There is no sound in the game Dead Mountaineer's Hotel on Windows 10

[Lowe Bowe]

Hello! I've encountered an issue that I haven't been able to resolve—perhaps your program can help solve it.

There is no sound in the game Dead Mountaineer's Hotel on Windows 10. I've tried different versions of the game, but with no success. Notably, on a laptop running Windows 11, there are no issues—neither with sound nor with the missing cursor. This sound issue is quite common among many players, but I haven't been able to find a solution.

Thank you in advance for your help.

[gho]

It is a DVD game, so it can't be a CDA problem. Have you ever tried dropping the indirectsound dsound.dll wrapper in the game folder?
I'll try the game to find a solution, but I have a Win11, so it's possible that I won't be able to replicate the problem. In this case, I'll give you directions about how to capture some logs to send to me.

[Lowe Bowe]

Have you ever tried dropping the indirectsound dsound.dll wrapper in the game folder?

Yes, I tried it, but it didn't help =(

[Lowe Bowe]

I'll try the game to find a solution, but I have a Win11, so it's possible that I won't be able to replicate the problem. In this case, I'll give you directions about how to capture some logs to send to me.

I'm upgrading to Windows 11 now too, but I have Win 10 on another drive, so we can try it anyway, thanks.

[gho]

I tested the game on Win11 where there are no sound issues. But the game comes with its own codecs for movies, so likely there is a problem of codec compatibility.
By the way, with DxWnd in window mode and no codec installation I get some weird movie sequence that seems caused by some unsupported FourCC code.
The game behaves curiously in any case: for instance, when run in native mode the beginning of the game (New game) is different, the investigator doesn't come by car and I see him directly outside the hotel! Weird!
The game has movie sequences and sound files (mostly .wav and .ogg) for dialogs and effects. Can you tell which sounds are muted? It seems all in the Data\Sounds folder.
Another peculiarity is that all .avi movies are mute and their associated sounds are in separated .wav files.

[Lowe Bowe]

Can you tell which sounds are muted?

There is no sound, no dialogues, no background music, nothing.

The game behaves curiously in any case: for instance, when run in native mode the beginning of the game (New game) is different, the investigator doesn't come by car and I see him directly outside the hotel! Weird!

Yes, it's not just you who have these oddities, but many of you. Maybe installing DivX 5.6.2 or the official patch 1.3 will help.

[Lowe Bowe]

I tested the game on Win11 where there are no sound issues. But the game comes with its own codecs for movies, so likely there is a problem of codec compatibility.
By the way, with DxWnd in window mode and no codec installation I get some weird movie sequence that seems caused by some unsupported FourCC code.

let me remind you that in my case, everything works flawlessly on Windows 11, without any manipulation or installation of additional software or patches.

[gho]

This comes from the logs:

avifil32.AVIStreamInfoA: pavi=0xe4256dc size=140
> fccType=0x73646976("vids")
> fccHandler=0x78766964("divx")
> dwFlags=0
> dwCaps=0
> wPriority=0
> wLanguage=0
> dwScale=1
> dwRate=30
> dwStart=0
> dwLength=481
> dwInitialFrames=0
> dwSuggestedBufferSize=67157
> dwQuality=10000
> dwSampleSize=0
> rcFrame=(0,0)-(800,600)
> dwEditCount=0
> dwFormatChangeCount=0
> szName=buttle.avi Video #1

This movie is rendered with avifil32.AVIStreamInfoA using the troublesome divx codec. I'd bet the problem is here ....

[Lowe Bowe]

This movie is rendered with avifil32.AVIStreamInfoA using the troublesome divx codec. I'd bet the problem is here ....

I tried installing DivX in different versions, but it didn't help.

[BEEN_Nath_58]

I have been looking into codecs for quite some time, but DivX has been unexplored. I need a week and a half when I can try it in a Win10 VM

[Lowe Bowe]

of course, I hope it's the codecs that are the problem, but I'm not 100% sure

[Lowe Bowe]

I also tried installing the Codec Lite Pack. It also didn't help.

[huh]

It may not help with video playback, but the web archive contains a compact gameimage .flatimage package for running the game on Linux (via Wine). When I looked at the tmp file that flatimage creates, I noticed that the author of this package uses ffdshow.
It might be worth trying. Before you try this, I recommend uninstalling Codec Lite Pack.

[Lowe Bowe]

When I looked at the tmp file that flatimage creates, I noticed that the author of this package uses ffdshow.
It might be worth trying. Before you try this, I recommend uninstalling Codec Lite Pack.

Codec Lite Pack - yes, of course, I have already deleted it. ffdshow - also tested - did not help =(

[gho]

A few things that it may be worth doing to have a better picture of what's going on with this game on Win10:

• set DxWnd "Options > Global settings > Flags > Debug mode" to enable the "Debug" tab
• in the game configuration set "Debug > Dump DirectShow graph" to enable the dump of graph files
• in the "Logs" tab set "Overwrite", "Trace", "COM trace", "DirectShow", "DxWnd hacks", "Sound"
• Run the game until you note a missing sound and terminate the game
• collect the file dxwnd.log in the game folder, pack it and post it here (use WinZip or WinRAR to pack it)
• collect all the graph.*.grf files that may be in the game folder and post them here.

If you want, you can also open the graph files with graphedt.exe (the Microsoft tool) and see how the movie is played (with or without sound).

[Lowe Bowe]

OK, I'll try it.

[huh]

I tried it today on Win10 and the game had extremely strange behavior.
I had no videos with or without DxWnd, but that's not it. I had a mouse cursor in the main menu, but none in the game. The mouse seemed to work, but the cursor was simply not visible, so the game was unplayable.
I changed the line in Documents\ElectronicParadise\Hotel\game_options.ini to fullscreen=0.
Natively the game would run in a window and I think there were videos there too. But the mouse cursor was not in the game.
With this setup I only had green with some kind of fog with DxWnd, that was all, I assume it was the main menu. No matter how hard I tried I could never get the mouse cursor to show up, even with various flags in Dxwnd or remove this green background (in the window mode settings). Really strange.
I had no problem with sounds
Now everything works natively here in Win7. Videos, sounds, mouse cursor.

Update:
I'm afraid something must be wrong with DxWnd, as this is how the video looks. But when I run the game without DxWnd, the video is fine. However, with or without DxWnd, the game does not respond to mouse clicks (in the game, not in the menu).

[huh]

I tried the game natively on a physical computer running WinXP today and had no problems with the mouse cursor (I don't know anything about the sound as there were no speakers connected to the computer).
Here in Win7, I can see the mouse in the game, but clicking doesn't work (it works normally in the menu). Interestingly, if I rename the video mountain.avi, which starts after loading my save file, I can't see the mouse at all in the game.
Here is the log, and whatever is in it, these lines are very suspicious

IDirectInput:SetDataFormat: did=0x5d698fc(Mouse) lpdf=0x420964 size=24 objsize=16 flags=0x2(DIDF_RELAXIS) datasize=16 numobj=7

> MOUSESTATE: pos(x:y:z)=(0:0:0) btn=0:0:0:0

[huh]

Hmm, some news. Well, this is interesting. I found out that with my current profile in DxWnd, the mouse works perfectly when I start a new game. But when I load a saved game, I can't click with the mouse.
This game has some crazy behavior...

OK, so here's the deal: if you enter the building, the next load save will work also with the mouse. The problem only occurs on the first game screen. If you load a saved game here, a video will start playing first, which apparently then breaks the mouse.
This also happens natively.

[huh]

@Lowe Bowe
Did you manage to solve the sound problem?
I mean, I noticed that I have some library files in the game folder that I don't think were in the original game. If you're still having trouble, can you post a screenshot of the game's root folder?

P.S.
I finished the game, but the ending video doesn't play properly in Win7 (natively), it freezes halfway through. Running the video through Graph Studio Next worked fine. This doesn't happen in WinXP.

[Lowe Bowe]

Hi. No, at the moment it was not possible to solve the sound problem. Here is a screenshot of the game folder:

[huh]

Hmm, interesting. I believe that the eax.dll and d3dx9_30.dll libraries were added to the game later. I don't have dsound.dll here, but I assume you added it yourself in an attempt to solve the problem. I don't have any config.txt, installscript.vdf, msvcm90.dll, msvcp90.dll, msvcr90.dll, or Patchinstalc.exe.
From what I can see in the game libraries, my version uses msvc*80.dll. I also have paul.dll and Hotel.exe. I haven't figured out the difference between Game.exe and Hotel.exe except for their size.

P.S.
I assume you have a similar configuration
game_options.ini in the folder \Documents\ElectronicParadise\Hotel
???

[graphics]
show_fps=0
fullscreen=1
shadow=1
shadowmap=2048
shadowmask=512
smoothshadow=0
[common]
time_scale=1
[volume]
general=1
music=0.5
step=1
dialog=1
subtitles=1
[localization]
code_page=0

[huh]

@gho
Is there any way to fix the video so that it plays correctly with DxWnd, as I posted here?
https://sourceforge.net/p/dxwnd/discussion/general/thread/720cb41e48/#0541
Is the problem in the YUV 4:2:0 color space?

[gho]

Maybe. It takes either to find a proper codec for that format or to implement it in DxWnd. I'll try the latter way, but all depends on the documentation and free sources that I may grab ... I'll make a try.

[huh]

Wait, maybe I should explain what I want more clearly. The video plays normally in Win7 natively in the game. With DxWnd, the video also plays, but the image is completely corrupted. It looks like some kind of color space error.