Battlefield 1942 Missing sounds fix!

My discussion is about sound problems I have had in this game in which case I have solved and would like to share with others and discuss regarding the cause.

Battlefield 1942 was awesome in its day and still is considering the lack of AI in recent iterations of the game. Some will and not agree.

The problem I and many others have (I've read up on quite a lot) is onboard sound failing to play many sounds throughout this game. Sound cards or GPU sound processors don’t have this issue as I’m lead to believe owning both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, outputting sound through hdmi play every sound happily.

Those with only onboard sound, the cause is a mixture of EA's poor choice in the game's development (Audio files where they should and shouldn’t be) and also the lack thereof of onboard sound unable to correctively read bit rate tags on sound files.


What’s happening is Battlefield 1942's compressed sound and sound_001 folder setup is like this 11khz, 22khz and 44khz. In the 44khz folder there are sounds sampled at the incorrect sample rate of 22khz and lower. Onboard sound doesn’t know what to do, so the sounds don’t play. Lowering the bit rate in game helps some, still some sounds are missing, i wonder why -_-

Sound cards and GPU's sound processors are smart enough to make these adjustments and are able to correctly read the bit rate headers attached to these .wav files and change accordingly. Lowering bit rate levels in windows will not work because the game uses its own audio player in which case onboard audio fails to communicate with properly.

Here we go, those who are interested in solving Battlefield 1942's sound problem with any onboard sound device, pc or laptop.

1. Locate sound.rfa and sound_001.rfa in Battlefield 1942\Mods\bf1942\Archives\
2. Will need to find an rfa tool and open and extract the contents of these two in their own directories. http://www.fileplanet.com/118941/110000/fileinfo/RFA-Ex...
3. This program I used http://www.goldwave.com/ Can convert to any bit rate you choose in mass.

Goldwave is free and trial with limitations but is good enough to get the job done. Here is how you convert; First click File > Batch processing > Add Folder.

Navigate through sound and sound_001 and add the extracted sound folder '44khz' to convert. Both sound and sound_001 will be done separately as they are two different files (both have identical sub folders; 11khz, 22khz and 44khz) that need to be recompiled later.

Under the Convert tab check khz 44100 and use PCM 16bit stereo. Also check Preserve mono and stereo attribute of original file.

Under Destination tab, check 'overwrite existing files' and 'delete original files' boxes.

Once done click on 'Begin' - This will forcedly convert every incorrect sampled wav file in the 44khz folder to the correct sample rate the onboard sound and game will recognise together.

4. Finally recompile them back together with the correct sample rates with BGA rfa repacker. The other 11khz and 22khz folders can stay as is unchanged.
http://code.google.com/p/bga/downloads/detail?name=BGA_...

Make sure there is no base path as it will save a directory in on its self and will not work.
This is what it should look like, sound > 44khz etc, Not sound > sound > 44khz etc.

Once repacking sound.rfa and sound_001.rfa, replace the originals in your Battlefield 1942 and enjoy! Do make backup copies first!

This work around is meant for in game sound settings to be set at 44khz as this, how I explained, how the game’s audio works.