One of the changes in Windows Vista (and 7) was a new audio stack. While it came with many nice improvements, MS also removed DirectSound3D, which was used by many, many games to provide positional audio.

In Windows Vista and 7, DirectSound runs in software emulation mode. There are several disadvantages, the most obvious being that only stereo sound is supported (meaning that 3 speakers in my 5.1 setup go unused) and there is no hardware acceleration of 3D effects (meaning a possible performance hit, too).

One affected game is Neverwinter Nights 2. I was disappointed, because NWN2 has pretty good 3D sound effects, especially for those with 5.1 setups. I’d heard of Creative ALchemy before, but as I didn’t have a Creative soundcard, I knew that that wouldn’t help. Fortunately, Realtek released a similar program called 3D SoundBack. While it is beta and hasn’t been updated since 2008, it seems to work perfectly. The “trick” for getting it to work on Windows 7 is to run it in Vista compatibility mode.

On a slightly-related note, if you’re looking for the music, they’re stored as MP3s (renamed to .bmu) in the app directory (eg. C:\Program Files (x86)\Atari\Neverwinter Nights 2\Music). For the expansions, append _X1 (for Mask of the Betrayer) or _X2 (for Storm of Zehir) to the folder name. These are the main themes:

• OC: Music\mus_ruins.bmu
• MotB: Music_X1\mus_betrayertheme.bmu
• SoZ: Music_X2\nx2_mus_maintheme.bmu