Technical notes ยท Yamagi Quake II

Yamagi Quake II: OpenAL played white noise (2026-10-16)

Date2026-10-16
GamesYamagi Quake II
batches2026-10-16-yquake2-white-noise, 2026-10-16-yquake2-byteswap
game patchesyquake2/0001

Symptom. The first runs of our ppc64 build (+ps3.229) drew right, but every sound effect was loud white noise (batch 2026-10-16-yquake2-white-noise).

Cause. The game loads its 16-bit WAV samples as they are in the file, little-endian, and hands them to OpenAL as AL_FORMAT_*16, which means native byte order: on a big-endian host every sample had its bytes swapped.

Fix. Patch 0001 swaps the 16-bit samples to host byte order at load (+ps3.240, batch 2026-10-16-yquake2-byteswap). The user confirmed the sound by ear. The SDL audio path (s_openal 0, variant sdlsound) is a second way to the card, kept as a variant.