I would just stick to Windows XP here, considering the specs and that you want to play pre-Vista games anyway. For me OpenAL/Creative Alchemy never worked that well any time I tried it.

You can try using DSOAL. It is an open source interface for DirectSound/DS3D games to OpenAL Soft.
https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/1363-dsoal/

If the game is natively OpenAL, then you can get OpenAL Soft and use it directly.

If you want to look for hardware, there was an Audigy 2 PCMCIA with DSP processed EAX 4.0. I used to run one. I'm less enamored with EAX than I once was though so I wouldn't say it's worth the effort to get one. They were also problematic on some notebooks because Cardbus chips vary in quality. Just like the fun with hardware audio processing glitches on some PCI chipsets.

Thanks for the info - it sounds like it might not be worth bothering with. I recall EAX not working that great at times even back in old Windows XP days & I guess the marginal improvement of sound won't be worth the hassle.

red_avatar wrote on 2024-02-22, 10:29:

Thanks for the info - it sounds like it might not be worth bothering with. I recall EAX not working that great at times even back in old Windows XP days & I guess the marginal improvement of sound won't be worth the hassle.

Yeah. I would go with the software options.

It's possible the XP sound drivers for your notebook could have 3D support. Some of them used Sensaura libraries. This might require older drivers though because I think when Creative acquired Sensaura they stopped licensing it.