How to enable EAX effects in old games

Good shit, remember going through this getting EAX back in Thief.

Is it happening?
Will Volvo make it happen?
archive.is/t8OFW

It's not a particularly good implementation, and would probably sound bad over a good pair of headphones. One part where it's really bad is when the character is positioned under an arch, and the surrounding rooms and halls are ignored during acoustic synthesis and you get this wet blanket quality suddenly. Also there was some lag in the processing and that was using a Titan (which even just using the original version, is still a somewhat capable card and thus should not be having these problems).

Note also that any game with audio running off of OpenAL can be made to use HRTF: reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1fzonq/psa_for_games_using_openal_including_minecraft/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_EAX_support

Thats quite a lot of vidyo.

I remember the EAX console. The effects weren't that bad. Better than the garbage ASUS puts out.

Great job, user. This is going to impact a big number of older games that are fondly remembered around here.

Thanks for going out of your way to put this together so some of us can enjoy these games the way they were meant to be enjoyed.

Filthy tabletposter here. Mixtape.moe doesn't allow me to download the file, could you please reupload the file somewhere else OP user?

files.fm/u/qqav56uc

Great, now I can play Splinter Cell and listen to those terrible foreign accents with incredible detail.

Thanks user!

I could cross post this on /vr/ also i guess. They might be particularly interested. Should i do that? Or is it frowned upon or whatever.

>>>/vr/ has 9 active users.I don't think they're in any position to turn away content.

Good reminder that Creative is a piece of shit company that needs to die.

There's also vid related. Probably the best shot at having fully 3D audio in a lot of games. No idea what happened with the Q3 one, and Phonon was bought by Valve so it's unlikely we'll see it in non-Valve/Source games. This one will be limited to Nvidia GPUs though, almost surely.

More focus on audio is the only good thing to come out of VR.

Even John Carmack was subject to the eternal Jewry of Creative. Back when he was writing the graphics engine for Doom 3, he was struggling to implement the various cases of his volumetric shadowing algorithm; he'd come up with a few different techniques before realizing that they cancelled down to one which became known as "Carmack's Reverse" and allowed shadows to be rendered correctly regardless of whether the camera was inside a volume, outside a volume, or the caster was visible or occluded. As was Carmack's wont, he was eventually going to release this source code after the game was venerable, whereupon Creative claimed that they had in fact pioneered this technique and patented it. Thus, if you download the Doom 3 source code and trawl through it, you will not find Carmack's original code for the shadow volumes, because Creative aka the audio jew decided that they were going to stick 25 centimeters of wood up the ass of graphics programming.

This part is wrong. What Creative really did is, they made their own sound api (OpenAL) which had hardware support. New games could use OpenAL to get hardware acceleration and eax. For older games they released a DSound to OpenAL wrapper, which could be used to regain hardware mode and eax.

The software you are linking to is probably a cracked version of the Soundblaster X-Fi MB, a software that emulates hardware acceleration and eax. The software was originally created for bundling with gaming motherboards, but can now be purchased for $30.

Appreciate the thought user, but Nvidia gameworks shit is every bit as jewish as anything Creative pulled in the 2000s.

Id rather openALsoft get on with implementing gpu wavetracing, then we can have everything we need in a FOSS library. Its just one guy maintaining it though afaik.

Is there no end to the damage this company has wrought?

Its not any x-fi bloatware shit, its a cracked version of one of the most recent versions of ALchemy [to remove the sound card check] and alternatively the actual emulation DLLs it spits out if you feel like just placing them where they need to go. The footprint on your machine to aquire EAX support is pretty much zero.

Let it be known that OP was not a faggot. Thank you friend, you're doing god's work.

The best part about Creative's DSound to OpenAL wrapper? It still doesn't work for a lot of older games. Tribes 2 sounds terrible and broken if you use EAX, and I know for a fact that playing it back in the day it sounded a lot better. Baldur's Gate 2 also has broken reverb.

The guy you're quoting is pretty much correct, because you can also enable EAX without a sound card in The Dark Mod, which is using EAX 5.0 or 6.0, I forget.

Thanks OP, OpenAL is great but does things a bit different.

Just gonna post this semi-related WebM since people mentioned A3D.

Creative deserved to get fucked over. Their shoddy, barely functional drivers were responsible for like half of all BSOD errors that users were blaming Microsoft for. Since Creative didn't care to fix their shit, Microsoft said okay, fuck you, no more DirectSound hardware acceleration.

Creative Labs has always been a shitty company concerned only with profit. Not a single fuck given for improving their products, user satisfaction, suitability for a stated purpose, or value. It's god damn criminal that Aureal died from legal costs fighting a case they won, and Creative Labs ended up getting their IP for a song at bankruptcy auction.

Fuck Creative Labs. They deserve to burn forever.

Could you run AIDA64 and look into the OpenAL tab, if this enables all EAX versions?
(The OpenAL tab is hidden by default and has to be enabled in the settings.)

Thanks you this makes a huge difference in Splinter Cell CT. It's obvious right away how much better it sounds. Did the xbox or xbox 360 have something like this?

That's Made In China tier logic.

also what about newer games? Have they surpassed EAX in quality or not? It seems like most people wouldn't think about how important sound is in a game.

The last games with EAX support were Mass Effect and Bioshock.
Most newer games don't sound too good.
TrueAudio from AMD is kind of similar, but hardly any game supports it.

Still sounds fucking amazing. I thought I misremembered how good it sounded, but no, it still sounds far better than 3D audio today, even.

The technology indisputably being held back for 20 years makes me wonder how many conspiracy theories are true (cars running on vegetable oil, Nikola Tesla's free energy tower, cold fusion, whatever the fuck else.)

I mean if Creative could sabotage and bury technology like that, it surely happened elsewhere.

The only other computer technology I can think of that has seemingly regressed like that is force feedback. I still have a Microsoft Force Feedback 2 Joystick from ~2002 that feels more sophisticated than any joystick I've used since. It can generate all kinds of strong and weak forces in any direction. I think that was just due to lack of demand, though.

Never mind, I tried it myself in a virtual machine.
OpenAL reports EAX 4 support, DSound EAX 5, but there are no EAX 5 games that use DSound, because EAX 5 was released after Vista.

80s/90s anime design always gets me more sexually attracted.
Probably because its not moeblob uguu cute bullshit and actually resembles a human being with actual detail along with the more natural looking hand drawn colors.

The technology has most certainly been held back. But this also makes me respect audio designers for their design, rather than the technology they're working with.

Take BFBC2 (wartapes), Battlefield 4 (non Wartapes) and SOMA for example probably some shit I'm forgetting. Excellent sound design/samples with god knows how primitive sound technology, or 'nigger-riggering'.

*Also the WebM I posted contains EAX zones, which is not what I was talking about.

This is more like it, except the sound also changes when you go indoors, not dynamically, but by good design, not technology.

I think you're just stuck in the past

Those had Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, when connected to a receiver and speakers

Take your whining elsewhere, this about technology.

So just to make sure I don't get my dick stuck in a fan here: I just install the two exes in the zip folder, then extract the ALchemy folder and run ALchemy.exe before I boot up EAX games?

I'm 21

>>>/a/
Learn how to deal with offtopic posts you retard.

How well does OGSE implement environmental effects?
Seems promising from the webm
Wasn't there an option for it in vanilla?

Dolby Digital is not really a seal of quality, at least not the normal version.
It is just a lossy compression, like mp3, that squeezes a 5.1 signal through a cable that can normally only handle 2 channel digital sound or 1 channel analog sound.

DTS all the way or am I misinformed on that as well? It sounds better to my ears, but what the fuck do I really know?

Then don't post off topic shit you try hard millenial faggot. >>>/cuckchan/

This was around the time I got a Sound Blaster card specifically for older games. So I tested it to around the garbage, and then I went on to F.E.A.R, Thief 1/2/3, Half Life 1 (CD version), Cry of Fear (surprisingly has EAX support), etc.

But only because I was burnt out with S.T.A.L.K.E.R at the time. And I just never returned to it, but just from vague memory, I thought it was great. Now that you don't need a sound card, just fucking try it, it's a free mod.

This, ALchemy is fucking garbage. If you really want EAX get an X-Fi card off eBay and stick it in a dedicated XP build.

It pretty much a preference thing, but for every Dolby technology there usually a DTS equivalent.
Normal DTS is also just a lossy compression for 5.1 sound.

Huh, okay, so the difference I hear must be placebo. Good to know.

also Aureal A3D was better fuck you Creative

WEW
>>>/a/

Damn son, never knew those two supported it, need to try this shit out, thanks.
Nice, but was support added by OGSE or was it already avaiable in vanilla?
While I admire the Slavs doing OGSE for all the details and neat shit they've added Id rather wait until its feature complete in a couple of years and use use the tech with vanilla if possible.

Thanks for the info and webbums by the way.

It's OGSE only, sadly, as far as I know. So I tried it out, as I said to around the garbage, then I quit.

Here's the best you can get from drunk recording and converting to WebM via Xmedia Recode. I did this on the spot because autism, etc. And I just know how to use this software quickly.

I don't actually remember OGSE's sound being particularly amazing, was there a specific setting or something needed? I played around 20 hours of 0.6.9.3 before getting bored of the fetch quests that made you search an entire zone for hours looking for an invisible unmarked objective hidden in a bush that sometimes falls through the floor (and you have no way of knowing) and quitting.

As I said, I used a Sound Blaster card, way before this fix was released. So if you played OGSE without one, you couldn't experience it.

Oh, missed that bit. I think I do have few old audio cards lying around, I'll have to check if one is actually a sound blaster or if they're all just old "generic" sound cards for stereo setups/mixing.

No harm done.

Here's my first WebM during the !!!release!!! of OGSE.

My own weapon sounds like mediocre. This could be improved, but I think it has mostly to do with sound samples, not necessarily reverb. And a lot of the distant sounds are on point, something I didn't capture on video.

Shame, I guess I'll bite the bullet and give OGSE a try.
Again, thanks for the info/webm

It's like framerate. You don't know how good it is until you experience it.

Yeah, here you can hear some sounds react to EAX and others not. So it ain't perfect.

Also I hope you niggers are wearing headphones.
Otherwise all discussion has been moot.

Its miles better the standart though.
Just the sound of the sewer monster reverbing through the room is more than enough.
Plus the water drops
Haven't felt this creeped out in a while
Thanks a bunch

What headphones you using, mang?
I'm a faggot for trying to make sure I get the "intended" or "original" experience with everything, so I have a pair of k701s I got for like half price when they were being made (plus a noice 5-output headphone amp). I'm kind of eager to try fiddling with fancy sounds in vidya, since I've never really tried it before (outside of having to use a real soundcard for a couple DOS games years ago).

Thanks. That recording was a legit playthrough. And so is this WebM.

audio-technica.com/cms/headphones/0edf909675b1be4d/

I ain't strictly 'audiophile', just care about audio.

Another thing for anons, you can install a project called "openal-soft" which will bring you OpenAL sound effects to you even if you don't have a sound card with hardware acceleration by pretending to be a soundcard and doing it all on software. It's open source and consists of dragging a few dlls to your system32 and syswow64 and games with openal support will detect a sound card called openal-soft, and it'll also become the default one.
kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html

People get called conspiracy theorists because the big guys they're calling out are afraid.

Didn't mean to sage.

also, for those people using wine, if you use wine staging instead of vanilla wine there's an option to enable EAX support, just have to click a checkbox in winecfg

WHY THE FUCK don't we have HRTF in every game yet?

This is why I can't take this industry seriously.

If you're waiting for a solution that isn't owned by some Jew or another, you'll be waiting a long time user. Creative will sue any small attempt to death since they know they can sink them with legal costs even if Creative loses in court.

So the readme.txt says to just throw the dsound.dll and dsound.ini into your game's folder, but it doesn't say anything about the eax.dll. What do I do with that?

Execute it.

Never mind, it says to place it into the system32/syswow64 folders by hand. I am retarded because I didn't read the whole thing.

I hate that so much, it's so close to being good but the reverb being turned up to 11/10 instead of a proper like 6/10 or so really gets to me. We should be able to have crisp audio and proper 3D audio at the same time.

Youll find no argument with that here lad

I never knew what the fuck EAX was supposed to be nor did i care about it, nice to know.

Yes but you dont need to run alchemy all the time. Just once to tell it where to put the files. Or you can just put them yourself.

Halfchan informs me there is a newer version of creatives openal available than i included in the archive, which i didnt know about, they didnt release it officially on their site. You can get it here if you want community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/10-openal/ just install it over.

Its not a huge deal, maybe it alters the way EAX sounds or something idk. Or maybe it changes nothing. Perhaps some user could test it for differences.

I might update the archive with it if i remake this thread in future.

OpenAL only added decent HRTF some time last year. Before that there were not many good middleware solutions devs could use. FMOD had it but it was a very basic implementation. I use openalsoft with gzdoom and play doom with full positional 3D sound now, is breddy noice, you can find secrets by ear if there is a monster in them.

The problem is not everyone hears HRTF the same way because it models the way a persons head and er canal modifies incoming sound [Head Related Transfer Function], and everyones head is different. But, there is a way you can actually make your own custom HRTF tables by listening to a bunch of samples and selecting which gives you the strongest 3D feeling and then telling openal to make HRTF tables from that. I havent gotten round to this yet.

I think when games really start supporting it, they will probably include a calibration step where you listen to a few samples and choose the best one and the game will set up HRTF for you personally. CSGOs one size fits all solution still works pretty well for most people though, people only whine about it because they thought simple stereo panning was 3D audio all along or are butthurt because their Razor [TM] '5.1' gaming-grade headphones are now obsoleted.

I should clarify some terms: OpenAL = an audio library made by Creative, for use with their own products, last official version 1.1 [or 2.1 not officially released]

OpenALsoft = the open source community fork based on OAL 1.1, maintained by kcat. Notable improvements are EFX which does the same things EAX does but in a free manner, and HRTF, and doesnt need hardware support for anything. Latest version 1.17.2 kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html

Note once again i couldnt get EAX to work with the OALsoft fork, so dont just 'upgrade' it systemwide, you have to use it with individual games. Most games search for DLLs to use in this order: inside their own game folder first, then in system32/syswow64, the former usually overrides the latter.

OALsoft also technically supports Ambisonics processing which is interesting, if anyone anywhere actually had an Ambisonics setup. Now there is an unfairly ignored technology.

Man, that would be the day. I think we'll reach ray tracing audio before that though. And then any schmuck can create good sound.

On another note; awesome information.

Basically. Creative was better driver-wise in the DOS era but they had long given up caring by the late 90s. I wouldn't be surprised that the wholesale move to onboard AC97 was in part to get away from those fucks, in addition to saving a few bucks on discreet audio cards.

There's some decent older SB cards out there, like Audigy, that have hardware EAX support if you go that route and may in fact be very cheap to pick up due to their planned incompatibility with modern Windows. That said you can run many of these older cards fine on Win7/8/10 using KX Project drivers (kxproject.com/index.php?language=en), although EAX support is up in the air. But it is open sauce so anyone Holla Forums might have some fun with it in that regard.

X-Fi itself has some potential modding options depending on how technical you want to go, but it can sound very nice indeed if you know your way around solder.

I was a hardcore Sound Blaster fan, but I fucking loved Aureal and A3D. It's a shame. I wish Creative Labs would sell off their patents and shit. I wonder what I could do with them.

How the hell did Creative pull that off? They were an audio company and stopped releasing graphics cards (based on Voodoo 3D or nVidia graphics) way before Doom 3's release. That court case would have had no basis, unless Creative Labs were going to get into graphics to compete with ATI and nVidia.

DirectSound hardware acceleration needs some sort of comeback with the on board stuff we have these days. Maybe we'll get higher quality on board sound.

And I never had a problem with Creative Labs sound drivers in my life. From my SB16, to my AWE32, even to my Audigy 2 ZS.

I got an XP machine with my Audigy 2 ZS. However, there is really no games I want to play on it.

...

It's called "software patents are cancer". Thankfully patent monopolies actually do expire unlike copyright ones. Also what's hilarious about the Doom 3 source release is that to make it non-infringing they changed, what, 4 lines?

uh-oh is there one with a mouse/keyboard? i'd love to imagine i'm playing some game while 2 anime girls molest me

Dead diary, today OP was not a faggot.

Dear*
Guess it was my turn to take on the faggotry. I accept this sacrifice.

I'm actually interested in getting better speakers for my PC. Right now I have Harmon Kardon speakers, they're at least 10 years old but they're still pretty good. I'd just like to add another layer of immersion for the rare time I play games and where audio can be Immersive such as Thief.

But playing Thief is better with headphones I imagine but I don't like them because I'm scared of hearing loss and my ears are sensitive. Gonna check out out Holla Forums and /g/.

this is news to me.

You don't need a scientist to tell you that. Just listening to loud music or at a comfortable level for an hour a day will fuck up your hearing, you won't notice it right away but you will suffer.

Actually doing a bit of reading, one site I read says using headphones is just like using speakers, just don't put the volume all the way up. I don't know what to believe there's a lot of misinformation out there.

Anything over 85 decibels has a maximum safe exposure time per day which halves rapidly for each 3db more over the threshold. Most mp3 players can get to up like 120db.

A lot of kids are listening to them all day every day.

Not to mention those in ear plugs that seal in the ear canal can basically suck your eardrum out with them if they get yanked out accidentally. If that happens you will regret it for the rest of your life.

I've been using headphones for years and my hearing is still sensitive like how it usually is, it's just that dumb retarded fucks cranking the volumes all the way up and complaining they're going deaf.

So using proper headphones at 82db is safe to use for 16 hours?

I suppose, I'm just a tad worried is all. I'm looking more into it, because having a nice pair of headphones would be great when playing Thief.

The idea is you need to give your ears a rest every hour at least and there should be no reason you need to listen to anything at more than 90db.

Otherwise the cells inside start dying from stress and they dont grow back unlike most other cells.

Augmented body parts when?
I feel more comfortable in buying headphones now, I'm gonna check it out. Thanks.

Reminder that an increase of 10dB is roughly the perceptual equivalent to doubling the volume of the sound.

I used to work as a mechanic, you're supposed to even with ear protection go take a break every 3-4 hours for at least 20 minutes

As for headphone's you're supposed to take a break every 4 hours for at least 10 minutes to keep hearing healthy, and for earbuds every 2-3 hours due to earbuds sealing in the ear canal which causes bigger pressure shifts

youtube.com/watch?v=1dhTWVMcpC4

Now. But its still shit and prevention is better than cure.

EAX is okay. But god damn do I miss A3D. I had no idea at the time how lucky I was to experience gaming with some of the best designed sound in history at the time of release with great headphones and an Aureal card. I mean really, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Freespace 2, Thief 1 & 2, Battlezone, my memories of these games are heavily infused with memories of being pulled in by the sound. And it was a legitimate tool in original CS.
I've tried some supposed alternative solutions but they either don't work or don't sound the same. I find a lot of them wind up more of a reverb mess than convincing positional sound. I'm thinking about building a retro box but I have absolutely no money to spend at the moment.

Keep it at a volume that just isn't too loud and make sure to buy open back non noise cancelling over ear headphones for desktop use.
Closed back is only really for DJs, and makes you go deaf by 30 not to mention they typically have too much bass.

Also, this.
Two decades plus of headphone gaming and I still freak out my friends by hearing their cell phones vibrating in their pockets when they don't even feel it themselves.

Daily reminder that decibles is a stupid unit of measure.

damn i forgot about this. Counter strike went with any actual positional sound from the release of Steam up until the CSGO update a few months ago then :/

Apparently half life on steam still supported EAX until valve updated it in 2013 goddamit.

...

Thanks.

Can't wait for Deus ex level of augmenting.

I believe the science is here, big pharmas just holding everything back, there's gotta be a cure for cancer but why would they when it's a billion dollar industry? Life extending technologies would be a huge implication.

Ah so the noise cancelling DJ headphones are still dangerous even at acceptable decibel level? Those other headphones I can imagine won't really add to the immersion in Thief.

OP if i ever have to update this, how would i go on about it? Where did you get this from?

see

But it's not just OpenAL that his post comes with, and that version is from 2013. There's probably a new one by now, right?

Actually i just downloaded one of creative's own drivers dated march 2016, etracted it and the version of OpenAL is the same.
How about alchemy though? How would i find the cracked version but updated?

There's OpenAL Soft which is sitll developing.

kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html

That's just an awful way to put it.

Not all compression schemes are equal. DTS is often lauded as better because it supports 24bit 96 kHz audio compared to 20 bit 48 kHz for DD. That is of course only just a theoretically advantage if your DTS source actually is in that format, but then how many hundred dB of range do you need and in how many cases do you have a sound one octave above human hearing having a significant interference effect?

Other say that the compression of DTS is inherently better.

In the end none of the golden ear faggots who say there is a huge difference dare ABX their opinions.

Not happening. CPUs are fast enough to do all of the fancy sound effects of yesteryear without the help of dedicated DSPs anymore. If anything there should be a push to minimize the amount of analog cabling.

I made it. This is the release thread.

There is no newer version of alchemy. Well i think there was one version 'newer' but im pretty sure the only thing they changed was patching the crack used to remove the vendor check, so i dont know why youd want to use it.

Creatives openal is not going to get updated again and i doubt the rest will either.

hot damn

Thanks for making this thread, I'll make sure to enable it in all of my gamedev projects.

Singaporeans = Yellow Jews

Yellow = Jew

So
Singaporeans = Jew Jews?

My nigger, I still use it for shit like this.

I still have and use one of the 90s soundblasters, mainly because it has that printer port that you can connect old controllers to and i have old controllers.

I have a bunch of SB Live and Audigy cards lying around, mainly to give discreet audio to machines with crapped-up AC97. Mainly use the Lives though and save the rest for nicer applications. I also have an XtremeMusic lying around, one of these days I should trick it out.

Updated the archive a little bit

my.mixtape.moe/ahhstc.rar

virustotal.com/en/file/322f0ff3e7de7c6bc38edddd9308790a93ee5e35c359a4d5031968105eb9c364/analysis/1484838542/

Gonna give this a bump.

So what's your audio set up, goys? Seinheisser HD 800 with Chord 2Qute DAC here. I was thinking of switching to the Audeze LCD3s but I haven't auditioned them yet.

Dolby Atmos gaming when? Hope there's a good speaker set soon but I haven't checked what CES had this year.

The future of gaming is surely with headphones now.

Another Linux trick I'll mention. DOSBox lets you route MIDI through an ALSA port, so you can use qsynth for playing it. In the config file:

mpu401=intelligent
mididevice=alsa
midiconfig=128:0

Normally I use sound blaster because that's what most people got back in the day. But sometimes it's nicer having better MIDI playback. fluidsynth has a better default patch set than GS Wavetable too.

Since you brought up MIDI, if you want noice wavetable action then consider using BASSMIDI. It's a driver that intercepts Windows default MIDI playback and replaces it with a system that is compatible with the popular SF2 soundfont format. There's no detectable lag or quality issues, either.

For a "default" soundfont look for SGM 2. It's a sizable file but it's well suited for most games, and unlike many other high quality General MIDI fonts it's free. For particular styles however, you'll need to do some searching.

I prefer Chorium

Awesome thread, there's a more general thread about this subject on Holla Forums as well:
>>>Holla Forums697442

Maybe we could pool our autism to sharpen up and flesh out the information collected on PCGW? We need a permanent record of how to fix this stuff:
pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Sound
pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Sound_card
community.pcgamingwiki.com/topic/980-audio-apis-and-eax/

Isn't it unnecessary for Unreal '97 if I enable OpenAL in Advanced Options?

Thats one of the places i went thru trying to get this shit together, the solution they list for alchemy is non functional now. Maybe they would host this archive.

I could only get it working with the original galaxy audio system when i tried.

Atmos has no real practical use unless you're in a theater. I don't it being used in many games, at least on PC.

The best solution would be, if OpenAL soft would implement compatibility with all the the old proprietary sound features. Theoretically it can already do everything required, it just need a compatibility layer that translates everything to EFX. Since the project is open source anybody could try his luck in implementing this.

We also need a good open source DSound to OpenAL wrapper. We currently only have 3 proprietary wrapper by Creative, Asus and Realtek.

Atmos pretty much does, what games have been doing for ages. It calculates the sound live from sound sources in a 3D space and plays them according to your speaker setup. The ceiling speakers would be a nice addition though.

Killing Floor seems to recognize the eax drivers and can be enabled through the menu. Its very helpful to hear exactly which direction the zombies are coming from and how far away they are.

I have Thief Gold with Tfix and Enhancement 2.0 but I can't hear a difference with or without the dsound files. Also tried running it through the Alchemy program and nothing changes. Has the audio already been patched in or am I not doing this correctly? Its not bad, I know its an old game that uses an older eax version but I still think it should sound better.

The ceiling speakers was what I was referring to. Unless you're in a theater or a very large room, and that's bigger than your living room, it just seems kinds pointless to include it in PC games where you're barely a foot away from the screen.

if you find a dsoundlog.txt file in the game directory tells you if the dsound dll is being run or not.

You also might have to explicitly enable eax inside the game somehow, youre on your own with that one. but thief is a particularly good game to have reverb with.

Must be on then. Sounds different from this video maybe a different preset.

You don't need ALchemy for Thief if you installed NewDark during the TFix setup. Just use OpenAL directly.

That Thief video is using the earlier Aureal 3D standard, not EAX. You can do some of A3D in software using the A2D shim.

Whats this?

I reinstalled the game, because I didn't remember how to exactly enable EAX. Hardware acceleration has 3 settings: Off, On and OpenAL. Set it to OpenAL and restart the game. EAX should be on now, too.

That did it, thanks!

Try playing a good game like Call of Duty

One more bump. Thread is good.