Hello,

I should have played this game a long time ago and the 20th anniversary edition was just announced, so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to go play the original even if just to compare it with the new release (and it still aged pretty well!). Looking at the settings, I noticed "lost technology" such as W-buffer and EAX, but I'm only really interested in the latter since it tends to enhance the experience and likely won't be available on the remaster/remake.

For some reason it seems I can't enable EAX even after following the same steps as for Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (IIRC I had to fiddle with it a bit but it is working just fine there). The settings launcher just won't enable the tickbox to toggle it... Does anyone know how I could fix it?

Currently playing the GOG version of the game on Windows 10 64-bit. EAX Unified is already installed, I've extracted the dsoal archive into the game's folder, and even copied eax.dll from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time just in case (since it wasn't already in the game's folder).

Thanks in advance.


Update: Tried the method listed on the PCGamingWiki by using ALchemy (and restriction unlocker), all it ended up doing was to generate dsound.ini and give me slightly different audio device options. I fiddled around with RegEdit and managed to tick the "EAX reverb" box by setting "SoundFX" to 2, but I'm not quite sure it's working.

After messing around some more, it turns out ALchemy is required but technically only for the initial setup.

In short: the only things that matter are the dsound DLL and configuration file provided by ALchemy (at least for me; I already had EAX Unified so your mileage may vary), since the "usual" method involving OpenAL doesn't work and forcing the option on or off via the Registry Editor doesn't seem to do anything either. Same for the copied EAX DLL, it's not taken into account.

Here are the contents of the dsound.ini generated by ALchemy (which is actually the default settings for most games supported by it out of the box) so that you don't have to bother with the unlocker:
Buffers=4
Duration=25
MaxVoiceCount=128
DisableDirectMusic=0

From the little I've tested it changes the soundscape a bit but ultimately I'm not certain of how much of a difference it makes for the entire game. The settings say "EAX reverb" but it seems to be a bit more than that, sound sources seem spatialized a bit better but some sound much louder than in the "normal stereo" version (mostly tested in Pey'j's workshop and hangar). Note however that I don't actually have an EAX sound card, so maybe some things are not working as intended.