UCyborg wrote on 2025-04-19, 09:57:

Well, who still buys sound cards? 😜

The AE family of cards turned out to be quite successful, despite the inferiority of the Recon3D chip from Creative itself. When the Titanium HD stops working under Windows 11, I will most likely switch to it.
If they weren't greedy and introduced Super X-Fi presets for AE card (which are made from ear photos), I'd switch right now

UCyborg wrote on 2025-04-19, 09:57:

Creative's a strange company to say at least...

Their marketing is strange.
They themselves don't know what to sell to whom.
An attempt to sell the Music Creation mode in X-Fi instead of E-MU cards...
Or how they calculated the demand, that Audigy chips are still installed on RX.
How much Recon3D they ordered, that this chip is already used on the third generation of products (though in AE they also added a bridge from PCI-e to PCI-e)

Does anyone still have the EAX 1.0 SDK?
It was saved in Web Archive (eax10.zip) but downloading stops at 42%. Retrying does not help.

# wget https://web.archive.org/web/20000817091704/ht … files/eax10.zip --2025-04-22 07:42:34-- https://web.archive.org/web/2000 […]
Show full quote

# wget https://web.archive.org/web/20000817091704/ht … files/eax10.zip
--2025-04-22 07:42:34-- https://web.archive.org/web/20000817091704/ht … files/eax10.zip
Resolving web.archive.org (web.archive.org)... 207.241.237.3
Connecting to web.archive.org (web.archive.org)|207.241.237.3|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2468125 (2.4M) [application/zip]
Saving to: ‘eax10.zip.4’

eax10.zip.4 42%[=======================> ] 1024K 655KB/s in 1.6s

2025-04-22 07:42:37 (655 KB/s) - Connection closed at byte 1048341. Retrying.

Here is some metadata from corrupted archive:
- Eax1.0sdk\
- Eax1.0sdk\docs\EAX.PDF (1 616 058 bytes, dated 1998-08-31)
- Eax1.0sdk\exe\eaxtest.exe (129 024 bytes, dated 1998-06-17)
- Eax1.0sdk\exe\MixClass.exe (49 152 bytes, dated 1999-04-30)

ott wrote on 2025-04-22, 05:57:

Does anyone still have the EAX 1.0 SDK?

Here's an excerpt from the EAX 2.0 SDK, but I don't know where to get the whole thing see below. IIRC, all development tools for EAX 1.0 and EAX 2.0 were released for free by Creative back in the day. Try sending an email to their support, and maybe someone can dig that up. By the way, I found this bit from the aforementioned excerpt particularly interesting:

EAX 2.0 SDK excerpt wrote:

Distance Effects […]
Show full quote

Distance Effects

To help provide a better perception of listener-to-sound-source distance, EAX 2.0 provides several different modes of automatic distance-effects management. They manage attenuation and filtering effects that change according to the distance between the listener and a sound source. The distance effects include:

• A method of simulating the natural statistical behavior of reverberation in enclosed spaces
• A reverberation rolloff factor that allows you to customize or modify the statistical reverberation model
• An adjustable air absorption model that filters out high frequencies with increasing distance. (You can use this to simulate moisture in the air such as high humidity or fog.)

Occlusion and Obstruction Effects

EAX 2.0 introduces occlusion and obstruction properties that provide aural cues about objects and walls that come between sound sources and the listener.

Occlusion occurs when a wall that separates two environments comes between source and listener. There’s no open-air sound path for sound to go from source to listener, so the sound source is completely muffled because it’s transmitted through the wall. EAX occlusion properties provide parameters that adjust wall transmission characteristics to simulate different wall materials and thickness. You can, for example, use occlusion properties to make a voice or noise sound very realistically as if it were coming from behind a door or from outside the listener’s house.

Obstruction occurs when source and listener are in the same room but there’s an object directly between them. There’s no direct sound path from source to listener, but the reverberation comes to the listener unaffected. The result is altered direct-path sound with unaltered reverberation. EAX obstruction properties can simulate sound diffraction around the obstacle or sound transmission through the obstacle, which provide rich aural cues about the nature of the obstruction. You can, for example, use obstruction properties to make a voice sound as if it were coming through a thin curtain or from behind a large pillar.

Source Directivity

DirectSound already offers control of source directivity, where a sound source is stronger in one direction than in all others—like a trumpet, for example, that’s strongest in the direction of the bell and attenuated to the sides and behind the bell. DirectSound sets the directivity across all frequencies equally, which usually not the case in the real world.

EAX makes source directivity sound much more natural by allowing you to make sound sources more directive at high frequencies than at low frequencies. This makes the sound of directional sources such as a voice, a loudspeaker, or a horn sound much more realistic as the listener moves around the source—or as the source rotates or flies by the listener.

I wonder if any EAX 2.0 game actually included that fog-based filtering that they mention here.

EDIT - here's the archived page where Creative offered the SDK for download, but the links are dead now.

EDIT2 - I found a more recent version of the page. The EAX 2.0 SDK can be downloaded from here.

shevalier wrote on 2025-04-19, 11:31:

The AE family of cards turned out to be quite successful, despite the inferiority of the Recon3D chip from Creative itself. When the Titanium HD stops working under Windows 11, I will most likely switch to it.
If they weren't greedy and introduced Super X-Fi presets for AE card (which are made from ear photos), I'd switch right now

Hm, interesting. I was more up to date on computer hardware over 15 years ago, though I don't recall sound cards coming up often, if at all. Well, if I knew back then what I know now, I'd consider it, at least for EAX.

shevalier wrote on 2025-04-19, 11:31:

Their marketing is strange. They themselves don't know what to sell to whom. An attempt to sell the Music Creation mode in X-Fi […]
Show full quote

Their marketing is strange.
They themselves don't know what to sell to whom.
An attempt to sell the Music Creation mode in X-Fi instead of E-MU cards...
Or how they calculated the demand, that Audigy chips are still installed on RX.
How much Recon3D they ordered, that this chip is already used on the third generation of products (though in AE they also added a bridge from PCI-e to PCI-e)

It's curious they have Audigy is available, but nothing X-Fi.

I messed around some more with the old new card, installing 32-bit XP got hardware DirectSound working right away.

Although I spent good amount of time with other XP quirks. For some odd reason, 32-bit NVIDIA driver supporting AHCI mode on my motherboard's nForce chipset just refused to cooperate. If I slipstreamed it to install files, got INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE (code 0x0000007B) BSOD before making it to Setup's welcome screen. Found some hackery that adds backported generic AHCI driver from Windows 8.1, this one worked. Updating to NVIDIA driver on already working OS got BSOD again on reboot. So I kept the generic driver.

Could go the easy route and set SATA (IDE) mode, but wanted to get AHCI going. Not all SATA ports on my motherboard work in IDE mode, which in my case means I lose the DVD drive.

It was also the first time I managed to install XP from the internal hard drive. Not as straightforward as with Win7 and newer. With one of newer OS, I installed from one partition to another in the past, in this case, I actually made it install from the partition with install files to the same partition.

Also experimented with hacked kernel increasing RAM limitation beyond 4 GB (PAE - Physical Address Extension), of course the drivers don't like it. Not sure if solely Creative drivers, but yeah, didn't get far with that, OS would crash soon after invoking sound acceleration. I was wrong about old 2006 drivers being used when installing from Daniel K.'s Audigy support pack, regardless of the OS, in my case, they get installed from "vista" folder (usually, you don't look for XP drivers in Vista folder!), where they're dated 2022. Must be rare seeing such recent timestamp on a driver that works on Windows XP.

Some sound related observations; in dxdiag's Music tab, default port acceleration must be disabled, otherwise, music in Drakan: Order of the Flame doesn't pay. First time playing The Suffering, I got sound with reverb, you usually get it constantly on newer OS with latest ALchemy + Host OpenAL, but normally, I think it's not supposed to be there. I've not found evidence that this game ever calls EAX. What's strange, why did this happen once on XP, but next time I played, it didn't happen again. Didn't have my normal saves at hand, so only played through the first level. Given the situation, I couldn't compare DirectSound acceleration levels in dxdiag if it makes any difference with reverb in this game. Going from pure logical reasoning, observing and not reading any documentation about acceleration levels, the logic seems to go along these lines: basic acceleration means normal non-3D sound buffers can be placed in hardware, standard acceleration adds 3D buffers in hardware while full acceleration adds extensions (EAX).

Sometime later when I booted into Win11, EAX refused to work in Half-Life. ALchemy was working according to logs, just no reverb. If I turned off EAX in menus, then I got baked-in reverb that comes with the game. Real EAX worked before on Win11!

Quirks on top of quirks it seems. 😀 Didn't get to try this one out, but I wonder if non-patched Interstate '76 would also break in on my XP install, it's a known issue with this game that playing menu click sound makes it hang (happens with enabled sound acceleration, though don't know if there are cases where it works with enabled sound HW acceleration regardless), known workarounds are corrupting related WAV sound file in the data file of the game so it doesn't play or hacking the .exe and explicitly forcing software buffers for menu sound.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-04-22, 06:41:

Here's an excerpt from the EAX 2.0 SDK, but I don't know where to get the whole thing see below.

Thanks for EAX 2.0 links!
I think the first version has historical significance, so I will continue searching.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-04-22, 10:13:

Sometime later when I booted into Win11, EAX refused to work in Half-Life.

Or maybe not that it wasn't working, they were just very quiet. Am I crazy, or are these legacy Sound Blasters just quieter on Vista+ systems? Because on XP, there's Surround Mixer application, in it, Wave mixer's volume is at 50% by default. According to my understanding of (analog) audio, it's best to set volumes to 100% in software then adjust actual volume on the receiving device. So naturally, I put that to 100% along with main volume control. But maybe on Vista+, it's permanently stuck at 50%?

I provide again a link to a very useful post about the RX and some settings that could be altered in order to make it sound better, especially concerning reverb and chorus effects : https://www-drive2-ru.translate.goog/b/464923 … &_x_tr_pto=wapp

I can also confirm that in Windows Xp x86 it sounds pretty loud. I have the main volume control in Rx's software at 67%.

ott wrote on 2025-04-22, 05:57:

Does anyone still have the EAX 1.0 SDK?

Finally! I found original EAX10SDK.zip inside another archive from foobar2000 OpenAL Output Project.
Thanks to albert1985g for sharing the EAX 1.0-2.0/OpenAL SDK files.

Trying out this unusual combination:

May be slightly better for converting surround output to headphones for newer games no longer using DirectSound3D.

Also found this, but haven't tried yet: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/ex … devices.318382/

Yeah, the old X-Fi MB3 was a paid product tied to a license, though I snagged license generator years ago that was linked on this forum before moderator purged it...

Other than that, I'm playing through Call of Duty 2. Places with reverb are few, though that's expected considering it mostly takes place outside. I'm going through the last set of British campaign missions and I remember hearing reverb only in a single bunker (in a British campaign)! Though going off the last save, I skipped few Russian missions, maybe there was a place or two there with reverb as well.

Call of Duty 2 was my first CoD, I spent hundreds of hours in that game when I was younger, using plain Miles Fast 2D Positional Audio setting.

I've been testing some things with Colin McRae: Dirt and I noticed that it's one of the few games which straight up shows EAX 5.0 support in its sound options:

Usually, you'd have to open the developer console or check readme.txt for this kind of info, but CMR: Dirt openly displays it inside the actual game. Just thought I'd share it here, since it's so uncommon.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-04-27, 20:40:

I've been testing some things with Colin McRae: Dirt and I noticed that it's one of the few games which straight up shows EAX 5.0 support in its sound options

Interesting. Probably the Race Driver: Grid also supports OpenAL EAX 5.0

ott wrote on 2025-04-29, 01:51:

Interesting. Probably the Race Driver: Grid also supports OpenAL EAX 5.0

It does, along with Dirt 2 and F1 2010. Codemasters probably used the same engine for all of those games.

But in each of the other titles, you need to look at the readme files to get that info. CMR: Dirt is the only one that displays it in-game.

I picked up a set of Logitech Z906 5.1's and am loving them in combination with my X-Fi Titanium. I've turned CMSS-3D off, which seems to be the accepted thing to do with a proper 5.1 system, and with EAX enabled via Alchemy I'm getting lovely surround on all games I've tried so far.

I'm not able to have the rear satellites positioned as close to me as I'd like them - this of course is the challenge with 5.1's - but otherwise I'm very happy with this setup.

badmojo wrote on 2025-05-01, 11:28:

I picked up a set of Logitech Z906 5.1's and am loving them in combination with my X-Fi Titanium. I've turned CMSS-3D off, which seems to be the accepted thing to do with a proper 5.1 system, and with EAX enabled via Alchemy I'm getting lovely surround on all games I've tried so far.

I'm not able to have the rear satellites positioned as close to me as I'd like them - this of course is the challenge with 5.1's - but otherwise I'm very happy with this setup.

Enjoy! Just a quick heads up, some games change the Windows speaker configuration to "Stereo" on first startup. In such cases, you need to go into the game, turn on EAX, and ensure that surround sound is enabled (if applicable). After that, exit the game, manually switch back the speaker configuration to 5.1 via the Creative Console Launcher, and finally start the game once again.

This issue isn't too common, but if you suddenly hear that your speakers have reverted back to stereo, that's probably why it happened.

I just finished playing a couple of rounds of Unreal Tournament 99 with the EAX 2.0 enhancements that Creative released way back in 2000. With headphones on, the position and reverb effects were pretty immersive, and I felt that the positional effects were on par with A3D 2.0. Using this mod that means I can't use my Logitech i-Feel mouse at the same time due to how both hook into the game's sound system, but honestly being able to play the game at ~70 FPS on my Pentium 4/GeForce 2 rig at 1024x768x32 on my nice CRT with really immersive audio is a treat and a reminder of why I keep this retro hardware around in the first place.

MadMac_5 wrote on 2025-05-10, 04:13:

I just finished playing a couple of rounds of Unreal Tournament 99 with the EAX 2.0 enhancements that Creative released way back in 2000. With headphones on, the position and reverb effects were pretty immersive, and I felt that the positional effects were on par with A3D 2.0.

I like that EAX 2.0 patch overall, but I think the devs may have gone slightly overboard with the reverb effect on certain maps. Though as you say, positional audio is greatly improved over the base game, which makes it easier to locate opponents by sound alone. That definitively makes the UT EAX 2.0 patch a worthwhile upgrade.

Also, the addition of occlusion effects is kinda neat. I particularly like how it muffles sounds when the player is underwater. Creative even made a video showcasing that.

These Audigy drivers remind me of old ATI drivers. Several days ago I was testing something on Win11, the OS just blue screened when I disabled sound card in Device Manager.

Yesterday, I was testing Interstate '76 with some newly found stability fixes for it on XP x64. I was using nGlide wrapper to be able to use its Glide renderer. The game was behaving oddly. Soon, it started happening the game would be laggy when there were projectiles on the screen. On mission 4, it crashed in d3d9.dll when shooting at another car.

Restarted the game and symptoms returned, but then at some point, audio died and game hung on inter-mission screen where you configure the car. Terminated its process and figured audio is dead system-wide.

Plugged the headphones into onboard VIA and made it the default device. Could play the story (TRIP) from start to finish with sound from onboard device.

Looks like the remaining memory leaks are much more pronounced on XP compared to 11 as Private Bytes in Process Hacker went over 400 MB even while being in menus while under 11, it consistently returned to under 150 MB after patching it for most allocations from process heap to be made from separate heap and freeing that heap regularly with HeapDestroy call. Maybe the remaining allocations are implicit allocations made through one of the libraries it uses (audio, graphics...?).

I find it odd the game managed to kill the Audigy's audio, despite all advanced DirectSound functionality being disabled on XP x64, being unable to find any way to restore it. Maybe it could be done with some kernel level hacking, but that's beyond me.

This game was known to hang on some systems when it tried playing menu click sound unless sound hardware acceleration was disabled. So far, no one figured exact cause. Still, hardware accelerated sound must have worked otherwise since another known workaround was invalidating the problematic sound in one of game files.

Eax with Quake 4 on headphones with Audigy rx:

https://youtu.be/PHeIYICVyAA

sharangad wrote on 2025-05-26, 19:20:

Eax with Quake 4 on headphones with Audigy rx:

https://youtu.be/PHeIYICVyAA

How do you record video with EAX sound? Everything i tried (shadowplay, steam record feature) produce no sound at all..

KainXVIII wrote on 2025-05-26, 20:04:

sharangad wrote on 2025-05-26, 19:20:

Eax with Quake 4 on headphones with Audigy rx:

https://youtu.be/PHeIYICVyAA

How do you record video with EAX sound? Everything i tried (shadowplay, steam record feature) produce no sound at all..

Through the "What U Hear" recording source. You can add an additional audio input source to OBS and assign it to "What U Hear. " it can be used to record the built-in MIDI synth as well (I have a video on how to adjust the h/w midi synth volume on Win 11:https://youtu.be/WvCV17nrB4w?si=6bdaaSgcCO7jDMD2 ). This source has been around since the live! On Win '98.