Frankly, I was going to be brief and just mention a modded driver for every manufacturer but then, Creative part was becoming really long, so I decided to split it.
Then I figured out even that split was becoming too big, so this post while just tell one of my usual stories of the past
So.. we could say that 80% of the driver hacking scene is (was?) done by a single person: mr. Daniel Kawakami (aka daniel_k)
Everything started in 2007 when Creative released ALchemy for their X-fi series... leaving Audigy and Live! users high and dry. And here is where the father of all the tweaks's career started.
He soon tried to improve even cards' own drivers, patching odd bugs and fixing Vista compatibility issues. But what then?
Creative released ALchemy for older soundcards too.. but to a condition: you had to pay for the "legacy" support. Therefore his work entered into competition with Creative all of a sudden.
So.. they kindly threatened him and he simply decided to leave. Ok, actually the wayback machine hasn't the whole story, and he never really left 100%
A nice summary of his works is given in his vent e-mail to wired (and some older file names can be checked here)
After some time though he came back (wikipedia claims there was an agreement but I couldn't find other reference)
Ok, let's just list his massive firms:
- Z, Zx, ZxR and Recon3D
- SB Live! series Support Pack (I don't actually know why all Live! stuff has been removed between May and September)
- SB Audigy Series Support Pack
- P17X Series Support Pack
- SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCIe / Notebook
- SB X-Fi Series Support Pack (supports Auzentech, Gigabyte and Onkyo solutions too) [alternative Universal Audio Architecture]
- SB USB series Support Pack
- Gameport support pack for Vista 32-bit (x86) and 7 (no 64 bit) (again, I can't understand why it was pulled out from forums) Better page layout, older version
EDIT: bugs with OpenAL exist in newer driver versions (EDIT3: rip making a sense of anything)
EDIT2: lol, they went as far as to bully iD too