DirectSound Alternative (Vista)

Vista does not support DirectSound API due to Microsoft wanting developers to switch to OpenAL.

Despite having Legacy Drivers, this is far from ideal and some games won't even work on moderate sound hardware. Creative is the only company to release a fix (ALchemy) for ONE of their cards.

Is it possible to adapt DirectSound to work on Vista and/or add another API option?

directsound works on my computer (its vista)? maybe its just ur sound card, i have realtek HD, i dont know thogh, im not much of a sound card person. im just saying it works on my vista

As I said, it is supported on some cards through legacy drivers, but not nearly all.

Realtek and Creative are two that do support it.

http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/default.aspx

Example of Creative's solution.

Can't edit, but wanted to add that I did get sound working on my system in XP, it is only Vista (which again, no longer supports DirectSound HAL).

WHAT?? I had no idea. I've done some reading, and I think I might be able to tweak it to use the Directsound emulator in Vista, but it will have very limited functionality (just stereo output as far as I can tell). I think I'm going to have to write a new XAudio2 plugin, which is the new sound API from Microsoft - but I've looked at it before and several effects and features from Directsound are missing in XAudio2.

This is annoying!