Enjoy older games with full 3D audio features in Vista

Jan 23, 2007 11:33 GMT  ·  By

As you might have heard, Microsoft chose to remove the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) from Windows Vista. This completely disables the software layer required by digital signal processors to provide hardware acceleration for various 3D audio algorithms, including DirectSound3D and EAX in pre-Vista games. In spite of this limitation, digital signal processors that support OpenAL (mainly Creative Lab's sound cards) can still take advantage of hardware audio acceleration in Vista.

In order to achieve 3D audio acceleration for DirectSound and EAX audio algorithms in Microsoft's upcoming Windows Vista, Creative Labs came up with an open source workaround software dubbed the ALchemy Project. The ALchemy Project is currently in its beta stages and will be finalized as soon as the official version of Windows Vista is released.

ALchemy will actually translate DirectSound codes into OpenAL. The ALchemy Project OpenAL wrapper has to copy a few necessary files into each game directory so it could be easier recognized.

For now, the list of supported games that are recognized by the ALchemy OpenAL wrapper includes: Battle for Middle Earth 2 Call of Duty Call of Duty 2 Diablo 2 Everquest 2 FEAR Full Spectrum Warrior Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers Guild Wars GTA: San Andreas Hitman: Blood Money Max Payne 2 Midieval 2: Total War Neverwinter Nights Neverwinter Nights 2 NOLF 2 Rome: Total War

As you can see, the list features too few entries, but Creative promises that many of our favorite games will be available in a couple of months. However, if you want to try and tweak the non-supported games yourself, Creative Labs provides a guide for advanced users to take advantage of the OpenAL wrapper. Advanced tweaking requires users to copy two files - dsound.dll and dsound.ini. If it is a newer game, you might be lucky to see the unsupported game working with the default configuration settings. If the game doesn't seem to work, the dsound.ini file can be further tweaked, enabling users to play around with Buffer, Duration, DisableDirectMusic and MaxVoiceCount settings.

The beta version of Creative Labs' ALchemy project provides support for Sound Blaster X-Fi-based sound cards with OpenAL compatible drivers solely. Audigy 2 and Audigy 4 sound card owners will have to wait a bit more for hardware accelerated DirectSound3D and EAX support in Windows Vista.