Posted on Friday, 4th May 2007 by Jimmy Auw

I’ve just downloaded Creative ALchemy from here. I install the Windows Vista with X-Fi Elite Pro and F.E.A.R.

Screenshot above shows the F.E.A.R on Vista. Hey? All the HW acceleration and EAX function are not available!

Run your ALchemy. It will detect the games on your system. Choose F.E.A.R and “transmutes” it to OpenAL.

Run your F.E.A.R again and see all the options are available! Turn them ON and hear the differents!

In my opinion:
So far, the ALchemy is a good solution for you who want to run EAX and hardware acceleration on X-Fi and Vista. Currently Vista only supports OpenAL not DirectSound/DirectSound3D and no EAX. All sound card and game which support OpenAL should experience no problem with Vista. But the others will experience problem (without DirectSound/DirectSound3D and EAX, it will support stereo channel and no hardware acceleration). So, ALchemy will work as a wrapper for X-Fi and EAX in Vista. Remember, only X-Fi with CA20K1 are supported (so remove X-Fi Xtreme Audio and Xmod from your list). Creative says that they will consider to provide ALchemy for Audigy series, perhaps in the future, but they can’t guarantee about it.


Posted in DIY Audio | Comments (2)

2 Responses to “Creative ALchemy: EAX Magic on Vista”

  1. Willy AC Says:
    September 14th, 2009 at 07:38

    Hi, Mr. Jimmy. I’m a loyal CHIP reader, my nick is “wac” in CHIP forum.

    I have tried ALchemy with my Vista and Audigy SE, it seems to work fine.
    When I first converted to Vista OS, I experienced that the EAX is disabled at some games with the Creative Vista driver, especially using old games with no Vista official support.
    But after reading from its official website and ALChemy recommendation from Creative, I tried it. And it works fine, even in Rightmark.

    My Audigy SE needs driver soft-mod in XP to activate EAX(4) HD, on the contrary, using Vista enables the EAX(4) HD on my Audigy without any additional mod. The Creative’s driver for Vista is great, with ALChemy as addition to enable EAX for some Vista incompatible games. :)

    What a nice blog you have here.
    Great work.
    (b^_^)b



  2. Gordon Halbersma Says:
    February 15th, 2010 at 12:55

    I’m at a total loss. I have FEAR installed and when I play it, all sounds are good EXCEPT the voices of the actors which I don’t hear at all. My drivers are up to date as far as I know, I’ve followed all the options to try in the game’s Readme.txt file. I do the Alchemy thing, turn on all the EAX options in FEAR, and still I cannot hear voice.

    My system is a quad-core Intel 2.6 Ghz CPU on an ASUS Motherboard, running VISTA 32, with 2gb memory.

    It plays great on my older Win2K system. Can anyone HELP.



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