MI-80

Awhile ago I purchased The Witcher: Enhanced Edition on Steam. I have been holding off for awhile on playing because I love hardcore RPG's but seldom complete them. Recently though I've been thinking: with a Metacritic score of 86, several RPG Game of the Year awards under its belt, and the recent free release of the Director's Cut, which uncensors some content previously only legitimately available in Europe, what am I waiting for?

Now, the first thing I do when I start any game is check out the options. I kick the graphics up, adjust the controls, and all that fine tuning ability we PC gamers enjoy. One thing I noticed is that the option to enable EAX was grayed out in the Sound Options menu. This caught me off-guard since The Witcher is so new. I typically see this issue with older games designed for XP (since Vista overhauled the Windows audio subsystem), but The Witcher was released in late 2007, some nine months after Vista hit retail, and nearly a year since it hit RTM and was released to OEM's. A little looking around on Google confirmed it however: The Witcher does not natively support EAX under Vista, or in my case, Windows 7.

So, as I always do in these cases, I turned to Creative ALchemy. Yes, this solution does require you to have a Creative Sound Blaster sound card. I know onboard audio is very popular, and with good reason these days, however Creative has devised an ingenious proprietary application dubbed ALchemy. ALchemy restores 3D sound and EAX support for legacy titles in Windows Vista/7. I have tested it with Diablo 2, Warcraft III, and several other titles, and it works wonderfully. However, when I tried to setup The Witcher as normal, simply by launching ALchemy and it auto-detecting the game, it didn't work, so I began some digging.

ALchemy Fail:

Now first off, this fix does work, but is a hack. Every time you upgrade ALchemy you are very likely to overwrite this hotfix, so be aware of that. I have contacted Creative and hope they fix this with a future version of ALchemy, as they do claim to support The Witcher, so with any luck they will devise a long-term fix. Basically the default ALchemy profile has an incorrect or outdated registry path, so that needs updating. From there ALchemy will work as expected.

1. You need a Creative Sound Blaster sound card installed. Ensure both its drivers and Creative ALchemy are fully updated from the Creative Labs website.

2. I did not have to set The Witcher application executable to run in Windows XP Compatibility Mode in Windows 7, though that is officially required for ALchemy to work, and I did have to do that under Windows Vista.

3. Locate your ALchemy installation directory. By default this is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Creative\ALchemy" under Windows 7 x64.

4. You cannot edit the needed file directly if you have UAC enabled, so if you do, move ALchemy.ini somewhere temporarily, such as to your Desktop, and open it for editing in any text editor such as Notepad or Wordpad.

5. Search for and locate the default entry for The Witcher. It was the 14th from the bottom for me, using ALchemy v1.25.10.

6. The default registry path is "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{F138762F-5A1F-4CF0-A5E1-1588EF6088A4}\InstallLocation". Change this to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CD Projekt Red\The Witcher\InstallFolder". If you do not want to edit the default profile, simply comment the default out by adding a semi-colon before each line in the entry, then copy and paste it to create a new profile (you can also create a new profile with a different name or change the name of the default profile; you will get an error from ALchemy if you have two profiles named "The Witcher"). This will make it easier to revert back if necessary for any reason. Once you are done, save the file and move it back to its original folder.

The changes are shown in the image below, with a new profile added and the original commented out. Note the extra lines not in the original are auto-added by ALchemy upon running the profile for the first time.

7. Launch ALchemy; The Witcher will now display and activate as normal. After doing so you can start The Witcher and enable EAX in the Sound Options menu!

Profit!