Nice catch as I do not have Windows 11! I think the reason I opted for DirectSound is that Windows 7 does not support XAudio out of the box. Perhaps I should drop Windows 7 or try to make some runtime detection in Windows 7, but it will be hard to test as I have Windows 10.
This is going to show my nerdiness, but judging from the default application icon for the game demo, I'm assuming you're using GameMaker? If so, it handily includes a function which tells you exactly what OS the game is running on.
Otherwise, I'm gonna have to go with a generic suggestion and say the Windows SDK does include a way to detect what OS version the game is being run under, which works as far back as Windows XP and as current as Windows 10 and beyond (at least according to the most current documentation I can find).
Hope that helps!
No, no game maker here. This is a completely custom engine written from scratch. It's actually quite nice and powerful, more like Unity but for pixel art games. It's done completely with pure c++ and hot-reloading for everything with a minimal set of dependencies which suits me nice, no dependency on any third party engine that breaks the game.
Someday I will probably open source it.
Detecting is not really the main issue, it's that I don't have Windows 7 around to test it :) But it sounds like XAudio is the way to go. It's much more performant anyway and I would want it to be the default.