Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-02-09, 11:42:

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-02-09, 11:16:

Itll allow me to throw a Titanium HD in there and see if it works.

Titanium HD doesn't have WinXP drivers.

There is no official WinXP drivers but third party drivers do work for this card on XP.

SansPlomb95 wrote on 2025-03-09, 13:29:

There is no official WinXP drivers but third party drivers do work for this card on XP.

Source on this?

I don't have the card, I'm just curious how/if someone got it to work under WinXP with all EAX features.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-03-09, 13:57:

SansPlomb95 wrote on 2025-03-09, 13:29:

There is no official WinXP drivers but third party drivers do work for this card on XP.

Source on this?

I don't have the card, I'm just curious how/if someone got it to work under WinXP with all EAX features.

My very own experience, I forgot if it was with DanielK's driver or Antes533's ones but I got to make the TitaniumHD work fine with EAX 5.0 on my usual WindowsXP build
The card being nothing less than a maxed out Titanium HD card with the EMU20K2 chip probably made the process of turning the drivers retro-compatible quite easy .

SansPlomb95 wrote on 2025-03-09, 13:15:

For your bracket issue I ran into the same problem for an other Low Profile card and be aware that you can find some alternatives from your favorite Chinese retailer, they won't fit perfectly but they'll still do the job.

Oh! I thought about something like that but didn't find it, so I expected it didn't exist. I'll search harder once i test if the one I already have fits.

SansPlomb95 wrote on 2025-03-09, 16:32:

My very own experience, I forgot if it was with DanielK's driver or Antes533's ones but I got to make the TitaniumHD work fine with EAX 5.0 on my usual WindowsXP build
The card being nothing less than a maxed out Titanium HD card with the EMU20K2 chip probably made the process of turning the drivers retro-compatible quite easy .

I discovered Antes533's drivers a few days ago and tried them with my X-Fi, just to find they aren't compatible with anything older than Windows 7.

Apparently these Version 5 drivers do support XP and Titanium HD PCIe

https://danielkawakami.blogspot.com/2020/08/s … rt-pack-50.html

IIRC its only the newer version that had to drop support due to Creative being meddling bastards.

Yes I recall not using the very last driver from him so this 2020 version is probably the one I used to make the Titanium HD work on XP 32

Hi, since I got the X-Fi Xtreme Gamer running on my XP build I had kind of mixed feelings. Sound effects and positioning were great, but there was also lot of clicking and popping. On Doom 3 I had to lower the volume or in some places reverb effects would saturate and generate distortions. On Unreal Tournament 99 and UT "oldunreal" there were a lot of sounds that played for a fraction of a second then silenced, and others suddenly losing "spacialization". Not having experienced these cards back in the day left me with a raw impression. But when I watched on YouTube recordings of people playing these games with these cards, I couldn't hear those artifacts, something wasn't right on my experience.

So after a lot of troubleshooting and reading about DanielK drivers creating some problems, yes DanielK X-Fi Support Pack 8.0 (Refresh 3) drivers which I installed from the beginning, seemed to be the source of all my problems. But installing other Creative drivers ended with the Audio Control Panel complaining about not detecting any supported sound card. I had to uninstall them with their setup, then do an additional uninstall using the great tool DriverSweeper 3.2 only available on Archive.org (now superseded by DDU but losing the needed Creative drivers uninstall capability). Then I could install the latest official drivers (SBXF_PCDRV_L11_2_30_0012.exe) and had an Audio Control Panel back (not as fancy as DanielK's). You can recover the fancy control panel, it's called Console Launcher (CSL_PCAPP_LB_2_61_09.exe) and also managed to install the SoundFont manager (SFBM_PCAPP_LB_3_21_02.exe).

mgtroyas wrote on 2025-03-17, 11:56:

So after a lot of troubleshooting and reading about DanielK drivers creating some problems, yes DanielK X-Fi Support Pack 8.0 (Refresh 3) drivers which I installed from the beginning, seemed to be the source of all my problems.

Interesting. I knew that there were some problems with OpenAL games in the previous versions of Daniel_K's drivers, but those only seemed to affect PCIe X-Fi cards, and the issue was supposedly resolved in his latest refresh.

Anyway, you can follow my guide for the optimal X-Fi setup under WinXP, but you will have to skip steps 2.1 and 3.1 since those drivers are for PCIe cards only. Everything else should be applicable to PCI cards as well. All the drivers and utilities that I use in that guide were taken from Creative's website.

Yes, now your guide is relevant for me after all, I'll spend some time later checking the versions, thank you very much as always.

Hi, fortunately after installing and tweaking hundreds of games, only a few don't work in this build, and one of them was Monster Truck Madness 2. No matter what I did during the last months (nGlide, cnc-ddraw, single core affinity, WinThrottle, using the Intel HD GPU instead of the ATI, different patches...), when I tried to enter a race the screen went black but with the music playing on the background. Long story short... the game for some reason freezes for exactly 30 seconds before entering ingame from the menu, if you wait the game continues without problem. I don't know if it's due to something specific to my build, but I'll left it here so anyone impacted can find it in the future.

Mainly the other games that don't work are Jane's USAF/IAF (but run on the integrated Intel HD), SpeedBusters (perhaps the same, I don't remember) and Superbike 2000/2001, so I'm surprised of the high level of compatibility of this build.

Having played around with the external idea for a bit and got .. well nowhere I decided a different approach was needed.

In comes this little thing, Its a External USB Soundcard with EAX 4.0 and drivers for XP through Win11.

Seems like this should work as itll be detected as a X-Fi sound card and will operate as such. (Im curious if Win11 will allow EAX support, it apparently works out of the box with 10/11 no drivers needed)

Hi, I was also thinking about trying this card. I read the USB connection instead of PCIe could generate some glitches but I'd love to see if the drivers support Windows XP and test it. On modern Windows you'll probably just need to use Alchemy as with all the other X-Fi models. Also perhaps Windows 11 is no longer officially supported, Windows 10 would be a better choice then.

Just for reference, I wasn't able to set the 640x400 70Hz custom resolution, which makes DOSBox run many games smoothly fullscreen, work on my new SyncMaster CRT but after some tinkering we found the way, the problem was modes under 31kHz are not supported on many monitors.

mgtroyas wrote on 2025-04-12, 19:43:

Hi, I was also thinking about trying this card. I read the USB connection instead of PCIe could generate some glitches but I'd love to see if the drivers support Windows XP and test it. On modern Windows you'll probably just need to use Alchemy as with all the other X-Fi models. Also perhaps Windows 11 is no longer officially supported, Windows 10 would be a better choice then.

It comes with XP drivers through to Windows 7 on the driver disc, 8 you need to download them from creative, 10 and 11 will run it out of the box with no drivers required not sure how that works with EAX but Ill find out when it arrives. The Daniel K drivers support this device too so thats always a backup option.

Ive used USB sound cards before and the only glitches I found were windows being a bit picky about detecting it but a quick restart would always solve that.

Ill let you know how it goes !

mgtroyas wrote on 2025-04-12, 19:48:

Just for reference, I wasn't able to set the 640x400 70Hz custom resolution, which makes DOSBox run many games smoothly fullscreen, work on my new SyncMaster CRT but after some tinkering we found the way, the problem was modes under 31kHz are not supported on many monitors.

Yeah, I have a old 14" NEC CRT that can do the 31Khz modes I can throw at it for the DOS side of stuff, might even see if I can rig/setup a DOS gaming side on a bootable CF card or a second SSD I can swap to when I want to run older DOS games that need sub SVGA modes. (Need to dig into the Vostro and see exactly what options are open for me to abuse)

The AC97 on the motherboard can do DOS sound blaster support since the USB card wont function under DOS, it wont be amazing but itll be good enough for older DOS games .. might even see if the machine has a PC speaker in it or if it can hook one up if it doesn't. Im not against using DOSbox for the late DOS games but I prefer true DOS with a CRT for the older games, there is just something nice about the scan lines and how they make the games look .. right.

Some crunchy PC speaker DOS also sounds fun !

Don't forget to test projects SBEMU, VSBHDA and VSBHDASF, I've had very good experience on the Intel HD audio of the HP 8300 SFF. They have a bootable Freedos image ready to use with Ventoy on a USB pendrive.

I also have a Tatung 14" CRT, on my parents house still connected to the 286 I grew with. With thick black borders the real image size is probably 13"but 640x480 games on that screen looked really high-res.

Regarding DOSBox vs real DOS I've been comparing both on many games and if in windows you set the right custom mode, the image will be identical with scan lines and all.

mgtroyas wrote on 2025-04-19, 11:42:

Don't forget to test projects SBEMU, VSBHDA and VSBHDASF, I've had very good experience on the Intel HD audio of the HP 8300 SFF. They have a bootable Freedos image ready to use with Ventoy on a USB pendrive.

I also have a Tatung 14" CRT, on my parents house still connected to the 286 I grew with. With thick black borders the real image size is probably 13"but 640x480 games on that screen looked really high-res.

Regarding DOSBox vs real DOS I've been comparing both on many games and if in windows you set the right custom mode, the image will be identical with scan lines and all.

Yeah DOSBox can handle most stuff .. till you get to the really old XT/286 era games that will at times try to use screen modes that DOSBox doesnt like, besides I honestly enjoy tooling around with DOS and trying to get it as lean as I can on base memory use !

Ill certainly give the projects you mentioned a try

I was stuck with 512Kb of RAM on my 286 until we got a new PC on Windows 95 times so I was unfortunately out of all these years of UMB/XMS/EMS tinkering...

Please give some examples of these games with unusual resolutions, I'd like to see what can be done.