djoye
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Aug 31, 2004
- Messages
- 3,115
It has actually been a while, but you can now play most (all?) EAX-based games with a combination of OpenAL Soft and DSOAL without a Sound Blaster card.
Relevant sites:
https://openal-soft.org/ -- https://github.com/kcat/openal-soft
https://ci.appveyor.com/project/ChrisRobinson/dsoal <- DSOAL's binary is available here for 30 days after its compiled -- https://github.com/kcat/dsoal
For EAX1-3 games, you may be able to simply place the dsound.dll file into the same directory as the game's executable. For later EAX games, you'll need to place dsound.dll and dsoal-aldrv.dll (rename soft_oal.dll to dsoal-aldrv.dll) into the aforementioned directory. Some Unreal Engine games (UE 2.5?), Killing Floor for example, may require you to rename soft_oal.dll to DefOpenAL32.dll and place that into the <game_name>\System directory with DSOAL's dsound.dll to get the desired result.
I tried this on a handful of games, audio going through an RTX 3090's HDMI output, and I was surprised at how well it worked. DOOM 3 and Quake 4 sounded fine and Unreal and Killing Floor worked properly. The last game I tried was Soldier of Fortune 2 and it appeared to work very well. I had tried SoF2 on my X-Fi with ALchemy and it was a mess, using DSOAL was actually better with no noisy scratches or pops.
It sounded good to me. It might not be perfect, but it seems better than ALchemy.
Relevant sites:
https://openal-soft.org/ -- https://github.com/kcat/openal-soft
https://ci.appveyor.com/project/ChrisRobinson/dsoal <- DSOAL's binary is available here for 30 days after its compiled -- https://github.com/kcat/dsoal
For EAX1-3 games, you may be able to simply place the dsound.dll file into the same directory as the game's executable. For later EAX games, you'll need to place dsound.dll and dsoal-aldrv.dll (rename soft_oal.dll to dsoal-aldrv.dll) into the aforementioned directory. Some Unreal Engine games (UE 2.5?), Killing Floor for example, may require you to rename soft_oal.dll to DefOpenAL32.dll and place that into the <game_name>\System directory with DSOAL's dsound.dll to get the desired result.
I tried this on a handful of games, audio going through an RTX 3090's HDMI output, and I was surprised at how well it worked. DOOM 3 and Quake 4 sounded fine and Unreal and Killing Floor worked properly. The last game I tried was Soldier of Fortune 2 and it appeared to work very well. I had tried SoF2 on my X-Fi with ALchemy and it was a mess, using DSOAL was actually better with no noisy scratches or pops.
It sounded good to me. It might not be perfect, but it seems better than ALchemy.