Hello all! This is my first time posting here, please don't obliterate me.

I was playing Half-Life the other day on my Windows 98 box (specs below) and happened to see that Half-Life supports creative EAX. Now, I've never used EAX acceleration before, and perhaps it's supposed to sound like this. But moderately loud sounds, and sometimes even just normal sounds that have been reverbed, sounded excessive and even clipped a little bit. For example, the door opening animation in c1a0 was just a clippy, distorted mess.

Is there a way to fix this? I used the drivers for the SoundBlaster Live! that are in the vintage driver library, and I would like to avoid having to remove and reinstall drivers. I'll see if I can perhaps get a recording of exactly how bad it sounds, because it does not sound right in the slightest.

Specs:
Motherboard from a Gateway Select
AMD Athlon 750 MHz in a Slot A card
384 MB RAM
RTL8139 network card
Conexant HCF modem
3dfx Voodoo 3 3000
SoundBlaster Live!
A DVD drive, branded Mitsumi
1 floppy drive, also branded Mitsumi (3.5")
20 GB WD hard drive, and a 40 GB secondary Maxtor drive
A 200W power supply, also from a Gateway Select.

I skipped over a few items I thought to be inconsequential (USB 2.0 card, USB mouse, parallel ZIP drive, things like that). Any ideas on what the problem is? Does EAX always sound this bad?