2 Gaming nuisances

[RossAdamBaker]

Hello everybody,

I have two quick questions for you all - really more of a set of nuisances than anything. You see, when I'm playing some games, one of two things can happen:

First, in some games - Unreal Tournament (All the time,) Battlefield 1942 (When in the menu gui, not while playing) I can see an "edge" on the top and left sides of the screen. It's as if the gray 3d edge of a window is half visible on these sides of the screen. Almost like it's embossed on there.

Secondly, rarely, for no apparant reason, my mouse cursor will appear on top of my game. It just sits there - right where I'm aiming... and is really annoying. Moving the mouse doesn't move it, as it just shifts my view. I can close out and go back into the game, and then it goes away - but still! What in the world?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

Ross Adam Baker

 

[EightySix Four]

I have to go through the normal questions of:

Are your drivers up to date, that includes the chipset and graphics card drivers.

And can we have full system specs?


w00t 100th post

 

[skace]

Usually the mouse thing is caused by another application attempting to take focus. IE: Someone send you an ICQ message, the window pops up and attempts to take focus, it fails because the game is fullscreen and won't allow it, but the mouse pointer still appears.

 

[RossAdamBaker]

Thanks guys,

Crazy SOB - I'm running an Athlon 3200+, DFI Lanparty NF2 Ultra B, ATI Radeon 9800xt, Onboard audio, Western Digital Raptor, some DVD burners, and a bunch of joysticks and gamepads and such. I downloaded my drivers as of last month - but did actually become a bit confused as far as which mobo drivers to use... DFI has a set released (That I am using) but since then NVidia has come out with newer ones... not specifically for my board, but just for all NVidia boards in general. I haven't tried those yet. I am running (gasp!) Windows 98se - packing a bunch of hotfixes and such - simply because I like older games. (I'm getting ready to do a dual-boot with XP pro - as soon as I get my second hard drive.)

While we're on the subject of drivers, my onboard audio causes some problems in some games if "sound hardware acceleration" is turned on. (Ghost Recon starts hissing at me, music in the games jumps around like a scratched cd, that lady's voice in the opening of Unreal Tournament is all echo-y beyond control. Thus, I've turned off sound hardware acceleration. It fixed those problems, and actually increased my FPS by doing it... what's the catch? Am I missing something by disabling it? Should I invest myself in a decent sound card which can actually handle the acceleration?

Skace - that gives me some stuff to play with. I've completely cleaned out my msconfig, and am able to view the active processes using WinTop... there are only a few running so it shouldn't be too hard to single one out, just by closing 'em one at a time. Normally, my system is running: Itouch (my logitech keyboard software) Mouseware (My logitech mouse software - go figure) and some kind of NVidia audio control panel. I'm leaning towards Itouch as being the culprit... it's always generating read only logs in my c: root, so it must being doing something back there... I'll check it out!

 

[Confused]

Firstly, uninstall Mouseware.

It is a horrible bit of software, and I've had nothing but problems when it's installed.

I've never had a problem with iTouch, however


Confused

 

[Fern]

Originally posted by: RossAdamBaker
Thanks guys,



While we're on the subject of drivers, my onboard audio causes some problems in some games if "sound hardware acceleration" is turned on. (Ghost Recon starts hissing at me, music in the games jumps around like a scratched cd, that lady's voice in the opening of Unreal Tournament is all echo-y beyond control. Thus, I've turned off sound hardware acceleration. It fixed those problems, and actually increased my FPS by doing it... what's the catch? Am I missing something by disabling it? Should I invest myself in a decent sound card which can actually handle the acceleration?

Here's a link to a thread about win98se and sound issues on nForce boards. A couple of posts down you'll find a link for sound patch. Works great for me. Win98se Sound Patch

Fern

 

[RossAdamBaker]

Confused - what's the deal with mouseware? Bugs and such? I just like it so I can remap the extra buttons on my mouse - I've just given them keystrokes so they work in games and in general use. (Such as page up, page down, backspace to go back in IE, f5 to refresh, et cetera. I can then use these keys in games to do one of the half a million commands I need to know.) Its been working alright for me thus far - but am I just lucky thus far, and should take the sucker down? Thanks for the bit of advice!

Fern - good call! That patch has fixed the stuttering problem in the music and stuff like that. Nice find! I still get this nasty static noise about a minute or two into Ghost Recon though (Or, any Rainbow six game that uses that engine for that matter. The new ones using the Unreal engine work fine.) It drives me nuts! Just minding my own business, then BANG! Full volume, static roar comes blaring out at me. That seems to be the only game that is doing that any more. I've patched it, to no avail. UBI's tech support answer? "Turn down harware acceleration." (Thanks, guys! Big help!) I'll have to putz around with those games some more, see if there's any other hotfixes available for it.

On a side note, my framerates are significantly lower with sound hardware acceleration enabled... odd... acceleration slows it down... hmm. On the plus side, it does give me EAX, only when its enabled. Other than that, is there a reason to leave it enabled? Does it giver better sound quality? I actually can't tell the difference... but maybe some of you have experience with such. Thanks again!

Ross Adam Baker