Does it have to be Creative ALchemy specifically, or is OpenAL sufficient?
Yes, so far Creative ALchemy is the only universal option AFAIK, but given your new sound card, it might come with its own solution. Drakan can only talk to DirectSound and ALchemy pretends to be DirectSound with full EAX support. There's this ancient thing called Creative ALchemy Universal, for which it's said that it works with any sound card, but in reality, Alchemy doesn't care about the actual sound card, at least recent versions, it just validates license files and bails out if they don't check out. It can use ct_oal.dll as backend OpenAL implementation (supposedly hardware accelerated), which you get with drivers bundled with dedicated Creative sound card.
There's also Sens_oal.dll, also known as Host OpenAL implementation (pure software OpenAL implementation, can be found in many Creative installers in HOAL folder), also compatible with ALchemy if you rename it to ct_oal.dll (some games work better when it uses that DLL, and some work better with it out of the way). ALchemy doesn't work with OpenAL Soft though because of some specifics that Creative stuff has, although it should be sufficient feature-wise.
Both Sens_oal.dll and ALchemy's dsound.dll can work on their own as long as license is there. There's this whole thread about the subject on
VOGONS.
Another strange thing that comes to mind related to ALchemy, The Suffering games, which use the newer version of Riot Engine...you would think that they use EAX due to the option present in Riot Engine Options window, while in reality, they don't. BUUUT, because ALchemy is not perfect, you may think EAX is there because if its dsound.dll finds ct_oal.dll it can use, you'll get reverb effect throughout entirety of both games. When you start the first game, it makes sense due to prison setting.
The guy that develops IndirectSound said he already did some work regarding EAX support few years ago, but there were complications and he won't put it out until it's solid. Not too long ago, he also talked about switching from XAudio2 to WASAPI, that might allow better control and easier re-implementation of EAX. People were wondering why he doesn't just OpenAL Soft which comes with library of EAX effects and the given reason is that OpenAL doesn't represent quite how sound works in Windows and would require implementing similar settings that ALchemy does, namely
Buffers and
Duration, which are basically hacks that have to be tweaked for a particular game to work right due to how different games use DirectSound.
Only the first computer that came with Windows 95 I've had long ago had a dedicated sound card from Creative. It says SF16-FMP on the manual, printed in 1996, boasts a FM receiver and full compatibility with Sound Blaster 16.
In the end, I was like "F you Creative!
", binned the Audigy, and bought a Xonar DGX 5.1 for a similar price (had to be PCIe also, I've run out of PCI slots). Which does support XP, just as claimed, and works perfectly fine on both systems. And it doesn't use the Realtek rubbish.
This card might let you use EAX in Drakan on XP without having to do anything special. The specs do says that DirectSound3D with EAX 2.0 (Drakan uses EAX 1.0) is supported on Windows 7. Given the audio architecture changes on that OS, my guess would be that you get something like Creative ALchemy with the card to be able to play old DirectSound games without restrictions.
Well, patch 445++. You're right, "AiO" doesn't appear anywhere in its documentation. I guess it was the "ancestor" of the AiO patch, then?
Historically, Drakon Rider's patches were the first, one was about boosting performance in some levels with crapload of crap in them, the other was about supporting some extra attack animations in multiplayer level NoWhere2, later Shelim came up with a patch addressing the crash issue with difficulty selection screen, then at one point I felt like playing Drakan after a long time and thought narrow field of view/everything being zoomed in on widescreen resolution was horrible for enjoyment, so I came up with my own patch, called just Widescreen hack, correcting the horizontal field of view. It also solved the issue on newer Windows systems, the dreaded "Session creation failed!" error and had the options to enable/disable some of the previous patches, since they were all separate, addressing one issue at the time. Due to this fragmentation and inclusion of the older patches in my version, I renamed it to AiO (All-in-One) Patch and it slowly grew from there.
Good card though that sounded much better than onboard especially in Drakan.
Drakan's sound files are pretty low quality to begin with. I bet due to crystallization or similar tricks.
There could be a little better chance of the music bug popping up when you do things that get music to change frequently, eg. loading saves from different areas in a short time-span. But even if you just return to menus from the game, you might hear that the transition is not 100% smooth as it should be. Sorry, I don't know how to put it in the words exactly.
