I might eventually. Right now I think what’s happening is, somebody at Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided “soundblaster is all PCI-e to PCI converted stuff, so let’s install a driver for that bridge for anything with a soundblaster device ID”, and/or the soundblaster install pings a server that doesn’t exist anymore. My card is not converted to an older bus… from what I’ve gathered.
I think it may be the drivers. I remember getting one of these (or close to it, don’t really remember since it was…2010sh). Although I was ensured that the card was functional, I never got it to run even on XP (or was it win7 already).
Only thing I would recommend here is to get Creative’s AE-5 (or higher). I never regretted buying it.
Looks like another quality Creative driver release - the core driver components are all dated 2012, which was 3 years before Win10 came out. Likely the “Windows 10 compatibility” testing was just someone seeing if the driver installed once on a RTM Win10 box and that was it.
You can try extracting the driver file to a folder (7zip exploded the .exe archive quite happily for me) and install manually via the inf file in \Drivers\Driver , but I wouldn’t hold out an awful lot of hope tbh.
There’s an unofficial driver that makes these work on Windows 10, I can’t remember what it’s called but I used to use it. It’s mostly Windows’ fault for ditching direct sound.
