Heroes III Sound Fix

[ByteBandit]

I hope it works better with XL maps than the last one. The last patch crashed the game after long extended use. It seems like the quality of this one, however is better than the last one was. Very pleased so far.

[GreatEmerald]

Does it work with WoG as well?

[Pol]

Sure. The previous version I was using with WoG happily ever after. Now I haven't got to to install WoG again, so it remains untested. But damn, it really should, there's no reason why the heck would not.

[ByteBandit]

I think the version Pol put up may be corrupted,,,maybe? I downloaded it and I could'nt send it to friend over Yahoo mail, as it (Yahoo Norton) said the zip file had a virus or something. (Maybe because the zip file contains an exe, perhaps?) Anyway I can't send the file from my end to anyone. And I've been sending other zip files everywhere, so I know I'm virus free.

[Pol]

Sounds like that it's blocked by your AV program. For sure I checked with Avira and it's ok. Looks like false alarm on the side of your AV keeper.

[ByteBandit]

That's good to know Pol. Thanks for checking it out. It's good to know nothing's wrong with it.

[Narzoul]

This is quite old, but I've been too lazy to post it earlier.

The same type of fix that was applied to exe files is available as a single, direct fix to MSS32.DLL. Remove any previous sound fixes and just copy the fixed dll from the archive into the game's install directory (override the existing file - though do make a backup copy of it first...)

It should be equally stable as the exe fix, but without having to mess with any of the exe files at all, so I suppose it's better this way.

Download links are in Pol's post below.

[Pol]

It's up.
Link1
Link2
Link3


This I suppose, will be the final version of our favourite essential audiofile fix. Thanks!

[Narzoul]

Thanks!

Yes, there'll probably be no more updates. I don't think I can do anything else to improve this fix.

I guess I could work on the old DirectShow fix and add support for non-mp3 music files for example, but that's rather pointless (you can always just convert to mp3) and it would become more of a modding project than a simple fix anyway.

[Aenain]

Hi,

I can't use the latest fix on the first page of this topic (http://www.celestialheavens.com/homm3/p ... sndfix.zip), because my antivirus, Microsoft security essentials, detects this as Trojan:Win32/Dynamer!dtc. I hope this is a false positive !

[GreatEmerald]

Pretty sure. It changes the EXE, so it makes sense for antiviruses to be suspicious about it.

[Aenain]

I opened the archive in my linux system, and did the "manual installation" described in the readme. Seems to work. Thank you

[Narzoul]

Bah, yet again no e-mail notification. Well, I see you solved your problem meanwhile anyway. Strange, I haven't got antivirus warnings before, but now that I went to check those files again my antivirus is complaining about h3sndunfix.exe too. It has to be a false positive, I doubt the apatch tool I used would generate trojan-infected patch files.

Anyway, I see you've installed the older exe fix - I actually recommend the newer mss32.dll fix instead. (I modified the first post to bump that version to the top). That one shouldn't give you any antivirus trouble, as there's no patcher included, just a fixed dll file with only a couple of bytes modified compared to the original. You can compare them with some binary file comparison tool and check that the changes really don't include any malicious code, although you might need some assembly knowledge to verify that. You can also just stick to the exe fix if you feel it's safer (it's only 3 bytes changed as you've seen), it should offer the exact same performance and stability. I just think the dll fix is more convenient - for example, there's probably no need to remove it before (or reinstall it after) installing other mods, patches or expansions.

[GreatEmerald]

I'm happy to say that this fix also works to solve the crackling audio issue when running the game through Wine. It's compatible with Heroes Chronicles, too.

[GreatEmerald]

I just tried to use custom audio files, and, well, it doesn't seem to work that well. When I encode MP3s with libmp3lame, I get a bit of audio corruption in the audio, and the lower the bitrate, the more of it I hear. This is very odd, because even if I copy the original file's bitrate, I still get poor-sounding audio.