There's not much to it.
Just running that patch includes a good working openAL driver. You simply click on options - advanced option, a little oldschool screen pops up, select drivers, select openAL, and tweak settings as desired.
Main gotcha with that menu is it runs in native windows controls and pops you out of fullscreen, some drivers/renderers crash the game doing that, so I recommend using the new D3D11 renderer in windowed mode, without any borderless fullscreen applied. Also disable specialK temporary if using, i found it broke that menu, didn't crash but just the mouse wouldn't work on it with special K.
Alternative the default galaxy driver also works by copying the dsound.dll from alchemy on creative cards. Or if you want to get fancy you can copy this into your alchemy.ini I set up:
[Unreal 1 Gold]
RegPath=HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Unreal Technology\Installed Apps\Unreal Gold\folder
GamePath=
SubDir=System
RootDirInstallOption=True
Buffers=4
Duration=20
MaxVoiceCount=128
DisableDirectMusic=False
For the steam version you'll probably have to also point that reg key to your directory, wasn't there by default for me. But the disk version maybe creates it.
There is also a newer updated openAL driver on the oldunreal forums. I tested it and actually seemed worse than the one included with 227i on my 5.1 surround setup. Perhaps it's just intended for headphone users.
--Axer128 (talk) 20:02, 18 March 2022 (UTC)