Use Vista? Want EAX? Get ALchemy!

[Pass The Towel]

Since "Upgrading" to Vista, it's annoyed me that you can't use the hardware sound and EAX settings in Guild Wars and other games. This is because there is a new sound library with Vista that in the long run is a better design, but it means creative and related cards can't run hardware accelerated sound.

However, Creative released a program for disenfranchised gamers to work around the sound issues for pre-Vista games called ALchemy. It's free for X-Fi owners, and $10 or something for Audigy owners. Since installing it my Guild Wars has been sounding great again.

The only snag is that you need to run Gw.exe as an administrator, otherwise you get an insta-crash.

www.soundblaster.com/alchemy/

[Tanin'iver BlindDragon]

Nice tip Towel

I've been running Vista since getting my new PC mid October last year, and got myself a X-Fi card simply because that or an Audigy is the only way to get EAX under Vista. Many slightly older games will revert to stereo sound only without EAX available.

[Pass The Towel]

I ran into an issue with using TeamSpeak with ALchemy turned on.

It seems that because you are running GW as Administrator, and TS as your normal user, the keystrokes you make when GW has focus do not also get passed to TS, so push-to-talk doesn't work.

The solution is to run TS as administrator too (or turn off ALchemy and just run GW as normal with Vista sound).

[Pass The Towel]

OK, so I now discovered you don't need to run the game as administrator. You just have to ensure that the 'Users' group has full permissions for the Guild Wars directory. I got an error about changing the permissions for Gw.dat when I did this, but it worked on a second attempt.