Glossary talk:Sound card

Bought a Xonar U3 to play with; ALL games, if launched as an admin (UAC prompt), will not be able to be "injected/hooked" by HsMgr and as such no EAX 1,2/HW OpenAL can be enabled. Here's a shitty fix (Task scheduler didn't help...): As always, "GX DSP" setting in sound card control utility must be toggled on. 1) Disable both 32-bit and 64-bit HsMgr autoboot entries (using msconfig win7 & before, task manager win8 onward) 2) Win+r -> shell:startup (Autoexec folder) & make a batch file there:

@echo off
if not "%1"=="am_admin" (
    powershell -Command "Start-Process -Verb RunAs -FilePath '%0' -ArgumentList 'am_admin'"
    exit /b
)
start C:\Windows\system\HsMgr.exe Envoke
start C:\Windows\syswow64\HsMgr.exe Envoke
start C:\Windows\system\HsMgr64.exe Envoke

--- 3) Reboot - on startup it is going to ask for UAC permissions, confirm the prompt & done.

If you prefer, move the .bat to a location of your choosing, and manually execute it to start GX when needed, since it is well known to cause BSODs / make certain programs think it's a virus etc. --- I think Phoebus onward use a different method altogether to reimplement DS3D... Have no such card to test if this trick works there too.

edit: added 32 bit install (start C:\Windows\system\HsMgr.exe Envoke) to batch! Has the side-effect of opening a "file not found" error window on 64-bit windows / vice versa - the rest of the managers will be launched anyway, so don't worry - it still works. If someone devises a classier solution, they are free to add it to the wiki...

Instructions says "Create a shortcut with following command:" but shortcut to what? To NewAlchemy.ps1 file or to powershell.exe?

You right click the directory (not on any files or folders, just a blank spot in file explorer), hover over "new" and click "Shortcut", and you paste the command in the box that says "type the location of the item".

It does not have to be the same directory, it can be any directory, even the desktop.

I'll update the instructions when I get a chance as I realize now it is a little confusing.

Thanks, works like a charm!

In the beginning Creative created the EMU10K1 chip.
Unfortunately they forgot to build a card around, so even though they started to announce "a completely new concept in PC audio".. nothing happened at that time. Hype was preserved with bimonthly updates.
Finally on the 6 August, 1998 the already showcased soundblaster Live! saw the light of stores, with first EAX compatible games scheduled for "that fall".
Not everybody knows that every PCI SoundBlaster card was made supporting EAX. And that included even boards prior to Live!, such as Ensoniq AudioPCI cards (which had been acquired by Creative by then), with a program called "EAX upgrade"

In the same year, EAX 2.0 was also introduced.
Microsoft eventually decided to license all the previously mentioned stuff to include it in the upcoming directX 8

Relentlessly after just 5 months the shiny new third revision was at the starting line.
Omitting the fact that they promoted its support for older boards (which didn't happen)..... There won't be any further news for more than 2 years.
In the end, after 881 days, EAX 3.0 EAX ADVANCED HD was revealed, a week before Audigy boards debut and this was the first time forward compatibility was ruled out.
First EAH games were released after another year though (even if that claim is challenged by some less famous games)

Contrarily to wikipedia assertions EAX 4.0 did not come out with the Audigy 2. Instead, that became an exclusive of the even newer Audigy 2 ZS, with the first game to ship being Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (the previous entry of the series instead presumably being the first non-ported game to use openal)

Finally, latest -forever- revision, EAX 5 was suggested on May 12, 2005 at the reveal of the Xtreme Fidelity audio processor, but I believe the right date for the debut should be set on August 2, 2005 (and indeed the following day it started to be featured on the Creative website). The first game was likely BF2.

And that was the story (with more to come!)

Just for additional reference here are the EAX reference websites for the past nearly twenty years
1997-1999
1999-2000
2000-2005
2005-2008
2008-2010..nuthing! thanks to our friend, Adobe Flash. Some news were still posted here in the good old html though
2010-2013 (the list wasn't update in this time frame)

EDIT: apparently some of the old website can be visioned in certain demo discs

Mediawiki is throwing a "WikitextException" error(?) if I try to edit the previous message... so, I'll just link here this, this, this, this and this for realtek drivers. This and this too.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/modified-drivers-for-x-fi-sound-cards.328110/

First DirectSound3D Game EXtensions debuted 3 months after Xonar D2 release (their first soundcard) and its only purpose was to restore DS3D in Vista, along with common EAX 2.0 support.

GX 2.0 was silently added on the end of February 2008 drivers 8.17.30 and 8.17.31. This introduced the much discussed EAX 5 emulation mode, which was widely featured a week later with the launch of the Xonar DX(which I own :3)
(EAX 3 and 4 can also be supported btw).
As side note.. Asus claims this "also incorporates Dolby Home Theater Technologies", even though these were already previously available (and the diagrams are the same)

Various emulation-translation accuracy tests showed little to none differences when compared to X-fi cards (even though there are still lots of people which believe differently)

Then by the end of 2008 with RC drivers 8.17.47 GX version was bumped to 2.5. Besides the questionable improvements in reverberation quality a much lower CPU footprint was objectively observed.
With subsequent driver releases asus mainly took care of bug fixing and hopefully all of them have been fixed by now.
Personally I hadn't none of the issues early adopters experienced 7 years ago.. (but maybe it's all merit of UNi xonar drivers instead..)

Finally, in the middle of 2012 Asus decided it was time to move on from the evergreen CMI8788 to the blazingly new CM8888DHT. And it did with its new Xonar Phoebus.. This introduced the new GX 3.0 which I couldn't find anything about. Hence I guess it could just be a marketing gimmick It actually has improved stablity and a new server-client
(and then there's this weird thing where WoW shows benefit from DS3D restoration without winXP compatibility)
Driver installer is signed by A-Volute, so I believe some of their technology is used

EDIT: albeit there's a Cm_Oal dll dated 13/12/2007 coming with Asus (and Auzentech/HT) drivers, it's suspiciously "smaller" than the other OpenAL native implementations.
It's reported to not work, but my quite unfunded theory is that it just does only when GX is enabled (and Xear3D?)
EDIT2: just found out that cm_oal depends on wrap_oal existing? not sure if just because they try to hook it to restore Generic Hardware (which is surprisingly not so useless even in openal, if you are fighting with the router's default device selection) or because they legitimately require some of its code to work

Frankly, I was going to be brief and just mention a modded driver for every manufacturer but then, Creative part was becoming really long, so I decided to split it.
Then I figured out even that split was becoming too big, so this post while just tell one of my usual stories of the past

So.. we could say that 80% of the driver hacking scene is (was?) done by a single person: mr. Daniel Kawakami (aka daniel_k)
Everything started in 2007 when Creative released ALchemy for their X-fi series... leaving Audigy and Live! users high and dry. And here is where the father of all the tweaks's career started.
He soon tried to improve even cards' own drivers, patching odd bugs and fixing Vista compatibility issues. But what then?
Creative released ALchemy for older soundcards too.. but to a condition: you had to pay for the "legacy" support. Therefore his work entered into competition with Creative all of a sudden.
So.. they kindly threatened him and he simply decided to leave. Ok, actually the wayback machine hasn't the whole story, and he never really left 100%
A nice summary of his works is given in his vent e-mail to wired (and some older file names can be checked here)

After some time though he came back (wikipedia claims there was an agreement but I couldn't find other reference)
Ok, let's just list his massive firms:

• Z, Zx, ZxR and Recon3D
• SB Live! series Support Pack (I don't actually know why all Live! stuff has been removed between May and September)
• SB Audigy Series Support Pack
• P17X Series Support Pack
• SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCIe / Notebook
• SB X-Fi Series Support Pack (supports Auzentech, Gigabyte and Onkyo solutions too) [alternative Universal Audio Architecture]
• SB USB series Support Pack
• Gameport support pack for Vista 32-bit (x86) and 7 (no 64 bit) (again, I can't understand why it was pulled out from forums) Better page layout, older version

EDIT: bugs with OpenAL exist in newer driver versions (EDIT3: rip making a sense of anything)
EDIT2: lol, they went as far as to bully iD too

Yes, I know this sounds pretty rude.
Though I'm really pissed off by all theirs contradictions that wasted tons of my time, and I wanted to let off steam

Let's start from the beginning.
They seemed pretty sympathetic towards users initially. were always scummy but not overly so.
In 1999 they announced support for I3DL2 open standard. Furthermore they announced their new EAX version.
If previous bulletins weren't enough to stress this, the support of these specifications for every PCI sound card was further underlined in these FAQ

.......
.....
...

Then what... ?

Well, they became the de facto monopolists of the gamer audio market.
Every good intentions vanished.. and the new EAX version just saw the light of day 2 years after. And it was as proprietary and exclusive as possible.
Not to mention that Interactive Audio Special Interest Group got canned

And later things just went worse. The new Audigy series was practically a rebrand of Live! series, but firewire port and improved DACs.
I mean, improved DACs are a quite nice addition.. though the DSP (despite being called 10K2) was still the good old 10K1
To add insult to injury even their marketing department was "messing up"

EDIT: hacked SbLive! drivers found!
EDIT2: new mess! Age of empires 3 is claimed to not even use DS3D... but here it supports EAX and it would even need ALchemy..
EDIT3: Creative's audio processors datasheets are available here
EDIT4: surprise, different revisions of the original live! existed
EDIT5: suprise²: newer is not always better
EDIT6: they are using sens_oal.dll for some cards. What of a irony.
EDIT7: ALchemy is freaking hardcoded and it might even misbehave on newer Core3D (Recon and Z) cards

Ok, now that I have your attention the thing is major.
Realtek has(had?) broken environmental audio extensions.

Nowadays it's not all that matter.... though this got me thinking: there must be more.
Especially if you consider that an ALC889 music-wise is almost on par with claimed damn better equipment
That's the "flagship" chip of the taiwanese producer, and maybe OEMs don't always use it to save as much money as they can (and this may be why people with lower end integrated chips feel so much differences)

Though, in games the gap seems way big and contrarily to music field I have yet to meet anyone that can't hear a tangible improvement with dedicated solutions.
Placebo effect could even be another explanation, who knows..

Thanks for reading, as always ;)
EDIT: is situation the same even under OpenAL?
And remember I don't bite if somebody want to release its findings

Adapted from my request to CarvedInside, developer of the UNi Xonar Drivers

All started by reading on wikipedia that C-media based chips used to support Sensaura audio extension and 3D algorithms thanks to an agreement. (though a bit lacking)
As usual, the more bossing and evil company ever existed in the PC audio world could not fail to spoil this. And so Creative Technology bought Sensaura back in 2003.
Anyway C-media license keep going on, but it couldn’t last forever. And in September 2008 it ended.

As soon as they could (judging by how stringent they had been in the announcement) all Sensaura technologies were removed from drivers. (cool pdf inbound: all the 3D audio rendering engine was Sensaura based..)
Now as rule, I wouldn’t be really worried, given that the greatest audio API (i.e. A3D) of the century is already dead and gone for more than a decade… but a review really stressed how Sensaura tech made a great difference in the overall gaming experience and surround accuracy of Xear3D.

So.. I was wondering.. Mr. CarvedInside.. wouldn’t be possible to add it back to the drivers? I already spent 3 hours probing the net for older drivers.
And I’m not talking about my Xonar DX drivers, but -hopefully- the c-media ones you use to work with. Let me post some links.
http://web.archive.org/web/20071019230809/http://www.cmedia.com.tw/forums/viewtopic.php?t=863&postdays=0&postorder
http://web.archive.org/web/20071019230809/http://www.cmedia.com.tw/forums/viewtopic.php?t=863&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=60&sid#4118
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.cmediadrivers.info/*
ftp://www.club-3d.com/Theatron/ (This includes Club3D c-media based sound cards.. but I couldn’t find accurate sources about their use use of CMI8788 chip)

Then, I think I ended. I would just like to link some goodies I found.
They seems to be the only precise articles describing the licensed technologies I could found. (C-media should have supported every Sensaura specs afaik).
Unfortunately they are either in Russian or in Polish. English editors seems to have been very skinny on the argument

“Sensaura CRL3D HRTF 3D positional sound enhancement with multi-drive” engine was used until the aforementioned end of contract. Funnily it was introduced in 1999.

Last but not least I finally discovered why when I install sound card drivers (including yours) I have this apparently meaningless pcm file (.\Customapp\GX30\3D_Helicopter.wav)
It seems it was one of the various asset cmedia took from Sensaura and it was originally inside a tech demo named Play3D (download). No explanation for its stay up to our days though.

Thanks for your time!

P.S. In the meantime I found out a damn good english round-up.
And I'd like to point out another thing: Before (2007) | After (2014)
Something is definitively missing.

EDIT: and guess who's half-assing monopolizing what again

Interactive 3D Audio Level 2 as the name suggest is the successor of the 3D Audio Rendering and Evaluation Guidelines 1.0.
Both of them are a kind of cross-vendor "advices" for a proper 3D sound experience, with a special attention on reverberations and occlusions (example).

Although first version had been mostly independently developed, the second one was mainly based on the just opened EAX 2 specification.
The final proposal nevertheless was backed by every major sound cards producer of the time (as can be seen in the Acknowledgments paragraph of pdf).
In turn it eventually ended on all their sound APIs: A3D 2.0, DS3D (since DirectX8), Sensaura.. all but one.

EAX in fact was that with a closer relationship to I3DL2 yes..
but even after Creative's wide claims about own openness and for its effor to "convert EAX calls to IA-SIG calls when the platform does not support the full EAX functionality" ...
...after 3 years was still missing the support for the no-longer-new standard (it is also true it quickly fall by the wayside)

The only game supporting this should be Slave Zero, ironically DirectX 7.

EDIT: this is still kind of relevant even today

Advice with renaming DLL is pointless for modern Creative cards. Some post X-Fi cards support both hardware and software OpenAL (like Z, ZxR), but AE-5, G-6, etc. don't. It'll result in error "Native Device not default" in logs instead. Also, it's necessary to switch installed DLLs in most cases (can be checked in OpenAL tools).

Posting links forcing me to solve the infinite amount of CAPTCHas and I can't post them directly... DLL problem
About new cards

Mod-edit: fixed links

About software alchemy from dsoal's author post: i.imgur.com/qGbEFtc.png

Write on forums so admin can give you privileges to ommit captcha checks.

I was already reporting that years ago. Check the latest edit in "Creative's BS".

It's not sens_oal to be bugged/wrong (or well, at least not inherently for this reason) but ALchemy that is biased to just care about "Audigy" and "X-fi" device strings. And I'm pretty sure to remember people on vogons had worked that around.

I'd be glad if you or anybody else with a good ear could report back about differences in this situation.

The following are qualitative tests. This is different from looking to sound quality/accuracy.
They are just supposed to quickly point out whether EAX game setting can be enabled or not with X version.

ALchemy and 3Dsoundback can't be set to show the exact supported version, neither will work with OpenAL games

EDIT: indirectsound now logs queried EAX versions. Remember some games won't check for EAX 4/5 if EAX3 is not there (as indeed happen with this dll hack), but most times this should be enough EDIT2: DSOAL at least advertises EAX4, so its logging should be preferred
These were the previous methods

Having said that, please take note that if you have X version (but game supports up to or only X -1) no one can guarantee it will work (e.g. this happened to me with DSGX and EAX 4 with splinter cell: double agent)
On the other hand even if in-game setting can already be enabled with X version, nothing stop additional effects to be applied with X +1 without further notice.

And this is where quantitative analysis comes into play.
Quantitative means that audio output is accurately measured and compared.

Indirectsound has fake EAX support, thus it can't be used. And Asus GX's cannot be scientifically recorded.. so things get really tougher

1. EAX1: VMware XP virtual machines uses an Ensoniq ES1371/ES1373 virtual audio device (aka Creative PCI128). Remember to install drivers.
2. EAX2: Under Windows XP(bugged implementations aside) the majority of sound chips should reach this level, just make sure to check actual support with previous method
3. EAX3: I think that original Audigy series is the only one that ever had EAX 3 without EAX 4..
4. EAX4: Besides hacked drivers, story is similar, with Audigy 2 and 4 series though. ALchemy may be used, as long as exact EAX version has already been determined (except in OAL games..)
5. EAX5: There's so few games using this that.. it's not such a big deal. Though if really questioned a X-Fi would be needed.

just a little compilation of websites with information which will be very useful

• A3D 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. A3D patches list. A3D game demos list. Technical diagrams(plainer in english)

• EAX 1, 2, 33, 4, 4 55

• DShw
  

universal HRTF for OpenAL games
biggest bunch of surround audio reasoning I have ever seen at once
Mother of all PC-audio revisiting (in Polish)

Explain midi, link to VirtualMIDISynth, link to CoolSoft MIDIMapper, explain setup for use with games.

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