Try setting your location to "United States of America" in the bottom right corner of the page.

But yeah, that website is very flaky. Sometimes, the drivers show up, other times, it's just the manuals. Might depend on which browser and/or ad blocker is being used.

Still doesn't work. It used to work just fine with the same browser setup.

EDIT: Can anyone access this website? http://archives.oldskool.org/pub/drivers/Crea … eative/drivers/ (EDIT: Alright, this is working now.)

I had the same isse a couple of weeks ago, but changed localisation and then I got the files up. Anyways, the files themselves are hosted on another server/domain so might still be available if anyone have the direct links.

Found a trick. Go to https://support.creative.com as usual and pick your device. If it doesn't list any drivers, in a separate tab open https://support.creative.com/downloads/ and it should list them for the device you had picked in the first tab.

Here is a list of a few additional driver repositories I've managed to find so far, but there's surely more:

http://mpolibbs.steptail.com/hardware/SOUND/CLABS/
http://files.mpoli.fi/hardware/SOUND/CLABS/
https://dos.retropc.se/sound/c_labs/00_index.htm
https://ftp.chasnah.com/mirrors/files.mpoli.f … re/SOUND/CLABS/

Noticed three other tricks:

1. The Creative Japanese website have them all still listed
2. Full list of all downloads available (in your localization, I choose USA) should be here in chronological order: https://support.creative.com/downloads/search … ename=&nPage=95
3. EOL files are available on https://files.creative.com/manualdn/Drivers/O … OAD_ID/FILENAME

vetz wrote on 2024-11-17, 23:11:

1. The Creative Japanese website have them all still listed

Same for the Chinese website: https://cn.creative.com/support/downloads/

It tells you the product has been way beyond its service period but still offers you to search for drivers and applications for the product you selected.

In the selection menus, I don't see any pre-Live models on the chinese website, and no pre-SB16 on the japanese.

I tried SB16, AWE32, etc. on the jap site, but it didn't offer anything for download.

Creative's websites always were shitty, like their drivers and product policy - I remember searching for drivers for a Sound Blaster PCI128 over 20 years ago. First you had to find out if the driver is really for the card and then if it is the latest...then I realized that it doesn't work for all the ones I have...so next I realized there were different chips on sound cards with the same name.

...and for many years it's getting harder and harder to navigate through this jungle.

kind regards
soggi

Looking more closely at the website I think all downloads up untill 2004ish could be easily ripped from the webside. After 2004-2005 they started with a hex code in the download directory path making it very hard to get the actual file without using captcha (I did find some other third party websites had the code for downloads from 2006 to 2016 and Wayback on Archive have some of them as well).

Product IDs and Download IDs have also remained the same since its inception.

I think I could modify one of my Python scripts to grab most of the content including file descriptions and put everything into one nice Excel sheet/database which could then again be turned into a website and/or uploaded to archive.org.

vetz wrote on 2024-11-18, 08:56:

Looking more closely at the website I think all downloads up untill 2004ish could be easily ripped from the webside.

From a retro gaming standpoint, those would likely be the most valuable drivers.

It would be great to have them backed up somewhere more reliable than Creative's flaky website.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-11-18, 09:21:

vetz wrote on 2024-11-18, 08:56:

Looking more closely at the website I think all downloads up untill 2004ish could be easily ripped from the webside.

From a retro gaming standpoint, those would likely be the most valuable drivers.

It would be great to have them backed up somewhere more reliable than Creative's flaky website.

I'd try to back up as much as possible if I go ahead here.

I'm thinking a dedicated webpage would be needed to make the files accessible with the HTML being server rendered. If it's hidden inside a huge zip file on archive.org it becomes cumbersome to search/browse. Netscape 2.02 minimum requirement for the webpage? I guess alot of people would love to have it all accessible directly on their old computers.

soggi wrote on 2024-11-18, 01:39:

Creative's websites always were shitty, like their drivers and product policy - I remember searching for drivers for a Sound Bla […]
Show full quote

Creative's websites always were shitty, like their drivers and product policy - I remember searching for drivers for a Sound Blaster PCI128 over 20 years ago. First you had to find out if the driver is really for the card and then if it is the latest...then I realized that it doesn't work for all the ones I have...so next I realized there were different chips on sound cards with the same name.

...and for many years it's getting harder and harder to navigate through this jungle.

kind regards
soggi

This is true, I discovered this late in the 90s, and as a result have made the effort never to directly put money in their pocket from purchase of new Creative products, because of their continuous lack of care toward their enthusiast base.

God bless the community for its preservation work that the owning companies themselves ignore.

@vetz:

I would love to have a Creative latest driver's page on my website, but I don't have the time to crawl it up and down and there are still (many) other things in the pipeline. If I had a package of all the latest drivers here in front of me, maybe I could effort it.

@BitWrangler:

I also never bought a new Creative product from a store, but the website wasn't the reason - I bought very few (PC) hardware brand new myself, think I can count it on my fingers (OK, I bought a dozen HDDs and some RAM new). Many HW manufacturers have/had costumer unfriendly websites, but Creative always was king concerning that.

kind regards
soggi

soggi wrote on 2024-11-19, 07:11:

@vetz:

I would love to have a Creative latest driver's page on my website, but I don't have the time to crawl it up and down and there are still (many) other things in the pipeline. If I had a package of all the latest drivers here in front of me, maybe I could effort it.

I spent last evening going through it even more. I have a plan of attacking it now. It's just that you have to use different approaches to get the full product list and downloads. The current website for instance have all the files, but many product pages have been removed which you need to grab from archive.org. You definitely need a custom database structure to recreate it all which will be the next step. I've already sorted hosting.

Yeah - go for it!

The only thing I have on my website (up with next update some day) is the latest BIOS for the Creative 3D Blaster Banshee, the drivers laying somewhere around... The rest was always a big jungle for me, as said above.

kind regards
soggi

soggi wrote on 2024-11-19, 07:11:

@BitWrangler: […]
Show full quote

@BitWrangler:

I also never bought a new Creative product from a store, but the website wasn't the reason - I bought very few (PC) hardware brand new myself, think I can count it on my fingers (OK, I bought a dozen HDDs and some RAM new). Many HW manufacturers have/had costumer unfriendly websites, but Creative always was king concerning that.

kind regards
soggi

Yeah, there's a lot of crappy support sites, what tipped me over the edge in vowing never to give them money though was that at one time they were very aggressive about preventing re-hosting of their driver files, and used various bully tactics to get them taken down. Not that I am a profligate spender but over the decades the big names in hardware have probably had a thousand bucks each off me, even PCChips and Cyrix had a couple of hundred, but not a cent for Creative.

So an update on the project to scrape all files and manuals from Creative's website for almost 30 years.

I've index'ed 951 files with download id, filename, file size, release date, title and descriptions. I've also index'ed Creative complete product list up untill 2008 with the categories, sub-categories and product IDs. For products released from 2008 to 2024 I have found a way through an old AJAX service still up which gives all the products, including the hidden ones on their current webpage.

Next up is mapping the files to each product and type of category they belong to (driver, firmware, application, etc) and also identifying which OS they belong to. This is important to construct the URL for the actual file on files.creative.com. The real download URL is hidden behind a reCaptcha on their website.

After that I'm gonna start indexing the manuals (which is a separate method on Creative).

I've also found alot of files.creative.com URLs on Archive.org and Google. In the end I don't expect that many reCaptchas that need to be solved to download everything.

vetz wrote on 2024-12-08, 22:29:

So an update on the project to scrape all files and manuals from Creative's website for almost 30 years. […]
Show full quote

So an update on the project to scrape all files and manuals from Creative's website for almost 30 years.

I've index'ed 951 files with download id, filename, file size, release date, title and descriptions. I've also index'ed Creative complete product list up untill 2008 with the categories, sub-categories and product IDs. For products released from 2008 to 2024 I have found a way through an old AJAX service still up which gives all the products, including the hidden ones on their current webpage.

Next up is mapping the files to each product and type of category they belong to (driver, firmware, application, etc) and also identifying which OS they belong to. This is important to construct the URL for the actual file on files.creative.com. The real download URL is hidden behind a reCaptcha on their website.

After that I'm gonna start indexing the manuals (which is a separate method on Creative).

I've also found alot of files.creative.com URLs on Archive.org and Google. In the end I don't expect that many reCaptchas that need to be solved to download everything.

That is cool, and awesome. Where will they be uploaded to ? vogonsdrivers , or some where else ? 😀