OS X Game Ports are Soundless

[PinkMartinis]

Silently raging.

Whenever I have a game that's a port/wrapper of a PC game, it is entirely soundless. Maybe I haven't been phrasing my queries right in Google, but I haven't been able to find any answers as to why this thing is happening. And, come on, sound helps set the atmosphere for a game. It's crucial!

Anyway--Psychonauts, 30 Flights of Loving, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, all silent. With the exception of a Steam patch that fixed Psychonauts, the others encountered no issues with sound only when Wine is used to run the .exe.

But I just caved and bought Dragon Age: Origins specifically for Mac since I was having issues running it with my PC copy. And, unsurprisingly, there's complete silence past the loading splash. Since this is a consistent problem that's been present over a long period of time and with different games, it's obviously not a one-game defect.

Any ideas on what's causing this problem and how it can be fixed?

Thanks so much for your help ^_^

Late 2011 MacBook Pro | OSX 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 - Intel HD Graphics 300 - Lion 10.7.5

 

[edddeduck]

Silently raging.

Whenever I have a game that's a port/wrapper of a PC game, it is entirely soundless. Maybe I haven't been phrasing my queries right in Google, but I haven't been able to find any answers as to why this thing is happening. And, come on, sound helps set the atmosphere for a game. It's crucial!

Anyway--Psychonauts, 30 Flights of Loving, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, all silent. With the exception of a Steam patch that fixed Psychonauts, the others encountered no issues with sound only when Wine is used to run the .exe.

But I just caved and bought Dragon Age: Origins specifically for Mac since I was having issues running it with my PC copy. And, unsurprisingly, there's complete silence past the loading splash. Since this is a consistent problem that's been present over a long period of time and with different games, it's obviously not a one-game defect.

Any ideas on what's causing this problem and how it can be fixed?

Thanks so much for your help ^_^

Late 2011 MacBook Pro | OSX 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 - Intel HD Graphics 300 - Lion 10.7.5

If it happens on many games including official ports then highly likely your OS / Software setup or hardware is to blame not the games.

Have you installed audio plugins or external audio for example. I would look into that before blaming the games if most of them don't work.

Sounds to me like you might have some audio software/hardware problems that once fixed will remove the issues for all the games.

 

[PinkMartinis]

The only changes I've made to my audio, besides recent attempts at fixing it after the problems appeared, was installing Boom. I even uninstalled it to see if that caused any problems. But other than that, I hadn't touched anything audio-related on my system.

And along with no audio, there's also no lip-synching. So it very well could be a hardware/software problem. But since it's isolated to a very specific type of program, I thought there'd be an easier-to-find correlation between the ports and maybe a deficiency in hardware/software or some other obscure issue that I just haven't considered.

Thanks for your help.

 

[edddeduck]

The only changes I've made to my audio, besides recent attempts at fixing it after the problems appeared, was installing Boom. I even uninstalled it to see if that caused any problems. But other than that, I hadn't touched anything audio-related on my system.

And along with no audio, there's also no lip-synching. So it very well could be a hardware/software problem. But since it's isolated to a very specific type of program, I thought there'd be an easier-to-find correlation between the ports and maybe a deficiency in hardware/software or some other obscure issue that I just haven't considered.

Thanks for your help.

If you have a spare HD I would install a fresh OS and run a quick test if you can. The other test is to create a new "test" user and try and play using that user account, sometimes the issue is with something deep in your user library and a new user is a good test to prove/disprove that theory.

The final possibility off the top of my head is Garage band or other sound applications, they can alter the htz and other settings with the OS sound that can cause games to fail. Rome Total War for example will not make a peep in 10.6 if you use Garage Band to alter the Htz from the standard 44htz.

My support spider sense definitely points to a software issue (unlikely hardware) caused by manipulation of the sound libraries or settings in some way that effects software that uses sound API extensively like games.

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Whenever I have a game that's a port/wrapper of a PC game

Ports and wrappers are completely different things. It's a bit like saying when I have a 360 or PS3 game. One is an OS X native application (port) the other is a Windows exe surrounded by virtualisation libraries (wrapper).

How they process sound will be fairly different if both have issues then it points to the issue being at a fundamental and deep level of the OS. Basic apps like iTunes etc don't care about sound settings as much so usually are not effected.

Edwin

 

[PinkMartinis]

Welp...

After opening GarageBand and opening some older files to see if they had any errors too, I received the 'error code 28773...audio driver' message. Seeing as how this seemed to be a rabbithole full of issues, I went ahead and, as you suggested, reinstalled the OS. Took me days to backup everything, since the only hard drive wouldn't accept Time Machine, but my sound is in perfect working order now. Thank you for the suggestions, I really appreciate it.