LinuxQuestions.org - OSS Has Alsa Distortion in Quake 4

I'm currently running the 1.2.1 version of Quake 4 in Suse 10.1. When I use Alsa, the sound is distorted, just as a lot of others have reported. When I tell Quake4 to use OSS (seta s_driver "oss"), everything works just fine for a while, and then the sound starts to go bad, pretty much sounding like it does when using Alsa. However, I can sometimes fix it for a few minutes by re-selecting the "Default" in the sound control panel, and letting the program re-initialize it. I have the number of speakers set to 2.

Sometimes, however, this doesn't work. A few times, it fails right from the get-go, and I'm out of luck.

I'm hoping this is a configuration problem somewhere. What I'm afraid of is that Suse has removed something *else* from the 10.1 distro (like my video card and wi-fi driver).

The sound card shows up in Yast2 as "IXP SB400 AC'97 Audio Controller". The kernel is "2.6.16.13-4-smp", and I'm running KDE "3.5.1 Level a".

I've tried reducing the number of "max channels mixed", as well as suspending artsd, but nothing changed. I feel I'm overlooking something obvious here, since I've been unable to locate any discussion where the sound works for a while then stops, then (sometimes) works again, then stops.

The sound-related settings from my Quake4Config.cfg file are as follows:

Code:

seta s_maxChannelsMixed "24"

seta s_musicVolume "0.5"

seta s_decompressionLimit "2"

seta s_globalFraction "0.8"

seta s_playDefaultSound "1"

seta s_maxSoundsPerShader "0"

seta s_doorDistanceAdd "150"

seta s_volume "0.349206"

seta s_radioChatterFraction "0.9"

seta s_speakerFraction "0.65"

seta s_numberOfSpeakers "2"

seta s_subFraction "0.5"

seta s_meterTopTime "2000"

seta s_reverse "0"

seta s_spatializationDecay "2"

seta s_dsp "/dev/dsp"

seta s_driver "oss"

seta s_alsa_lib "libasound.so.2"

seta s_alsa_pcm "plughw:0"