Blank sheet notes panel....

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Keith1970
Posts: 6

Post by Keith1970 »

Just a quick question. I've installed Synthesia 10.4.4395 and it all works apart from the Sheet Music line. I'm on Windows 7 (I know, time for a new PC!!) but is this a known bug.....? It shows the white panel with a blank blue section, where I'm guessing the notes should be....
miek
Posts: 37

Post by miek »

On the screen where it says "HANDS COLOURS AND INSTRUMENTS" are any of them assigned to "Right Hand", "Left Hand" or "Custom"? Or do they all say "background"?
Keith1970
Posts: 6

Post by Keith1970 »

Hopefully an image will explain my problem better....
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Missing Sheet music notation
Missing Sheet music notation
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Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

This is not a known bug (until just now)! :?

Do you happen to know which graphics hardware your computer has? Is it an older computer?
Keith1970
Posts: 6

Post by Keith1970 »

Ah, thought I was going mad ;-)

So the PC is

Windows 7 Home Premium SP1

AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+ 2.20 GHz
RAM 4.00 GB
64-bit Operating System

HP Compag dc5750 Microtower
DirectX 11

Graphics Card ATI Radeon Xpress 1150

DirectDraw / Direct3D and AGP Texture are all Enabled

Final note, I'm currently using the Preview version and also tried the PC developmental version, hence the different version numbers.

cheers
Keith
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Thanks for all of that follow-up info. That Radeon Xpress 1150 is one of the circa-2005 cards that are right on the edge of fully supporting OpenGL 2.0 (which we bumped our minimum requirements to in Synthesia 10.3 and that the new sheet music rendering uses).

Judging from the green/red boxes on this list, newer drivers for the 1150 kept adding more of the OpenGL 2.0 features over time. The latest HP's site has for your computer is this ATI driver from 2009. If that's any newer than what you've got, installing it might improve things.
Keith1970
Posts: 6

Post by Keith1970 »

Looks like I am probably out of luck. I'm on 6.14.10.8545 and this appears to be the end of the line... only GL_NV_conditional_render is RED (in fact in a previous version it was GREEN)

I'll tinker a little but I doubt I'll be able to rectify this. Thank you for taking a look though, much appreciated.

cheers
Keith
Keith1970
Posts: 6

Post by Keith1970 »

I suppose I could run an HDMI cable to a monitor and the piano keyboard to the USB via an Android tablet (Fire HD 7). That should work fine....
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Keith1970 wrote:... only GL_NV_conditional_render is RED
All the green there is a bit misleading. That chart only includes rows where at least one of the four drivers support a feature. When you add a modern card to the comparison, things look quite different!

Otherwise, that's unfortunate to hear there might not be a workaround. "Ideally" you would get a message from Synthesia saying "Sorry, OpenGL 2.0 hardware is required" (then you would at least be equipped with an explanation instead of wondering if it were a bug) but ATI cards from that era have a tendency to report that they're 2.0-capable when they were still missing a few features.

This may be a case where 13 year old hardware just won't be able to do it. But the good news is that Synthesia 10.3 should continue to work fine on that machine (forever) and anything you get in the meantime (like the Fire HD 7 you mentioned) will be good for another ten years or so of updates.
Keith1970
Posts: 6

Post by Keith1970 »

Thanks for all the info. I agree. one day I'll upgrade :-)

Purely academic, but thought you may be vaguely interested.

10.3 - showed the Stave but no falling blocks --
10.2 (which I'll use now) shows everything (including notation).

Thanks again.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Ah ha: that 10.3 error also sounds like a bug we had found and fixed in 10.4 in old ATI hardware that reports it can do one thing but actually does another. In that case, there was a simple workaround to avoid the broken feature. (Unfortunately, for the blank sheet music bug, we don't have any simpler features to fall back on. Sorry again for the inconvenience!)
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