kx driver not working on Vista32 with SB Live! 5.1 Platinum

tomoyo255

Hi,

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First, I've a word to write to the persons who wrote kx drivers: it's damn good work! If I had time (the same that everyone seems not to have ), I'd like to contribute in some way. The first reason, I wanted to install kx, was to have prologic II decoding which CL driver are unable to perform on stereo material.

Question: Is there a prologic II (phantom, 3ch logic...) decoder (maybe hidden behind a less TM name) in one of the effects or setting of surrounder or surrounder+ available?

Why are CL drivers and software always so poor. However, I've only tested kx driver for a short time and am trying to understand how the card works. I tried prologca and surrounder with more or less success (I'm still new to the card's heart). I'm also interested in using linux prologic patches, is it possible? Or find/implement prologic II patches for the surrounder if it hasn't been done yet (I'm used to x86 asm and already read some on e10k1/2 asm doc and TRAM rotating buffers, otherwise I've prooved mysleft in C/C++). I've read somewhere that you only want skilled developpers. I don't know if I correspond to the description, but I'm willing to have drivers work on my Vista machine. That's leading to the subject of this post.
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I've troubles getting kx driver to work on my Vista 32-bit machine with an SB Live! 5.1 Platinum. I've successfully installed the driver and made the required reboot. Since then, at system startup and everytime I execute kxmixer, a pop up appears and states that driver initialization failed and kxmixer won't open. Of course, there's no sound at all.

It's very annoying, since the CL driver also seems unable to work. However, it is stated to be an XP driver, therefore I'm not that astonished... Well, well, well. I've an Audigy2 ZS PP on another machine (with XP SP2 this time) and I don't really wish to swap cards (kx works very well on that machine, by the way - this is the machine on which I tested the prologic stuff)... and I'm not sure it's gonna work better anyway with kx - which already doesn't work with the SB Live! -, even if it might work with CL driver that exists for A2 cards, but that's not what I wanna achieve (or as last solution), as I wanna use kx. These incompatibilities are really, really an issue. Is it because the driver is run in user mode as Vista is supposed to I've understood? That a question. If it wasn't for the 8800 gfx card and dx10, I wouldn't have installed Vista. And, I've understood that new X-Fi cards are black boxes anyway, so no kx driver may be expected.

I've read some posts that suggest that some people get the kx driver to work on Vista.

Do you have any clue? I'm not in front of the computer causing the issue right now; that's why I didn't report the exact pop up message. If you need the exact sentence, I'll complete this post with another one. However, maybe you have enough information to answer.

The pop up appears on system startup and whenever I try to execute kxmixer.

Thanks in advance.

Russ

Make sure that you are using kX version 3539 as it provides the best Vista support (but there still may be some issues related to Vista).

The are currently no kX plugins that do Prologic II decoding (that I know of).

tomoyo255

Hi,

Now, I'm in from of the beast (I'm refering here to the sentence where I said I wasn't in front of my computer...).

Thanks! I checked the driver version and, indeed, it's only 3537. So I'll give it a try with 3539.

In fact, I'm now experiencing a similar issue on Windows98SE (if not identical - I cannot recall the popup message I had on Vista).

Yes, you could say I'm really trying on a bunch of OSes. Well, this is because I want to achieve having both a fully functionnal AWE32 driver (with Voyetra FM driver) to work with a kx driver. I, indeed, installed an SBAWE32 next to an Audigy2 ZS card, to be able to produce AWE32 sounds for the little music I composed and for oldy DOS games (my music is nothing great really, but... well... it counts for me) through the Audigy2 (via external cable, that's ok) to have Surround experience. Have a SB16 DSP, an OPL3-like FM chip, E-mu 8000 next to an E-mu 10002 with 7.1 output, that's what I desire (you may freely say it's a fullish dream).

On Windows98SE, I get the following message:

kX Error: error initializing WinMM subsystem

The fact that "error" appears twice suggests that the part of the message following the colon has been concatenated from another source (windows I assume) than kx itself, or some developper didn't care about message contents (that's a possibility, but I don't think that's the case here). I never programmed with windows multimedia layer, so I won't speculate more.

By the way, I found that Surrounder provides what I needed. It might not be Pro Logic II branded, but I don't really care. It's just more than fine. It's great! I get 5.1 output from 2.0 input with proper channel cancellation and surround channel delay, I never asked for more (I don't know if surround channels are filtered under 7kHz though). I'm finally going to have this complex (I admit it) sound installation to work.

Thanks again.

I'll come back to report if it worked with 3539 driver.

Best regards,

Russ

BTW: Stick with 3537 with Win98SE (Win98SE/WinME is no longer supported), but use 3539 for Vista.