Thursday, June 19, 2008

Charles Brain: Bad News for PC-ALE Under Vista

From the hflink group on Yahoo:

Hello Folks,

Well I have done yet another Google search to try and find why programs like PC-ALE won't work properly under Vista.

All I can find is that the Microsoft Vista sound development team have completely re-written the Sound subsystem, they have moved it from Kernel space to User space. Apparently the reason they did this was because Microsoft was being blamed for OS crashes by errant sound drivers that were not their fault.

The side effect of this change has been to disable hardware acceleration in a number of soundcards most notably Creative Devices ones. Creative got around the problem by using their version of ALchemy.

I have not tried this but it might help.

Unfortunately this problem with Vista goes places in Windows that I fear to tread so unless some genius comes up with a simple fix Vista support for PC-ALE will never happen. It seems like the only cards that stand a chance of working are the simplest ones with no hardware acceleration.

Looks like my next project will be Linux based!

- Charles