(Hidden) Updated Vista Audigy 2 ZS Vista Drivers

The Creative lab new X-Fi driver does contain a newer driver for the Audigy Cards then what you can download from creative's web site.

The "current" beta driver for the Audigy 2 zs card
Date: 12/18/2007
Ver: 6.0.1.1261

The "hidden" driver found in the X-Fi
Date: 3/5/2007
Ver: 6.0.1.1272 (and none of the driver files say "beta" in them)

This is for advanced users... or those that are not afraid
This trick may work for other Audigy cards as well.

How to install, go to creative web site, pick Vista and X-fi card software
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi series Vista Driver 2.13.0012
SBXF_PCDVT_LB_2_13_0012.exe

Use a file compression utility such as 7zip, Power Archiver, etc to "decompress" all the files from the SBXF_PCDVT_LB_2_13_0012.exe.

From the extracted files, go in to a folder called "drivers". Run Setup (as administrator). Choose Update Existing Driver and check mark overright existing shared audio drivers.

During the update, it may indicate it's "Not Responding" but let it run anyway. You should get two "do you trust this driver" prompts, one for the game port, the other for the sound card, accept both times. Reboot when prompted.

You may be able to just run the "update driver" from the control panel -> hardware and point the the driver folder and see if it updates automatically.

Side Note: EAX via OpenAL does not yet work with GW using Creative Alchemy. Using the beta drivers and manually installing Alchemy would allow gw to run... and generate an error report on the desktop. With the newer drivers, no error report but GW would not have any sound until the alchemy files were removed.

Nice find.

...and now you know why I'm not installing Vista on my home gaming machine just yet. I do however have Vista Ultimate it on my works machine, which sadly puts my gaming rig to shame, and will no doubt give this a try tomorrow. May as well screw up works computer rather than my own eh?

There is another trick I tried.

Grab both the "current" beta Audigy driver and the newest X-fi and extract each to there own folder.

In the x-fi driver folder delete all the files in the root and the AudCon folder. Leave all the other folders alone.

Copy the root files + the AudCon folder from the extracted "beta" Audigy driver to the X-Fi driver files. Run the setup as you would if it was a normal driver

You will get a newer version of the "Creative Audio Processing Object Interface Module" .. not sure what it is does a keep the working Audio Console from the older driver. The newer Audio Console from the X-fi driver doesn't appear to work for the Audigy at this time.

Im still in XP MCE 2005 3x as much as I am booting in to Vista myself. I dual booting.. and don't see me removing XP anytime soon. I like vista but still waiting on some more driver / software updates.