VPX 10.8.0 64bit SSF will not work - but 32bit does

[MIKEYPIN6]

I just upgraded my 4 year old pinball cab, with 300 working tables, from VPX10.74 to 10.8.0.  I cannot get the surround sound SSF to work with windows 7.1 surround sound, no matter what I do, for the 64 bit version of 10.8.0. I even bought a new USB surround sound board, replacing the old generic one, with a new StarTech 7.1 card.  Using this card, with it's dedicated drivers (not the generic USB ones from Microsoft)  I was able to finally get the 32 bit version of VPX 10.8.0 to play SSF sounds and NOT destroy the older 10.74 sound from working after installing and running 10.8.8 for the first time. AI (Grok) says that this is a common bug and the new releases, such as 10.8.1 may address this problem. My computer is a good one, HP Omen tower with i7-10700K CPU, Win 11 (latest update) Nvidea 3070Ti video card, 32GB RAM.  I have gone through countless resets, Equalizer APO toggles on/off, deleted VPX .ini file, ran again, etc. Nothing helps. Anyone else gone through this? Any advice?  (It appears the 32 bit VPX 10.8 runs the VPX8 tables I have just fine...but I hear it's recommended to use the 64bit version so tables don't crash due to running out of memory.)

[Thalamus]

I don't know what your problem might be. But, know this. There definitely is a sound bug in 10.8 Final. Well, at least the last official final. I haven't tried to newest updated yet on the cab. There I experienced drop of sound from all Bally MPU. Noticed it first when I played Frontier and I didn't get all the crickets (the rom with name frontier, isn't working correctly here - the alternative one does). Resolution was to not use Default output as the sound source, but, the RealTek one. At that point I did try an older version of 10.8.1 I had with the very latest pinmame (at that time) and it worked, no matter what output I picked.

 

BUT, I don't recommend 10.8.x yet for anything else than testing. And it is also essential that you keep 10.8.x completely separate from your current VPX install !!

DON'T put any files from 10.8.x into your current VPX path. Extract them to their own folder !

 

I would focus on getting basic 7.1 working, not using EQ APO. It just complicates the setup. Then when basic is working, is it time to improve using that program.