Slave Zero - missing sound effects

[WinterSnowfall]

When playing Slave Zero, various sound effects are missing or clipped. Logs continuously spam:

0024:err:dsound:Buffer::setLocation Out of hardware sources

Here are the full logs: SlaveZero.log

I've tried boosting sources in alsoft.ini, but that hasn't made any difference.

[kcat]

Increasing the number of sources unfortunately doesn't affect the number of "hardware" sources, which is limited to 128 for compatibility (all other remaining sources are left for "software" sources). The game seems to create a mix of software and hardware sources, and duplicates a number of them too, without releasing any which causes it to exceed the number of hardware sources available.

Something interesting the game does is it seems to set DSPROPERTY_VMANAGER_MODE to 3 (which I think is DSPROPERTY_VMANAGER_MODE_USER). It uses the VoiceManager stuff, and I'm not sure what that means. Also for every hardware buffer, it sets DSPROPERTY_VMANAGER_PRIORITY to 0, which isn't set for software buffers. I wonder if this might be intended to allow hardware buffers to dynamically shift around the underlying hardware resources (e.g. if it tries to allocate or play a hardware source when they're all used, it will take one from a low enough priority buffer as needed, ensuring the appropriate properties are used for the underlying voice as it's used for different buffers).

The voice manager is very poorly handled, largely being a stub to accept whatever the app expects it to accept but doesn't actually do anything.

[mirh]

#124 (comment) for a collection of info on the saga.
Of interesting note that asus seemed to have +1 over creative.