Finally, a year and a half after I uninstalled BG from my HD, I have successfully reinstalled it again.
After several emails for tech support, and posting for help on several forums and trying every configuration of installation I could come up with and ending in failure I gave up about 6 months ago.

Today I decided to randomly try again and it worked. For no rhyme or reason....

But what sucks is I may have to wipe my HD and reinstall windows thanks to a soundcard issue I posted about in the GD forum.

But for now The game is installed and I can finally start a charcter in BG1 and take him/her all the way through to BG2 & TOB.

I would have to play w/o sound, if I decided to leave well enough alone. Or I can wipe my hd and reinstall windows and HOPE that BG installs again.

What do you think I should do? Play w/o sound or risk not being able to play at all?

Chewy, man, I have never heard anyone have the troubles you did in getting BG1 to work! Seriously, for my own education, what in the world were all these tech issues??? What kind of system do you have? Personally the sound of BG really does add to the game play especially through the first time. Do you think your game is corrupted in the load disk? I know that the newest version is cheap and fully patched, plus it has Tales of the Sword Coast included. Perhaps a new purchase is needed.

Sound in my opinion, is very critical in this game, as you will be able hear enemies (sometimes) before you can even see them.

Also, the spoken dialogues that you get to randomly hear between your own NPCs, really adds to the wonderfull atmosphere of this game.

Not to mention the dialogues of 'non-joinable NPCs' and major enemies which you get to hear at specific times.

It would be really tragic if you played this game without sound.

Do you have any idea why your sound card is not compatible with the game?

Is it really old?

Have you looked at the manufacture's website for possible patches to the sound card?

I'm not a computer guru by any means, but I thought that heard from someone that some motherboards have a sound device built into it which can act as a default for sound without a separate card.

Now if this is the case, I would venture to guess that any voices or other complex sounds may come out as distorted and would force you to eventually get a newer upgraded card.

I don't know how straped yor are for money but an average to decent soundcard shouldn't cost too much these days, especially if you looked around on ebay or Amazon.com

Yeah, I agree that sound is way critical for the entire gaming expirience. Gameplay, atmosphere, ect.

I have playyed BG&TOSC before, finished it twice, so I know what I am missing. Now that I have playyed a bit again, beelining for Friendly Arm, I really miss the sound. But I am still torn.

I love this game and its sequel and ever since I finished TOB I wanted to go back through and play the whole series again in order with the same characters to just for fun. But the game would not install. ( see below for details)

So now that it actually works again I dont wanna give it up!!! [img]smile.gif[/img] It's like a long depression has suddenly lifted even if the stupid sound doesnt work!!! [img]smile.gif[/img]

Anyway my system is this fairly up to date with:
WIN 98 fully updated
AMD 1.5 processor
512 RAM fully updated
Gforce3 t200 64 RAM
LG DVD/CDR (generic)
Santa Cruz sound card that quit working when I updated the drivers

The error would occur around 76% of the way through the install, when the entire installation set-up program would suddenly dissappear...no blue screen of death, no error message, just gone.

This is the THIRD copy of BG I purchased just in case it was a disc problem with the other two.

I'm just gonna cross my fingers, perhaps the machine will randomly re-instated my sound as well! Well I can hope anyway, what ever I decide to do! [img]smile.gif[/img]

one hint for playing without sound is to auto-pause when enemy sighted as you won't get the warning shrieks of the gibberlings to help you out

You don't NEED it. To be honest, the first time I completed BG2 I had no sound. ;)

Umm, my sound came back randomly! No kidding! :D
While I was playing BG the machine dropped my game and asked for the win98 disc...
So I put it in and it ran the driver setup and then walla- sound, volume control, the works.

This was like 12 hours after I reinstalled WIN 98, which I suspect had siomething to do with it.

I can now hear...."You must gather your party before venturing forth."
Just like the good old days! :D I forgot the miners in Naskel moan something about coughing up blood!

For the record I was willing to play w/o sound, but I'm not complaining now that I have it! It is one of the dimensions of the game after all...
Woo hoo!!! :D [img]tongue.gif[/img]