I am having problems with sound overlapping and scratchiness when faction leaders are speaking. I am running WinXP and have latest patches.
Any ideas?
Thanks again

Do you have SBlive! sound card?
Add this line to your Alpha Centauri.ini file
eax=0

it will disable EAX

I've got the exact same problem with xp and sb live.
This eax=0 thingy doesn't fix it. Anything else I can try?

I installed the new liveware 3.0 for XP (which creative finally released) and the sound works without problems.

SMAC works ok for me on XP before patching, then when I apply the latest SMAC patch I get no sound at all (except in the intro movie). I also have Sound Blaster Live. I haven't tried the EAX off thing yet, I will try tonight.

Also, I can't seem to find the liveware 3.0 for XP on the creative.com site (man, the creative site is so challenging to navigate!!) :cry: HELP!

I have XP and the SB PCI512. I tried the eax=0 thing, to no avail. I also upgraded to the latest XP drivers from Creative's site. Also, no luck. I'm running out of options...

get liveware 3.0 for XP from:

http://bj.mydrivers.com/sound/livexp.zip
or
http://file2.mydrivers.com/sound/livexp.zip

I tried the EAX=0 thing and it works! Yay!

Now I need to get Birth of the Federation working...

Thanks, laisak. I can't believe that Creative went to a CD-only distribution method (although it's impossible to decipher this from SoundBlaster.com). I'll try out the liveware, and post what happens here.

Didn't work. It may be because I'm using a PCI512, but the LiveWare install didn't work for me. I started getting random lockups and GPF's all over the place. So, I got to use the nifty driver rollback feature on XP (which worked flawlessley, I might add).

Maybe Creative will take a cue from Riva and start using a Unified Driver Architecture... If only Creative had to battle it's way to market dominance (like Riva), instead of floating on top since the original Soundblaster, maybe they would have come out with innovation like that.

And so I remain, with choppy (though not as choppy at times) audio in SMAC. And no response from tech support as of yet.

Hey...

I got the sound problem resolved. Per EA's instructions, I turned DirectX hardware sound acceleration down to 'basic' from inside the DXDIAG tool. the sound works great now.