X-Fi and Gears of War on XP -- No rear speaker sound

[SH1]

Has anybody running Gears of War on XP been able to get their rear speakers to work?

Best I can tell, Gears requires OpenAL, which I've installed. However, Gears keeps choosing "Generic Software" as the device, instead of my X-Fi card, when it loads up. (I assume this is my problem, but I can't get it to choose the X-Fi...)

 

[HenryBravo]

Yeah I did some digging on this issue over the weekend in the official Gears of War forums. It turns out there's not a good solution at this time. The game doesn't properly support 5.1 out of the box. There is a hack to enable 5.1 but it's not a good one: the sound doesn't pan properly from one speaker to the next. For example if there is a sound behind you and you rotate your character, the sound will suddenly jump from one speaker to the next instead of a smooth transition from speaker to speaker.

Looks like we'll have to wait for a patch from Epic.

HB

 

[AdmiralFlameberg]

go to your gow folder in documents. and open up Wareengineusersettings.ini

Scroll down til you see Alaudio.alaudiodevice. go to its Devicename= take out generic software. leave it blank. now start the game. it will detect your sound card right. If you look at the logs it will tell you what it detected for sound. also do this for the one in your main game folder .ini .

It what I had to do for it to see my sound card right.

 

[SH1]

Thanks guys!

Unfortunately, I still haven't had any luck.

Maybe it needs a patch. (Hope it gets one. Hard to believe this is an issue, but maybe Vista and OpenAL have complicated things even for XP...)