Can you show a screenshot of that menu item in the game options? AFAIK, Gothic 3 never supported EAX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_EAX_support

I've been contemplating a thin client for quite a while, specially the HP t630, for running a modern OS. Those go at about the same price of a RasPi on eBay but are way more powerfull.
Fairly modern x64 AMD (not Ryzen) quad-core with integrated GPU capable of running many modern games and hardware decode most videos.

For anyone interested in thin clients, here is a couple of links that were helpful
Wikipedia AMD embedded list
parkytowers website wich has a truckload of information on those units

Edit: @ Phil from philscomputerlab, please, don't do a video on those as they will triple the price :D

Interesting. G3 was just an example, but one I thought had EAX. I don't have the game installed now, but if that list is accurate it seems to contradict the Alchemy list that mentions G3.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130702030043/http://connect.creativelabs.com/alchemy/Lists/Games/AllItems.aspx

So back in the day I think I remember I ran it with ALchemy win7, had buggy textures though good sound, and reverted to winxp but without community patch graphical improvements. THen discovered I could get stuff working in linux for both.

If there is indeed no EAX sound, just Directsound3D surround sound (hardware), then the added benefit of getting this to work in linux is kinda moot of course.

I'll try to install the game and see what the sound options are with the community patch installed or not/if there is an eax.dll somewhere etc.

Your description of the capabilities included in Wine Staging is not quite accurate. It does have a patch which implements EAX 1.0/2.0 in software and emulates hardware support to certain games that require it to enable EAX.

The emulation does not provide 100% coverage, but early EAX titles like Thief and Price of Persia titles will work. Other games will simply crash because of trying to use unimplemented EAX pathways, or simply not show EAX as supported even if the emulation is enabled in Wine. Which is one of the reasons why it's still in Staging.

It will work universally, when it does work. Your sound card does not need to support EAX or any form of 3D audio at all (as I previously said, it's software emulation of what historically was hardware accelerated logic), and can even be your standard integrated HD audio. There will be some CPU overhead though.

Last time I looked at the DOSBox site there was a list of games that were supported, partially supported and not supported, so for some it is more than an old hardware fetish.

For business stuff, I'm required to deal with legacy hardware. Got a machine application written in DOS - and no, there will not be an updated Windows version - that works 90+% with DOSBox, except for one thing: the software 'talks' to a proprietary ISA card, and DOSBOx does not. The highest OS we can use with this software is Windows 98 SE. So replacing a PC for these machines requires buying a new legacy box that has ISA, DOS 6.22 or WIN98 SE, and plays nice with floppies and CD-ROM drives.

There are hints that DOSBox-X might work with ISA, but I haven't yet played around with it to see how that goes.

On the upside, since I did get the software itself - minus ISA - working in DOSBox, I can at least open and use the customer machine software on my Win10 laptop. That in itself has been handy often enough.

I agree it is not really needed for MS-DOS era games, but for old Windows games, especially retail CD games which have copy protection for which you can't find a working crack online, yes.

It would be nice if there was some kind of "old Windows emulator" for old Windows games. Nowadays it is mostly a collection of different fixes (dgVoodoo2 etc.) that possibly make the games work. It is similar how people tried to make MS-DOS game run on Windows NT machines in the past, using various fixes like VDMSound etc. (sound would usually be the first (and sometimes only) thing failing when running MS-DOS games on Windows NT or 2000).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDMSound

I recall using it to get e.g. Ultima 6 to produce sound on Windows NT a long time ago... It wasn't until I tried DOSBox the first time when I felt I didn't need to keep any real MS-DOS (or Win9x machines which can boot to MS-DOS mode) around anymore.

Maybe WINE is the closest thing to a "Windows emulator", even if its name states it is "not an emulator".

Do I recall right you mentioned somewhere being 14 years old or such?

Yeah, I must admit that back when I was 14, I also only cared about the newest and best looking games, generally wanting to fit in with my school buddies (playing the same games as them), or failing that, having something that they would envy. I couldn't care less what kind of video games my grandfather had played in his childhood, probably something shitty. Even worse, maybe video games didn't even exist back then!

However, as years went by and I had to get rid of my older systems that I liked a lot, or they simply stopped working, I started gradually feeling the sensation that many call nostalgia. I recall the regret when I sold my Amiga 500 with all of its games... even though I had kinda gotten fed up with the system and its games (which is why I sold it), I still felt bad thinking I will never see and hear some of the games I liked on it so much. I even went to record some of its games onto VHS tapes, that way archiving at least part of my personal gaming history to future.

So when many many years later I experienced emulators like MAME and WinUAE which could run e.g. Amiga games pretty much perfectly, I was quite excited. And still am.

So don't feel surprised if you at some point do get a similar nostalgic feeling. Not saying you will for sure, but it is quite possible, depending if there are games (and gaming systems) in your childhood which you enjoy a lot. For instance, I know two 20-something young adults who were overly excited when they were able to replay the N64 version of Mario64 and the Playstation versions of Spyro 1-3 and Croc: Legend of the Gobbos, which they played to death as kids.

Another reason to want to play older games is if you have simply amassed lots of older games that you haven't had time to play yet, but still want to play them. I have quite a lot of such retail CD games still around, like the 2005 King Kong game I mentioned some time ago. With them it is more like I feel I lose money if I am suddenly unable to install and play any of them.

It is a bit similar if you had bought lots and lots of DVD and Bluray movies. You'd probably want to keep some system around that can still play them so that your library of movies doesn't become dead just like that. (Then again, I've fixed that problem with my DVD movies by ripping them into digital video files which I can easily watch on any system, without a DVD player or DVD drive).

To me, wanting to (re)play some older games is no different from being able to see some old movies or listen to some old music. Do you feel it doesn't matter if "you" could never listen to Pink Floyd or Beatles classics anymore, or see the 1987 version of the movie Robocop or the movie Brazil, as there are always newer music and movies you can play instead?

Is possible to get EAX working on modern OS's?
I have a couple of old Soundblater sound cards but I'm not in the mood to install Windows XP.

I guess that answers my own question, I dont have a dedicated retro machine, Have the space and hardware available but never felt the need for one.

People keep giving me old computers, this month I got 2 Pentium 4 machines and a Phenom x4 + HD 6950. One P4 machine was very cool with lots of expansion, geforce4 ti 4600 and a SoundBlaster audigy 2 (wich to my unsensible and untrained hears still sound very good on Linux Mint).
The Phenom 2 x4 will probably be gifted to someone in my area but the Pentium 4's are not usable this days. I feel bad to send good working units to recycle center.

Now that is cool. It's been years since I've heard those sounds. I honestly don't miss the CRT monitors for the picture, but a cat sitting on top of it and it tries to whack the enemies. :)

Sure, it works fine for me in Win10, with Alchemy.

[url=https://support.creative.com/kb/showarticle.aspx?sid=28967#:~:text=Creative%20ALchemy%20allows%20Sound%20Blaster,translating%20DirectSound3D%20into%20OpenAL%20calls]https://support.creative.com/kb/showarticle.aspx?sid=28967#:~:text=Creative%20ALchemy%20allows%20Sound%20Blaster,translating%20DirectSound3D%20into%20OpenAL%20calls[/url].

I have several retro systems as nothing beats booting up the original computers and playing them on a CRT. What I have done is added a CF card, Gotek or whatever the systems equivalent is as too much of the software disks/ tapes are now corrupted and no longer work.

It is hard for someone who may be looking at buying a retro system now as the prices have skyrocketed over the last few years.
An Amiga 1200 that has been refurbished will cost you northward of £300. A lot more if you buy it with a CF card installed with the games downloaded already.

There were some old systems at a thrift shop going for $15-20 that were gone within 10 seconds, no joke. There's a flipper in this city that bought a moving truck just to flip more. Wouldn't be surprised if he's a scalper on top of that.

Thanks for this, it's illuminating.

I think the 'emulation' or the Windows XP mode in Wine is so good and much better than the 'compatibility mode' of Win10 of older versions, that you don't actually need the EAX patch - just the fact that it's win xp is enough. This is at least what I suspect happens with my win xp games in linux - I get hardware accelerated sound merely because i'm in win xp mode in Wine, unlike using the Win10 compatibility mode.

As @teceem mentioned, Creative Alchemy also deals with getting these legacy hardware accelerated sound systems to work on modern windows OSes, and does not seem limited to getting EAX - also DirectSound3D hardware accelerated sound translated into OpenAl calls. I think this is what actually happened with my depiction of Gothic 3 improved sound - it sounded better because of this, not EAX, though I still have to confirm there is no EAX in G3 if i can be bothered to actually install it. But I don't think it does, otherwise it should be mentioned somewhere on the interweb. Anyways, there's still a bunch of other games that benefit from Wine's tranlations and OS compatibility modes, not only in regards to sound systems.

Yeah, it kinda makes me wish I hadn't thrown my old CRT away : /