I just installed NWN and noticed the sounds are worse than how I remember them. I noticed it's not possible to enable EAX in sound options and googling told me it's because EAX has been scrapped since Windows Vista.

Is there any workaround of getting it enabled. Googling suggested ALchemy. Is it a good option? I noticed the official website is not there anymore and it hasn't been updated for some time. I found old ALchemy installers on some sites, but I'm wondering if it's a good solution or whether it will create more problems.

Are there any other options?

I'm using my motherboard's sound card.

If your motherboard uses Realtek for sound, they do have an alternative to ALchemy called 3DSoundback. It's not really developed anymore (don't think it ever made it out of beta) and although it allowed at least up to EAX 2, it didn't really do much except make it sound like all your games are being played in an echo chamber or a really large church.

You're right. Big miss for me.

But playing around with sound options made the sounds good enough. Thanks for the suggestion, but it didn't do much for me either.

i thought creative themselves dropped EAX years ago???

They did, but that doesn't change the fact that hundreds of older games still use it.

yeah but OEMs or whatever don't care about their own damn product, it's useless to point fingers at MS or GOG or whoever hell else.

Who's pointing fingers?

What? The OP asked for help with EAX, we offered a few suggestions, no fingers pointed anywhere.

I suppose all hardware support is either dead or undead, but are there really no EAX wrappers that implement the interface in software?

There is an unlocked version of ALchemy you could try.

Thanks, unfortunately it didn't work for me though.

It detected the NWN installation, and enabling it did allow me to enable EAX and choose Creative EAX as sound provider in game. Unfortunately it also completely stopped all ingame sounds from working. No matter what provider I chose or whether I enabled EAX or not.

Since this somehow relates to sound I was wondering: I recently got myself some new headphones (others broke) and they have surround sound. How do I test if it works? I can listen to "tests" on youtube but does that really work?