Restricted Notes by a Geek

While I am not a fan of Daniel K and all the drama he has caused in the past, I will admit for now he did something that I very well like for a change.

He released his first driver support pack for the X-Fi series cards including those released by Auzentech and Creative.

The following cards are supported by this driver pack
- Creative SB X-Fi PCI (except Xtreme Audio)
- Creative SB X-Fi Titanium PCI-E
- Auzentech X-Fi Prelude

Components installed depending on detected card
- Creative SB X-Fi series driver 2.18.0001.8
- Creative SB X-Fi Titanium series driver 2.17.0006.8 BETA
- Auzentech X-Fi Prelude driver 2.14.0001 RC8.1
- Creative Audio Control Panel 2.55.12
- Creative Console Launcher 2.60.35
- DDL and DTS Connect License Activation 2.00.03 (*)
- Dolby Digital Live Pack 3.00.00 (*)
- DTS Connect Pack 1.03.00 (*)
- SoundFont Bank Manager 3.20.34
- THX Console 3.00.22

List of improvements and fixes
- CMSS works properly on Windows 7 Beta
- THX Console works with Auzentech X-Fi Prelude and other cards
- DTS Interactive encoder available on Windows XP
- All setup scripts were modified to detect Windows 7 Beta.

File details
Filename: XFI_SupportPack_1_0.exe
File size: 84.6 MB
CRC32 hash: 43225D94
MD5 hash: 76CBA45C9DF761FFBC8BD61D17B3D127
SHA-1 hash: 7BB68AF44C83CC65B7FB2EF4414FACEED4ECD015

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Original Post: Creative Forums

Very interesting article and video. I’d love to test this new sun xVM software to see how well it works, however from the video it seems to work really well and making life so easy at the same time. This will very much be the way forward to do virtual machines especially moving a live server to new hardware, without clients even noticing at all!

Video: Link
Original osnews article: Link
Sun xVM server software: Link

Since been using Vista I found little things that have changed that one got used to expect in previous versions of Windows explorer. Unfortunately this OS is here to stay for x86 gaming pcs as that is one of the best operating systems available regardless what most people will argue.

One of those things was that I could set windows to not have seperate view settings for each folder and set a global view setting. There is a workaround, and the same time it seems that at install time Vista saves these settings in the wrong location and therefor has no effect.

Here is how to fix this: Create a .reg file with the following contents and import it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\BagMRU]
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell]
“BagMRU Size”=dword:00002710

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\Shell]
“FolderType”=”NotSpecified”

I have not used Vista much knowing all the headaches that goes with the new OS and especially the fact that DirectSound does not go via the hardware layer anymore ect.

One of those things that always caused much pain was getting file sharing to work smoothly, especially if you just want to share something simple with guest access. In vista the guest account is by default denied from file sharing and this is the big problem. So to remove this restriction as well as the sharing headache that goes with it follow the following simple instructions:

1. On Vista Computer, click Start, type secpol.msc in the Start Search box and press Enter.
2. Expand Local Policies > User Right Assignment, and then you will see the policy “Deny access to this computer from the network” in the right panel. Open this up and remove the “Guest” account from this list.

Only that and Sharing will work like a charm.

Few weeks, or rather a month ago when I tested Windows Vista my biggest gripe with it was not all the new features, bloat and disk space usage, but the fact that Winamp couldn’t play songs smooth and uninterrupted while playing a game myself.

Vista features a completely re-written audio stack. Because of the architectural changes in the redesigned audio stack, a direct path from DirectSound to the audio drivers does not exist. DirectSound and other APIs such as MME are emulated as WASAPI Session instances. DirectSound runs in emulation mode on the Microsoft software mixer. The emulator does not have hardware abstraction, so there is no hardware DirectSound acceleration, meaning hardware and software relying on DirectSound acceleration may have degraded performance. It’s likely a supposed performance hit might not be noticeable, depending on the application and actual system hardware. In the case of hardware 3D audio effects played using DirectSound3D, they will not be playable.

Third-party APIs such as ASIO and OpenAL are not affected by these architectural changes in Windows Vista. A solution for applications that wish to take advantage of hardware accelerated high-quality 3D positional audio is to use OpenAL. However, this only works if the manufacturer provides an OpenAL driver for their hardware.

As of 2007, a solution to re-enable hardware acceleration of DirectSound3D and Audio Effects, such as EAX, called ‘Creative ALchemy’ was launched. Creative ALchemy intercepts calls to DirectSound3D and translates them into OpenAL calls to be processed by supported hardware such as Sound Blaster X-Fi and Sound Blaster Audigy.

This however also didn’t work out that good, in most cases it does work but for the gamer trying to listen to music via Winamp while playing a game will still experience problems.

gameschild took it upon himself to write an openal output plugin for winamp. I recently tested this plugin and it seems to work really really well. For those still trying to find the perfect solution might like to try it out as well. It does lack a lot of the features that the latest winamp direct sound output plugin include, however it has come a long way.

Author website: http://www.wumpus.co.uk/
Forum post: Link
Download: 0.5.2