Nerve demo system: Vista doesn't like v2

Vista doesn't like v2

Published Wednesday, May 30, 2007 by Glow | E-mail this post

Some time ago (two or three weeks perhaps, not so sure) I detected a nice problem in the v2 software synth library I've been using for our 64k demo's. It's already a bit old news, but I just recently noticed that I'm not the only unlucky person experiencing this bug with v2. So maybe I can help some people by sharing my info here.

What I noticed was that all apps that used libv2 (v1.0) crash on my Vista pc. Exactly the same .exe files ran fine on Windows 2000 and XP. Even the demoapp that's shipped with libv2 crashed on my Vista pc, but worked fine on 2000 and XP. I used VS2005 both with and without SP1, but that didn't give different results.

Since I really wanted to use v2 on Vista, I started debugging/h4xx0ring libv2 using IDA. What I found was that libv2 uses incorrect settings for its internal wave format, which for some odd reason doesn't give a problem on Windows 2000/XP, but DOES give errors on Vista. In the latter case it results in an access violation when calling ssInit().

I've been able to fix this error in libv2.lib by modifying the following two bytes:

offset: 0xAC88, was: 0x80, changed it to 0x10
offset: 0xAC89, was: 0xAF, changed it to 0xB1

For me, that fixes the problem :)

I've contacted kb about this issue (in the first week of May), and he'll probably release a new patched version of libv2. But until then, manually patching libv2.lib is the only way of fixing this bug.