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EAX in DOOM 3

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First post, by vorob

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So i've got a laptop with a PCMCIA slot. I bought Creative Labs PCMCIA Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook and it works perfectly, i've got working EAX in Half-Life 1, Thief 1-2, Requiem: Avenging Angel. I've installed DOOM 3 with the latest 1.31 patch, enabled EAX and nothing happened. No change in sound. I was experimenting with some config lines, no luck.

Does it work? Maybe I need 1.30 patch and 1.31 broke EAX?

This card supports EAX 4.0 which one is used in DOOM:

Gamers will love the hardware accelerated EAX 4.0 ADVANCED HD that not only brings games to life, but delivers maximum performance! Musicians will also enjoy true 24-bit recording and low latency ASIO support for the ultimate audio recording platform.

Reply 3 of 13, by God Of Gaming

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It's normally installed by the Creative drivers, tho idk if the audigy 2 zs notebook installs it, I have one of these as well but haven't gotten around to using it yet. The X-Fi card on my main PC installs OpenAL with the drivers and EAX in Doom 3 works fine. If you have it installed tho, and still not working in-game, then idk why.

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 5 of 13, by swaaye

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Are you using the latest drivers? The older Audigy drivers will not work right with Doom3. Creative put a lot of work into their driver just for Doom3. So you want a driver from 2005 or later.

Be sure the card is in advanced mode too. The card is very sensitive to any quirks with the notebook's cardbus bridge chip so it has a compatibility mode that disables accelerated features.

http://en.thethirdmedia.com/article/200509/sh … w3322c22p4.html

Note that even if you get it working you are probably going to have the visual twitch bug that happens with Doom3 EAX.

Reply 6 of 13, by God Of Gaming

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🤣 its EAX that causes that visual twitch? I always thought its just some incompatibility with modern graphics cards... Guess thats another reason to use the dhewm3 source port that has openal soft and EFX

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 9 of 13, by Sylarito

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kolderman wrote:

I think xfi is right for doom3.

DOOM 3 supports EAX 4.0 which the Audigy series have full support for. XFi cards are good for games like Bioshock, Prey and Quake 4 that support EAX 5.0.

Reply 10 of 13, by kolderman

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Sylarito wrote:
kolderman wrote:

I think xfi is right for doom3.

DOOM 3 supports EAX 4.0 which the Audigy series have full support for. XFi cards are good for games like Bioshock, Prey and Quake 4 that support EAX 5.0.

Maybe but you won't be worrying about driver incompatibility with the X-Fi. It's simply the best WinXP sound card, Audigy rules for Win98.

Reply 12 of 13, by God Of Gaming

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For headphone users, the CMSS-3D in X-Fi is improved quite a lot over the one in the 2 ZS. And it's not just boring virtual surround tech, in supported ds3d/oal games CMSS-3D can do 3d binaural hrtf. With that said, Doom 3 probably sounds best with the dhewm3 source port which uses openal soft and EFX. For one thing, the EAX in Doom 3 was not coded properly, Carmack didn't even intend to have that tech in the engine, but Creative forced him to implement it, so he did a bit of a half-assed job. The EFX in dhewm3 is coded-in properly so it sounds better. And you don't need a sound card for it. Also dhewm3 has proper widescreen support without stretchign the HUD like regular doom 3 does. I'd say dhewm3 is probably the definitive way to experience doom 3, well, as long as you don't want to use sikkmod

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project