Need Help with Battlefield 1942

[Dark54555]

My Rig:
EPoX EP8KHA+
Athalon XP 1600+
512 MB ram Crucial DDR2100
Gainward ti 450 TV (GeForce2)
WD 80GB Special Edition
SoundBlaster Live! Platnium 5.1 running Logitech z560 4.1
Cable @ 2mbps/384kbps
WinXP Pro

So I bought the game and R2R. Haven't been online yet, because I'm having some issues getting it running. I've been using single player to tweek it, and nothing seems to work. One's a sound issue, the other's a choppiness issue, may be related.

On sound, I'm getting a weird echo. some sounds will play 2 or 3 times in a row or just studder. I've tried: hardware acceleration on and off, 11 hz, 22 hz, 16 sounds, 32 sounds, 64 sounds. Nothing seems to help it. I'm running an SBLive! Platnium. Other than that, the game just seems really choppy no matter what resolution i put it at. 640x480 or 800x600, medium, low...whatever.

ok, so i tried installing the new SBLive drivers, and that killed my whole system's audio. I had to roll back to the MS drivers to get audio back. grrr...

I'm using the 1.3 patch. I had no problems with the 1.1 Multiplayer Demo. Help would be appreciated!

 

[styrafoam]

I had similar sound problems to what you described which were fixed by the Creative XP drivers. If you cannot get those to work I would try running DXDIAG and turning the acceleration all the way down in the sound section when you play BF1942. As far as the choppiness of the game, I think the 2 biggest hits on performance are view distance and texture detail. Fiddle with those a bit and see if you get any improvement.

 

[RSMemphis]

I am rather sure that both the XP1600 (stock speeds, I assume) and the GeForce2 are holding you back.
My guess at this point is that the GeForce2 is actually more of a bottle neck, maybe you could pick up a cheap used GeForce3 somewhere?

 

[Tates]

There is known sound issue to be corrected in the upcoming 1.31 patch

 

[Radiohead]

Read about this fix for echoing sound issues in a BF forum.

Go to your ...\BF1942\Mods\bf1942\Settings folder & find & open Default.con with notepad.

Look for the line Sound.soundBufferCacheSize; change the value following it to 150, save the file & try the game again.

If you still hear the echos up the number by 50 or so again.

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: RSMemphis
I am rather sure that both the XP1600 (stock speeds, I assume) and the GeForce2 are holding you back.
My guess at this point is that the GeForce2 is actually more of a bottle neck, maybe you could pick up a cheap used GeForce3 somewhere?

The GeForce 2 likely is, but not the XP1600. BF1942 runs silky smooth with my XP1700/Radeon 8500LE combo.

 

[styrafoam]

Yeah, I was running it on a celeron 1100 and a gf4ti4200 and it was respectable. Much smoother on a 2100xp now, but not choppy at all as Dark54555 describes. I vote for a video card bottleneck also.

 

[DT4K]

The 1.3 patch fu#$% the sounds up for 90% of the people.
According to EA, 1.31 will be out soon but will NOT fix the sound issues. It will fix the wallhack cheat and a couple of other issues.
So you can try changing sound settings to minimize the sound problems, but you probably won't eliminate them until EA releases a 1.4 patch.
The Geforce 2 is very weak for BF. I have to put my GF 3 Ti200 on mostly medium detail settings at 1024 x 768 to get a nice smooth game. I've got almost the same system as you except video card and an XP 1700.

But if changing to lower resolutions makes no difference, it doesn't sound like a video card bottleneck. You may have other things running that are hogging your CPU time.
Use Task Manager and check what processes are running. Do a google search on the name of each process to see which ones are really needed and which ones are not. Disable any that are not needed and see if that helps. Also check your display settings and make sure you don't have AA or AF turned on. You should see a smooth game at 800 x 600 on low detail with your system.

 

[chemos]

what IRQ is your sound card using? i had this problem with XP and found that XP likes to manage (emulate) IRQs, which can mess with some hardware, including my SB Live Value card. i had "stuttering" problems in BF:1942 as well. it went away when i went back to win2k. FWIW.

as far as the choppy video, your video card is holding you back. low res (800x600) with low details should run fine, though. how much memory is on that card?

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

ok, i went through this with my AMD 1.4GHz with GF3.

Is your motherboard using a VIA chipset?
If so, there is an option for AGP driving control(i thinks thats it.) by deafault it is set to Auto, put it on manual and change it to DC.
Also make sure your VIA all in one's are current. Also try older revisions of the Det drivers. I had to go back to 29.3x to get it to work.