Hi,
I've been tweaking UT99, using the Creative EAX patch for the Galaxy Audio renderer to use with Creative Alchemy to enable EAX on my X-Fi card on Windows 7, (pretty long winded but EAX is worth it) but the audio is popping and crackling a lot.
No amount of changing audio latency in unrealtournament.ini, buffer count and size in ALchemy would fix it.

After googling for quite a while, the only solution that one other guy found was to actually set the affinity of the game to 2 cores rather than just the 1 that he had set it to.

I've uninstalled the SingleProcAffinity compatibility fix GOG automatically applied with Compatibility Assistant, but when I start the game and alt tab to change the affinity, I can set it to core 0 and 1 but when I alt tab back in it automatically sets it back to core 0.

How do I override this?
Its something I want to know in case any other game does this too, I usually manually handle affinity with RadeonPro.

Ok, I'm redoing my entire post since I looked into this while making the post (sigh). Now I don't have the time or inclination to research and troubleshoot this from every angle so it may not be completely accurate.

Anyway, it seems GOG has frankly gone about this is a very silly way, it seems that anything called "UnrealTournament.exe" will have things, like CPU affinity, set because of a registry entry (and probably related to the Program Compatibility Assistant Service).

Disabling the Program Compatibility Assistant Service should stop the affinity constantly being changed back after you manually set it (or even if it is set by a program to manage CPU affinity). However because of the registry entry it may still be set at launch. To avoid this delete their silly registry entry at...

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Custom\

In there should be something called "UnrealTournament.exe", delete it. From then on the game should start up using all cores by default.

Why GOG would go this route is beyond me, it causes nothing but problems should anyone want to do something like change the affinity (even if you use a program to manage CPU affinity) for any reason, including the unforeseeable which is really obtuse of GOG to do this. They could use anything from a special shortcut to making some simple software of their own (a launcher or countless other ways) to set affinity and avoid this kind of nonsense which can result in the user having to fight to get an old game to work properly, which ironically is something GOG of all places should be avoiding, Good Old Games.

Relying on things like Windows services is the kind of thing that makes games have problems on newer operating system (such things eventually get removed, replaced or changed causing old things that rely on them not to work properly anymore without updates). This is kind of lack of foresight that is the reason for many old games not working on newer/current systems.

After installing the GOG UT GotY version (to make this post, was using the CD version) I started having problems including audio glitches, all due to the game using only 1 core. Thanks to the way GOG has done this not only could it stop working in the future when Windows features change/get removed, it also caused my old CD version of the game to use only 1 core, well done there GOG. Simply installing the GOG version even effected the old CD version in a backup folder. Talk about using a steamroller to hammer in a nail. Just imagine what will happen if the new Unreal Tournament is released and has the same exe name and the system sets it to one core because of GOG, well done GOG, great foresight lately.

I am flabbergasted by some of the approaches GOG takes on some things, this being a prime example. Personally I'll be making a note to myself to only use my old CD version rather than the GOG version should I ever need to reinstall to avoid all this nonsense. Infact with some of the things and ways they've being doing things I'm starting to think I'd best stick to my old CD versions whenever possible. My UT is again working flawlessly across 8 cores, no thanks to the GOG version and its shenanigans.

this is some useful piece of information. thanks a lot for sharing it.

Does anyone know how to fix the current GOG version?
I'm also unable to get EAX working without the sound cutting out or crackling, and the game seems locked to a single core.

However I don't have any compatibility flags listed for UnrealTournament.exe so I'm wondering if they modified the executable to only use a single core or something?

This is very frustrating because software sound works without that problem, but hardware accelerated sound + EAX (via ALchemy) sounds so much better.

I really regret getting rid of all my old CDs years ago, as the GOG versions of a lot of games seem to have strange problems due to the "fixes" they apply.