Acceleration for DirectSound under Windows Vista

Believe it or not, this is another program designed to address the problems that are being experienced by Windows Vista users with DirectSound3D games.

For some reason, in Windows Vista, Microsoft have decided to remove the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for DirectSound and DirectSound3D. This means that any of your games that require use of this card will be rendered almost useless or at least, not work properly. Fortunately, this small program from Creative Labs allows you to enjoy them still as the developers intended with full hardware accelerated 3D Audio and EAX support. The program works by translating the legacy DirectSound calls into OpenAL and simply isntalls a few files in each game directory. Unfortuantely, at this stage it still does not work with all games and you’ll have to check the developer website to see whether the games you want to run are supported. Note that this is not some kind of driver software and therefore requires that you have an appropriate driver installed and functioning properly first.

An essential little program for all DirectSound3D card owners but note that it doesn’t work with all programs yet.

In Windows Vista, Microsoft has decided to remove the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for DirectSound and DirectSound3D. The HAL is the software layer that in previous Windows operating systems enabled an audio accelerator such as the Sound Blaster X-Fi to provide DirectSound3D applications with hardware accelerated audio.

This enabled soundcards to perform tasks such as sample-rate conversion, mixing, 3D spatialization using HRTFs, filtering, and effects processing. Without the HAL, DirectSound on Windows Vista will be rendered in software with no advanced functionality such as EAX.