Windows XP x64 is actually Windows Server 2003 at its core and has not much in common with Windows XP x86, apart from the same GUI. The game(s) may simply not detect that they are running on an EAX-capable Windows XP (which - to some extent - is correct).

derSammler wrote on 2020-02-26, 20:17:

Windows XP x64 is actually Windows Server 2003 at its core and has not much in common with Windows XP x86, apart from the same GUI. The game(s) may simply not detect that they are running on an EAX-capable Windows XP (which - to some extent - is correct).

Yeah, I heard that XP x64 has a newer kernel than x86 XP. Still... would that really be enough to make games think there isn't EAX-capable hardware when there is?

I don't remember having this problem back when I was running XP x64 when it was current.

I would have probably had a Sound Blaster Audigy of some sort back then though.

Have you tried setting the games to run in compatibility mode?

cyclone3d wrote on 2020-02-26, 22:57:

I don't remember having this problem back when I was running XP x64 when it was current.

I would have probably had a Sound Blaster Audigy of some sort back then though.

Have you tried setting the games to run in compatibility mode?

I've never thought of doing that before under XP with an XP game, but I attempted it, and nothing:

Also, the longer I play Halo CE, the more buggy I find the game to be than I ever remembered it to be (then again, I only really remember playing it for real as a child, and the rest of the times it was the updated MCC edition on the Xbox One). And I patched it with the latest official patch - 1.0.10. I've limited the game to using one CPU thread to help, because I know older XP games look at a 4-core, 8-threaded CPU and not know how to best handle all of the resources it's give, but that only does so much.

I guess I could reinstall the sound card drivers, but I seriously doubt that would solve the issue. Reinstalling the game might help, but even if it did solve the problem, a) we wouldn't know what exactly caused it to begin with, and b) that would still leave F.E.A.R.'s identical issue in question.

Again, I'm confused.

https://danielkawakami.blogspot.com/2017/01/s … ack-62.html?m=1

There is no DirectSound hardware acceleration on Windows XP 64-bit (x64) with 4GB RAM or more […]
Show full quote

There is no DirectSound hardware acceleration on Windows XP 64-bit (x64) with 4GB RAM or more

The Audigy driver does not support 64-bit addressing, disabling the DirectSound hardware acceleration and causing multichannel sound to be played only in the stereo channels (front left/right).

Workarounds:

- install the 32-bit (x86) version of Windows XP.
- limit to less than 4GB the amount of RAM available to Windows.
- enable the "Memory Hole" setting in the BIOS Setup, if your motherboard supports it.
- install and use Creative ALchemy to convert the DirectSound API calls into OpenAL, which is not affected by this issue.

I think that sums it up. I remember reading this at some point. So give those workarounds a try. Alchemy on XP! Heh.

I wonder if DSOAL works on XP x64.....

Have you tried modifying config.txt?
https://opencarnage.net/index.php?/topic/7383 … dated-05092019/

You can also try running the game with Dependency Walker to see if you are missing any files.

You can also try the EAX wrappers like Alchemy, DSOAL, indirectsound etc.
https://forums.ubisoft.com/showthread.php/225 … P-64-Bit-Forums

You can quickly test limiting the memory using msconfig

You can run through all the various driver versions, according to the below thread the modified driver worked to enable EAX on XP 64bit. Don't know if you can track that one down. If not them possibly a driver version later than the one you have may have fixed the issue:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080625113006/ht … php?t27037.html
https://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthrea … 369#post5299369

DosFreak wrote on 2020-02-27, 02:27:

Have you tried modifying config.txt? https://opencarnage.net/index.php?/topic/7383 … dated-05092019/ […]
Show full quote

Have you tried modifying config.txt?
https://opencarnage.net/index.php?/topic/7383 … dated-05092019/

You can also try running the game with Dependency Walker to see if you are missing any files.

You can also try the EAX wrappers like Alchemy, DSOAL, indirectsound etc.
https://forums.ubisoft.com/showthread.php/225 … P-64-Bit-Forums

You can quickly test limiting the memory using msconfig

You can run through all the various driver versions, according to the below thread the modified driver worked to enable EAX on XP 64bit. Don't know if you can track that one down. If not them possibly a driver version later than the one you have may have fixed the issue:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080625113006/ht … php?t27037.html
https://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthrea … 369#post5299369

swaaye wrote on 2020-02-27, 02:17:

https://danielkawakami.blogspot.com/2017/01/s … ack-62.html?m=1 […]
Show full quote

https://danielkawakami.blogspot.com/2017/01/s … ack-62.html?m=1

There is no DirectSound hardware acceleration on Windows XP 64-bit (x64) with 4GB RAM or more […]
Show full quote

There is no DirectSound hardware acceleration on Windows XP 64-bit (x64) with 4GB RAM or more

The Audigy driver does not support 64-bit addressing, disabling the DirectSound hardware acceleration and causing multichannel sound to be played only in the stereo channels (front left/right).

Workarounds:

- install the 32-bit (x86) version of Windows XP.
- limit to less than 4GB the amount of RAM available to Windows.
- enable the "Memory Hole" setting in the BIOS Setup, if your motherboard supports it.
- install and use Creative ALchemy to convert the DirectSound API calls into OpenAL, which is not affected by this issue.

I think that sums it up. I remember reading this at some point. So give those workarounds a try. Alchemy on XP! Heh.

I wonder if DSOAL works on XP x64.....

Jesus, that's a lot of info to take in. Thank you guys so much! I think I'll be able to find a solution in all of that, especially that forum post page, but you are going to have to give me some time. I'll spend a good few hours on this on the weekend.

So... I found the solution.

So, I first I went to see if my BIOS supported that "Memory Hole" feature, @swaaye, and in fact it did and was already enabled. Toggling it did nothing.

Then I added "support" for my GPU and sound card into the config.txt for Halo, as per the forum post's suggestion, @DosFreak. That... did nothing. It allowed for the game to properly name the GPU at least, but nothing else really.

Then I finished my first Legendary playthrough of the game. 😁

Then I tried dumping DSOAL's DLLs into the root directory of the game. Nothing. In fact, it essentially disabled sound for the game.

Then I tried installing different releases of Creative Alchemy. Nothing, as the installer complained it wanted Vista+.

Finally, I limited the memory XP could use to 4GB, which it then automatically so graciously rounded-down to 3.5GB, as that is the relative limit for the amount of system RAM 32-bit versions of Windows can handle.

And, that did the job surprisingly. No need to mess with anything else. Although, it's kinda sad that's what it takes for EAX to work. I would'a thought at this point, maybe someone came up with a patch to the Creative drivers to solve this issue at this point.

@Cyclone3D, when you were running XP x64 "when it was current," how much RAM did you have in your machine? My guess is you had 4GB or less, no?

Yeah, I probably only had 4GB. That was a really long time ago.

It would be nice if we could track down the modified drivers that allow EAX with >4GB of memory.

Until then instead of limiting the memory would EAX still work if a ram drive was used instead?
Then mabye could enable or disable as needed without a reboot.
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk

Well, this explains why my Titanium Fatal1ty Champ (at the time) in my xp machine didn't want to work with eax on xp 64........

mastergamma12 wrote on 2020-03-01, 23:47:

Well, this explains why my Titanium Fatal1ty Champ (at the time) in my xp machine didn't want to work with eax on xp 64........

The More You Know TM

Reference for this behaviour
https://web.archive.org/web/20091022130117/ht … y/ms790402.aspx

Also interesting to note Windows 2000 64-bit lacks hardware acceleration, while Windows Server 2003 has it.
EDIT: docs may be wrong too though

IMO ud be better off to just install x86 xp having more then the 3 some odd gigs x86 will let u have is pretty much pointless unless u get into games from 2007 or 8 and beyond and those games would run better under windows 7 anyway.

i would say games from 2002-3 upto 2007ish are perfect for xp x86 games beyond 2008 go windows 7 x64.

mirh wrote on 2022-01-25, 21:24:

Reference for this behaviour
https://web.archive.org/web/20091022130117/ht … y/ms790402.aspx

Also interesting to note Windows 2000 64-bit lacks hardware acceleration, while Windows Server 2003 has it.

Not that surprising, Win2000 64bit is for Itanium only and lacks many other things as well IIRC

Ok, actually according to tidbits from 17 years ago.. This isn't even necessarily about the operating system per se, but just the drivers?
Because of course creative had to botch them.

As for dsoal, of course it was failing just like it wouldn't run on the 32-bit version either. You want dsoal-xp if any, for as much as currently unmaintained (confirmed to be working in the issues).

mirh wrote on 2024-06-24, 15:21:

Ok, actually according to tidbits from 17 years ago.. This isn't even necessarily about the operating system per se, but just the drivers?
Because of course creative had to botch them.

As for dsoal, of course it was failing just like it wouldn't run on the 32-bit version either. You want dsoal-xp if any, for as much as currently unmaintained (confirmed to be working in the issues).

... I think Creative had a lot of issues back then. Some of which only manifested when system memory became more available (>=4GB), and some of which also affected x64.

I remembered having issues with mic and some other stuffs with Audigy 4 on a Win7 x64 system with 4GB RAM and there was a suggested registry tweak back then. However, that only resolved the issue with 4GB RAM but not any higher as far as I could remember.

On the other hand, Creative had a critical design flaw back with SBLive!, which totally borked its hardware MIDI synths if you have more than 2GB of RAM. It doesn't matter whether you use Creative's official drivers, or kX.

X-Fi appeared to have corrected those hardware design flaws but driver software was no better. On a PAE-enabled WinXP its driver could BSOD at random or specific occasions, and sometimes the driver could outright fail and hang the system (on driver load, either during boot or during install) in a very strange manner -- when it hangs, even RESET button would stop working and I have to power cycle. Because of that I'm only using that sound card for Win7 for the time being...

PS: Is there a ready-to-use dsoal-xp build that I could experiment with WinXP? (EDIT: Pre-built binaries exist in the "release" folder... though I'll have to test it myself to see if it really works...)

I recently got my hands on an Audigy Rx and got the same problem. I installed latest Audigy Support Pack 8.1 by Daniel Kawakami and did the /MAXMEM=4096 trick, but hardware acceleration is still unavailable.

I can't tell what's different about my system. Any idea how to troubleshoot?