A solution to the ANNOYING No Sound problem.

I've seen some people have this issue, and I had it too! Legitimately I could not find a fix for this problem anywhere:
-I thought it was the audio drivers, so I reinstalled them a few times in any way I could, didnt do jack.
-I thought maybe there was a config file from an old version of SORR before 5.2 that causes this issue, nope.
-Checking if maybe the game gets confused with speakers being redirected to headphones, nope.
-Installing the SDL dll files in the system32 and sysWOW64 folder? didnt do jack again!


I remember I asked about this a few years ago, and yeah nothing happened sadly, cant blame ya since the fix is really specific.

So the issue is related to SDL, SORR uses SDL 1.2, which has a different configuration value to detect audio drivers compared to SDL 2 but for some reason the later uses the exact System Variable as the former, making it so some programs using SDL 1.2 get confused and just end up having a wrong config that leads to the "no available audio device" problem which makes a game like this completely silent, if you run SORR game with CMD and have this issue, it spams the console with errors about not being able to find the audio device and not being able to play the correct music.

Some saint at the Prison Architech forums in the paradox forums somehow managed to find a solution to this, SO HERE'S THE FIX!:

-Go Win + R, type "systempropertiesadvanced"
-In popped up window click "Environment Variables" at the bottom
-Find a variable (At the bottom box called System Variables) named "SDL_AUDIODRIVER" with the value "directsound" and change its value to "dsound". If you don't have a variable with this name - create it.

If the variable is already there and has "directsound" instead of "dsound", then thats the reason why SORR is completely silent, changing it finally fixed the problem to me.

Deleting the variable after fixing the game causes no issue, the sound plays without problems, some people recommend to delete it so it doesnt cause later issues with programs using SDL 2.

This also fixed me the issue with some thrown weapons erroneously causing explosions or explosive projectiles not exploding somehow, maybe all the console error spams was starting to cause issues.

Hopefully this can also help some people out there with that problem, it sure did for me! Now my only problem is the incorrect scaling when set at Normal X3 windowed, but thats a problem with SORR 5.2 itself.