all.com/ (WDM).

this is a good point, but you'd be surprised about how few people have an asio sound card...moreover it is some years that audio is integrated on motherboards, so how many people would spend on more hardware just to play lfs? imo it would be not a smart move regarding marketing, while technically i agree with you.

Quote from DEVIL 007 :

I have some feeling that Vista might end like Windows Millenium.The biggest mistake in MS history.

i doubt it ... ms has learned from that mistake and while theyre most probably doing it all over again they were smart enough to make vista the only choice by deciding to not support dx on xp anymore

Quote from Honey :

this is a good point, but you'd be surprised about how few people have an asio sound card...moreover it is some years that audio is integrated on motherboards

What i'm saying is everyone has an ASIO card, even integrated $0.5 chips.

Attached is a realtime recorded clip of my budget realtek chip on my budget motherboard playing 9 channels of asio sound, using 6 different virtual instruments and 2 mastering plugins. At 16.6ms latency (DirectX).

Quote from filur :

What i'm saying is everyone has an ASIO card, even integrated $0.5 chips.

Attached is a realtime recorded clip of my budget realtek chip on my budget motherboard playing 9 channels of asio sound, using 6 different virtual instruments and 2 mastering plugins. At 16.6ms latency (DirectX).

And whats the CPU usuage using ASIO?What was in your test?

Quote from DEVIL 007 :

And whats the CPU usuage using ASIO?What was in your test?

Around ~26-28%, running Cubase SX3.

I guess it's fair to say LFS would never need/use the complexity offered by Cubase, thus load would drop quite a bit.

Quote from filur :

What i'm saying is everyone has an ASIO card, even integrated $0.5 chips.

Attached is a realtime recorded clip of my budget realtek chip on my budget motherboard playing 9 channels of asio sound, using 6 different virtual instruments and 2 mastering plugins. At 16.6ms latency (DirectX).

oh you're right i didn't figured so many cards are asio now, all the time i watched specs of recent motherboards (even on asus site) there's no mention of asio support...
so i guess that people with no asio hardware prolly have so outdated hardware that they will not run anything newer than windows xp.

Quote from Honey :

i guess that people with no asio hardware prolly have so outdated hardware that they will not run anything newer than windows xp.

If LFS is using DirectSound, anyone who has sound in LFS could also run DirectX ASIO. Simple as that. It's not nearly as effective as native ASIO support of course, i think most if not all Creative cards these days have native ASIO, so a Creative card owner could run sound at ~2 ms latency.

The ASIO SDK was still completely free and without any form of royalties last time i checked.

Quote from filur :

If LFS is using DirectSound, anyone who has sound in LFS could also run DirectX ASIO. Simple as that. It's not nearly as effective as native ASIO support of course

so in other words its all done in software which of course isnt exactly the best idea in a game that loads the cpu as much as lfs does

Quote from Shotglass :

so in other words its all done in software which of course isnt exactly the best idea in a game that loads the cpu as much as lfs does

And this is somehow different from the current system?

Quote from filur :

And this is somehow different from the current system?

you got me there

not exactly but if its a asio emulation it might make a difference

Quote from Scawen :

Has anyone else tried unlocking with the 64 bit version of Vista?

I tried with the first version of patch U and I couldn't do it: I'll try with latest patch U19...

retired

retired

I ported the sound test program to SDL library. With SDL I get a stable sound at 0.02 latency, on Vista, using a built-in Intel sound card. It is even almost stable at 0.01s, with rare audible cracks only when the system is heavily loaded.

Unfortunately using SDL does not really solve the problem, as SDL does not have an API to report playback position. It uses a callback mechanism. When it needs another chunk of audio data, it calls a user function. The easiest way is to generate sound in the callback based on whatever is happening at the moment on the screen - but then you loose temporal resolution. There are ways to improve the resolution, such as writing information about sound events to a log, with a time stamp of each event, then playing the log in callback, streching or shrinking gaps between events as required. However, it may add unneeded complexity.

SDL uses DirectSound API on Windows. It seems to use IDirectSoundBuffer::GetCurrentPosition to find out what is being played. I think this is a viable replacement for waveOutGetPosition. It does not seem to be affected by the Vista bug, and I guess it can be easily adopted without big changes to the program logic.

As a side note - both waveOut and DirectSound position reporting APIs are not very accurate. Undetermined amount of time passes between the driver getting position information from the hardware, and the information finally reaching the application. Time spent in context switches, interrupts, other tasks. ALSA solved this problem many years ago by providing a time stamp at which the position was sampled, thus allowing the application to determine the current position by extrapolation, with high accuracy. The same method is used in Vista's WASAPI.

If you are interested in the SDL based sound test, it is available from my SVN repository. The repository can also be browsed using a web interface.

Thank you for the information :up:

I will look into these methods and consider the use of a callback function, etc...

Has anyone had any luck unlocking on x64 yet

Ive tried with the latest build but get the same result as everyone else

Ive had no problem unlocking on the x64 WinXP Pro before but Vista seems to throw up new issues with file creation or something

Ill keep trying...

I tried with the latest build too, but it still doesn't work.
I also put lfs dir in my documents folder and still can't unlock, even running it as an administrator.

I think we would have to wait a fix for this...

Im just downloading the RC1 Build of Vista32bit , i will test U/U20 as soon as its installed and test unlocking and sound issues.

Pre-RC1 you mean. I have it installed and tried with patch U. Music in setup screens and in-game works just fine. but engine sound is totally gone. It's dead silent. Have not tried unlocking and patch U20.

Well, got engine sound back by increasing sound lag to 0.25.

Well look at the tread title
We know about the sound problem, and microsoft isnt going to fix thix bug on their side.

Interesting to see would be:
1. does unlocking work on PreRC1 32bit? (likely it will work) (confirmed - works)
2. does unlocking work on PreRC1 64bit?

Confirmed

Vista (TM) Pre_RC1 Build 5536 (32bit) Unlocks succesfully (LFS Version U20)

Sound problem is still there.

Good to know Al Oh, and wanna know something sorta dumb, yesterday I found my Vista CD key... :S

I am unable to unlock it(not sure which patch) on Visra 32bit Build 5600 aka the RC1 any help?