warning : failed to initialize sound system

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. $ wget http://quadra.googlecode.com/files/quadra-1.2.0.tar.gz
2. $ tar xvf quadra-1.2.0.tar.gz
3. $ sudo apt-get install x11proto-xext-dev libpng12-dev zlib1g-dev libxpm-dev 
x11proto-xf86vidmode-dev libxext-dev libxxf86vm-dev g++
4. $ cd quadra-1.2.0
5. $ ./configure
6. $ make
7. $ QUADRADIR=. ./quadra

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
I got "warning : failed to initialize sound system" and I would like the sound 
works.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
1.2.0
Debian "lenny"

Please provide any additional information below.
I use ALSA sound drivers.
My others software work perfectly with the sound (mumble, eduke32, armyops, 
icecat, vlc, ...).

Original issue reported on code.google.com by yugioh...@1s.fr on 20 Aug 2010 at 11:01

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I see in the console :
/dev/dsp: No such file or directory

Original comment by yugioh...@1s.fr on 20 Aug 2010 at 11:04

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Quadra is fairly old, and uses the OSS interface for its sound. Nowadays, that 
generally means installing some compatibility layer, which is clearly missing 
here.

On Debian lenny, I'm told there's an "oss-compat" package, sounds like this 
might help?

Let me know if this work (or not), so I can close this bug, thanks!

Original comment by pphaneuf on 20 Aug 2010 at 2:22

• Changed state: Accepted
• Added labels: Type-Other, OpSys-Linux

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I install this oss-compat package :
$ sudo apt-get install oss-compat

The I run the game :
$ QUADRADIR=. ./quadra

And now there is no message "warning : failed to initialize sound system" and 
"/dev/dsp: No such file or directory".

When I move in the game menu, or when I put the ENTER or ESCAPE key I can 
listen a strange sound with a very bad quality. The quality is not the same 
than when I do "vlc sons/*.wav". In fact I can't recognize what is the sound 
which is currently played because the quality is too bad. Probably this is a 
problem in oss-compat.

You say "Quadra is fairly old", I can't see a ChangeLog file in the source 
package so I couldn't know that. Is it an inactive project? Can we hope a ALSA 
support will be soon released?

Original comment by yugioh...@1s.fr on 20 Aug 2010 at 10:28

[GoogleCodeExporter]

We've been having issues with sound on some platforms, that we can't reproduce, 
and it's really difficult to debug the issue if we can't reproduce it. We've 
had this reported before (issue 101), we couldn't do much, but that person 
found some workaround, using PulseAudio's OSS emulation instead of ALSA's.

If that doesn't work, you can use the "-nosound" command-line flag to turn off 
the sound, in the worst case. :-(

I'll mark this issue as "fixed", since we could resolve the core issue.

Original comment by pphaneuf on 21 Aug 2010 at 2:11

• Changed state: Fixed