The now smoke-free Kenn Hoekstra (congrats, welcome to the club) updated his .plan with word that the Soldier of Fortune demo has been downloaded enough to put it in the big leagues with the Quake III Arena demo, as well as details on a major sound problem people have been experiencing. Here's the scoop:

I'm continuing to lead the tech support charge on our message boards and we seem to have most problems nailed down. The biggest one that I'm aware of is the fact that the demo hangs on a blue/gray screen for users who have a YAMAHA DX-SG sound card or similar YAMAHA model. The problem is with the demo's auto-detect features looking for A3D support. These YAMAHA cards have limited A3D support (1.0) and Soldier's auto-detect code is looking for 2.0 or 3.0. This is what's causing the hang. Adding "+set snd_dll defsnd.dll" to your command line shortcut has fixed the problem for some users, but most YAMAHA owners are pretty much out of luck at this point. Jake "The Gent" Simpson is talking to his sources now to see about fixing the problem. As soon as we know something, you'll know something. According to Rick, future Soldier of Fortune releases are going to start up with default sound to avoid these sound support issues. Amen to that... =)

The sad thing? I have one of those DX-SG cards in my machine and it works. Probably because the drivers are the 1998 factory installed variety... *shrugs*