Upgrade to EMU10k1 + Enemy Territory = Choppy game

[Bradeeoh]

Sick of dealing with DMIX for mixing multiple streams on my motherboard's built in sound chip that doesn't support hardware mixing, I found an old SB Live! card in a box and put it in today. Fired 'er ALSA drivers up and played some music and browsed some web and things worked great - including the hardware mixing.

With that having been the only thing that changed, Enemy Territory has developed a symptom I cannot live with. When I start'er'up, things are as usual. I can connect to a server and play 1, sometimes 2 maps before the problem starts.

After I play the map and after the next map has loaded, things are choppy. But choppy I mean the sound and the mouse/UI chop once or twice every second. The sound, mouse, and graphics all leap ahead at the same time, and the game is unplayable. Disconnecting from the server does nothing - the main menu exhibits the same behavior and I must completely exit the program to get rid of the symptoms (they do not carry over back to the desktop, thankfully).

I have yet to try reverting to my old kernel with the old MOBO sound drivers to confirm that this behavior is directly tied to the new card.

Another possibility is that previously I was using 2.6.6-vanilla and for this new card I jumped to 2.6.9.

Other than that, I can't think of what else may have caused this. Any and all ideas appreciated - if I get around to tinkering with kernels and options and stuff, I'll update this thread.

Thanks!

[monotom]

I can confirm this as I have the exact same problem.
It's not just enemy territory, but also other games like e.g. American Army.
I read somewhere that this could come from a lousy network connection, but since I have 10Mbps+ and I get the same problem when I run RTCW single player. I don't think that is what causes the problem. I switched from using my sb live to my onboard cmedia soundcard as the first soundcard. This did not change anything... I'm not shure that it's the emu10k1 that's the problem here.

My setup is: Kernel 2.6.9 (got the same choppy gameplay in 2.6.8 ) with alsa. Do you have a nvidia card or an ati card? I had a radeon 9000 before and then I did not have this problem. Don't remember whether I used the oss or alsa at that time though. The really strange thing is that this doesn't happen all the time. It's really bugging me.

[Bradeeoh]

It's sounding suspiciously similar. My mobo (MSI KT4-Ultra FISR) has onboard cmedia 8738MX 6-channel sound.

As I could not figure out how to tell ET to use /dev/dsp or /dev/dsp1 (it seems to ignore asound.conf...?) I manually relinked those to point to the other card so ET would hit up the cmedia instead of the SBLive. When I did that our problems seem to diverge a little as it DID infact work.

When I relinked the DSPs back to the SBLive, I started having better luck - for some odd reason I cannot explain. Every other time it is choppy, and quitting/restarting the app fixes it. And sometimes the app will start choppy but fix itself in the first 30-45 seconds.

However the problem definitely does still remain and definitely still pisses me off.

And yes, of course I "remember" which video card I have - built this box from the ground up. ATI 9500 Pro. But as I have indicated, with that video card, I never had this problem with just the cmedia sound installed and with kernel 2.6.4. The simultaneous upgrade to 2.6.9 and the SBLive is what borked this.

I still haven't had time to recompile 2.6.4 with the emu10k1 drivers but I will at some point to see if it's kernel related or something else.

2 questions - anyone else out there have a similar problem? And more importantly, anyone FIX it?

-Bradeeoh

[monotom]

[wolf31o2]

Try removing the SB Live! completely from your system. Creative cards are notorious for causing signalling problems on the PCI bus.
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[DoktorSeven]

I do know that kernel 2.6.9 has a bug in kswapd that causes the problem you describe (system slows down after a few minutes when playing games). I've stayed at 2.6.7 because of this (never went to 2.6.8.1).
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[monotom]

It turns out that I was using 2.6.9 when I thought that it was 2.6.8
With 2.6.8 it works just fine, so it's the kswap bug that's the problem.

[Dashiva]

Also you might consider using the stock oss kernel driver. It comes from the creative tree [ opensource.creative.com ] and I find it a lot easier to manage with more features than the Alsa drivers even now. You can do Pro Logic/SPDIF/midi with it and it works great.