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Hardware 3D audio gimped in Windows Vista


Supreme Cmdr
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This stinks. One of my favorite game series is "Thief" and the good stuff of the game is all in the EAX audio.

Grumble grumble...

Hmm.

Given that DirectSound (like the rest of DirectX) is a set of COM interfaces backed up by coclasses providing the interface-to-whatever implementation, wouldn't it be possible for someone to develop their own DirectSound implementation that delegated to OpenAL, including hardware access? People have already done something similar with 3dFX GLIDE (which wasn't COM); I use such a program (Glidos) on my PC now to play Redguard.

I suppose the nasty problem (as if the preceding weren't complex enough) would be getting the DirectX device enumerators to "discover" the DS coclasses in such a way that games out there would "see" them without code changes.

Somehow, I don't think that would work, but if Vista is like XP (boy I wish I had access to it) and the DS coclasses are listed in the usual place in registry, maybe one could hijack the InprocServer32 value and redirect it to a DS-to-OpenAL audio implementation. It's not like that's unheard of either; I wrote a simple utility for spying on all calls on select COM interfaces that uses that hijack and I'm sure I'm not the first to have done so.

I'm sure some intrepid audio programmer will come up with a "fix". Or try

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Anyone else feeling kind of Microshafted, again?

If they continue with the "Let's reinvent the wheel" line of thinking, they won'r be selling many copies of thier new operating system.

For some odd reason, I get the feeling that they are doing this in concert with the hardware makers so everyone will be FORCED to buy new gear. Bovine Scatterrings

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