Tag Archives: oss

Fixing sound in Linux Civ:CTP

When my old 64-bit motherboard died, and I replaced it with the DP35DP, one of the surprises I ran into was that the sound was badly broken on “Civilization:Call To Power”. All other applications that I tried worked well, any programs using the ALSA interface, as well as a few 32-bit binaries on the OSS interface, like Quake 2 and Heroes 3. However, with Civ:CTP, the sound stuttered and looped horribly. I couldn’t use the aoss wrapper because Civ:CTP is statically linked. After a lot of tinkering, I finally came to the conclusion that, for this one application, I had to load the sound module with different parameters.

For every application except Civ:CTP, my snd-hda-intel module is loaded with the parameters

position_fix=1 model=5stack

However, in order to run Civ:CTP, I have to exit all sound applications, remove the snd-hda-intel module, and re-load it with the parameters:

position_fix=3 model=5stack

With this change, the sound in Civ:CTP sounds fine. However, all other applications have poor sound, scratchy and unpleasant to the ear, so I only make this module change just prior to running the game, and re-load the module with the usual parameters immediately afterwards.