Add info regarding DirectSound registry key fix for Windows 8+

[Mystyle-48]

https://www.indirectsound.com/registryIssues.html

[mirh]

You can see in #34 why the problem may not even be (only at least) about Windows version, and how those keys aren't the whole list even if you wanted to pursue this fix.

[kcat]

I'm not sure what the link is supposed to do to clarify the issue or show what to do.

[JayQ2K]

How material is this risk actually? In the sense of do we know how many games actually use fixed paths to address dsound.dll and not always prefer a dsound.dll file in the game folder itself.
I know this can happen when no file available locally (so not in the game folder, but e.g., in the Windows System folder), but regular Windows behavior is to always look in the root folder first and only then check other locations for required files (regular FilePath behavior that is pretty common amongst most operating systems).

Thus far I've always just dropped the 3 files from the binary distributions in the game folder and everything works as planned. Didn't even make any changes to the alsoft configuration file.

[mirh]

As I pointed out in #34 (comment), this is eventually only about some games using CoCreateInstance instead of LoadLibrary to load directsound.

[Mystyle-48]

I see. The issue is a lot broader than I realized. Personally, I've had to run the .reg file before dsoal would work in any of the games I used it with on Windows 11 (Max Payne, Red Faction, Mafia, etc.) I'll close this and continue observing the developments of #34.

[mirh]

Mafia uses eax unified, indeed.
And I don't have red faction, so I cannot really tell much about it
But the strange thing is that I just tested max payne and both with and without eax.dll installed, it straightaway loaded the dsound.dll I dropped in its install folder.
Granted, this was on W10 21H2, but it seems to show there must be clearly at least another unaccounted variable here.

[ThreeDeeJay]

@mirh Yup, Red Faction also uses eax.dll (version 0.0.0.1) even with Dash Faction

@Mystyle-48 In the meantime, until we find a better method, you can also use my script here #34 (comment)
which patches more registry keys and has a direct effect on fixing (at least 99% of the time) local dsound.dll loading for EAX like this https://youtu.be/qN9EX33mcYU?t=111
The game database includes these instructions for Max Payne, Red Faction, Mafia and others 👀👌

[Mystyle-48]

@ThreeDeeJay I've been using that script for several months now, it really does the trick for situations where the game is required to run with elevated privileges :)

A while back I added a link to your solution on the PCGamingWiki sound card page:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Sound_card#DirectSound_hardware_path