My guide to installing Creative Sound Cards (In this case the Audigy series)
Ok, after spending a frustrating weekend trying to get EAX to work in games for my Creative Audigy 2 ZS, surfing through countless how-to guides only to find nothing worked, and then finally finding the holy grail, or in this case getting EAX working, I have decided to make a simple how-to guide, as apparently issues with creative cards and drivers are widespread.
(Not mentioning Creative's laughable Vista support, which they are using to extort people anyway).
Ok, for windows XP.
1. If you have a previous sound card, uninstall it, remove it from the add/remove programs list in windows control panel.
2. If you have onboard sound, uninstall the audio driver (eg; Realtek driver) and disable the onboard sound in the BIOS.
If you have the option of doing this, force the IRQ setting of your sound card to an unshared IRQ. This will save problems later if you can, unfortunately my motherboard only had the options <reserved> and <PCI> neither of which actually served any point. PCI means an IRQ can be used by a PCI card and/or a program, it is still shared unfortunately.
(Now the fun begins).
3. Install your card into your computer (ie: put it in the pci slot) and start windows, when the new hardware found wizard pops up, cancel it.
4. Go to the creative site, and download the newest driver for your card. Just the driver. Then install these drivers. Restart the computer/windows.
5. Go into windows device manager and click view/resources by type. Click on IRQ resources. If your card is sharing the same IRQ as something else, you will, either now or later, run into issues. If the other device/service on the IRQ isn't needed, simply disable it. If it is needed. Power down and move your card to another PCI slot until you are able to get it on an IRQ by itself, you will probaly have to disable another device to do this, I had to disable one of my onboard ethernet ports. (If you were able to force the cards IRQ then the above swapping and switching should not be needed, as the card will have it's own IRQ).
6. Off the creative CD that came with your card, install everything but the drivers, you probaly don't need to, and shouldn't need to, but Creative's software department is all over the shop, so I wouldn't take any chances. Restart the computer/windows.
7. Go to the creative site, and use the autoupdate utility there to download and install the newest updates.
8. Restart the computer. When in windows again, go into the control panel, then sounds, speech and audio devices, then sound and audio devices, then hardware settings/advanced. Hardware acceleration should be on full. If it is set to basic and you didn't manually do this then you have done something wrong, and EAX will not work, even if you manually set hardware acceleration to full. If you aren't sure you can go to start menu/run/dxdiag and run the sound tests, you will fail part of the way through.
The most likely reason for this is an IRQ conflict, you must resolve this conflict. Swap and sort PCI slots, and disable programs as necessary until this is sorted. You may need to disable firewire ports or USB ports in the BIOS to get this to work, depending on motherboard.
Thats about it. Try not to stuff up the driver installation as it is almost impossible to get things to work properly again if you do, short of a reinstallation of windows. You could try using a driver cleaner, yet with creative drivers they only tend to make things worse, I don't know why, try asking creative.
The main points from this little guide are:
1. Creative Cards need their own sole real IRQ (<17), otherwise they through a tantrum and you either get no EAX, or other problems like cracky sound, sound stopping for no reason, etc).
2. Install the newest creative drivers first, then the applications of the CD, then update those applications from the Creative site. Deviating from this order is a good way to cause yourself a migraine.
For the record I have reinstalled windows XP 3 times in the past 2 days until I nutted all this out. It took me 2 reinstalls just to get EAX working again, and, despite my fear it wouldn't work again, I did it a third time just to test it.
Edit: Added my further frustrations as per Freddie's Helios article, my board simply wouldn't allow me to force the IRQ, even with all IRQ's but one on reserved, and the last on PCI, had me in tears almost it did.
Now that I have Vista I will look at ways (probaly third party user made hacks and software) to get EAX, etc in Vista, if possible.
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