Get EAX sound effects working in Vista
The pain…
If you’ve invested your hard earned cash on a Creative X-FI sound card and a copy of Vista, you may be feeling a bit underwhelmed right now. Some of your games may be sounding a bit flat and lifeless and you’ll have no doubt felt that sinking feeling when you edit the sound settings in your new game only to find that you can’t enable some of the fancy options. There is a good reason for this and you probably will have been told at great length about it by one of the many passengers on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon.
The Science…
If you’re an experienced PC gamer you’ll no doubt be aware of DirectX and the various functions that make up the DirectX standard, such as DirectDraw, Direct3d and DirectSound and DirectSound3D. You will probably be aware of the hype surrounding Direct3d already, given that it has now reached version 10, but that’s a story for another day. DirectSound is what we are interested in here and it is sadly missing in Vista. XP and DirectX9 featured a “Hardware Abstraction Layer” which was a piece of software that allowed Windows to talk directly to a soundcard such as the X-FI to provide hardware mixing and 3d effects for your games. Without this layer any sound you hear will be mixed using software, rendering much of your shiny new soundcard useless.
The Relief…
Fortunately, directsound was already starting to disappear over time in favour of “OpenAL”, which was originally developed to allow Windows games to be ported to other formats such as Linux, OSX and even the PS3 and Xbox 360. To the listener any difference between the two formats is extremely difficult to detect so you’re not going to miss anything on a lot of newer games like Battlefield 2, Battlefield 2142, Call of Juarez, S.T.A.L.K.E.R, Quake 4 etc, but it does leave us with a problem when trying to play games that use DirectSound. Games like Half Life 2, Far Cry, Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R. will not let you enable hardware mixing and will therefore sound a bit empty.
Thankfully Creative Labs have responded to the cries of despair from gamers and launched a beta for their “Alchemy” project. What Alchemy does is convert the DirectSound files from your games into OpenAL “on the fly”, giving you back the ability to enable all the advanced features that you’ve been missing.
Installation is simple. All you have to do is click on the link below and download the small compressed folder. Open the folder and run the file inside. Follow the prompts to install it and once that’s done, go to your start menu and open it up. You’ll be greeted with two columns. The left column will hopefully have some of your installed games listed and the other will be empty. All you need to do is click the “transmute all” button with the arrow pointing right and you’re done….
Well, almost. In its current release it doesn’t support all games yet, but all is not lost. The application can scan for updates, with a view to increasing game support over time http://preview.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx
A version for the Creative Audigy sound cards has also been released, but unlike the X-FI version the Audigy version isn’t free. Creative ask for a nominal charge (about a fiver) to download it. This has caused some bad feeling on some forums but people forget that the Audigy is five years old now and has been replaced by the X-FI.
Tags: 3d effect, Battlefield, battlefield 2, difference, Direct, direct3d, DirectDraw, DirectSound, directx, directx9, download, fear, Game, gamer, Half-Life 2, Hardware, Microsoft, OpenAL, pc gamer, Science, sound settings, soundcard, Windows, windows games, windows vista, X-FI, Xbox, xbox 360
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Gamer tips « Zachgaulke’s Blog on 30 Nov 2008 at 3:19 pm #
[...] you’ve invested your hard earned cash on a Creative X-FI sound card and a copy of Vista, you may be feeling a bit underwhelmed right now. Some of your games may be [...]