Hi,
Over the past six months I've read several times how much better A3D used to be than EAX and I've always been curious about how it sounds, especially since some of my favourite games support it (Thief, Unreal etc).
So I picked up a Diamond Monster Sound II MX300 (vortex 2) from ebay for a few pounds. XP seems to have drivers built in for it, but TBH it was a bit underwhelming in the games I tried like Thief, so I'm not sure whether the drivers fully support A3D. Does anyone know whether A3D works on this card under XP?
I've also got a second old PC so I put it in there and did a fresh install of Win98 SE. Just couldn't get it to work properly. It nearly worked in Half Life, except the sounds would sometime cut out, like someone would start saying something only to stop half way through. In Thief and Unreal though, the sound worked for a few seconds before becoming a horrible distorted mess. Clearly the A3D was going wrong in some way because the sound was fine with hardware accelerated sound turned off.
I tried 2 different motherboards in that PC (with fresh OS installs both times), and the card in every available PCI slot. I also tried WinME and I tried every Vortex 2 / MX300 driver version I could find on the net, and every relevant bios setting.
Did a bit of a search on the net and seems there were other people with the same problem so I'm just going to assume this card was a bit picky about what hardware it worked with.
Can anyone recommend another old soundcard card I can try, one that's maybe a bit easier to get working, but still fully supports A3D 1.0/2.0? I still really want to hear A3D working in Thief. From the brief few seconds it would work for before going wrong, it did sound excellent, the best positional audio/reflections I've heard.
An interesting side note is how much better the sound quality was on the ancient MX300 compared to my Audigy 2 ZS
If anyone has any suggestions to get the MX300 working under WinMe/Win98SE btw, please suggest away, but I really did try everything. I also tried various versions of the games in question via patches. The drivers did install, it's just that A3D seemed to go wrong.
Cheers for any insight
Simon.
Over the past six months I've read several times how much better A3D used to be than EAX and I've always been curious about how it sounds, especially since some of my favourite games support it (Thief, Unreal etc).
So I picked up a Diamond Monster Sound II MX300 (vortex 2) from ebay for a few pounds. XP seems to have drivers built in for it, but TBH it was a bit underwhelming in the games I tried like Thief, so I'm not sure whether the drivers fully support A3D. Does anyone know whether A3D works on this card under XP?
I've also got a second old PC so I put it in there and did a fresh install of Win98 SE. Just couldn't get it to work properly. It nearly worked in Half Life, except the sounds would sometime cut out, like someone would start saying something only to stop half way through. In Thief and Unreal though, the sound worked for a few seconds before becoming a horrible distorted mess. Clearly the A3D was going wrong in some way because the sound was fine with hardware accelerated sound turned off.
I tried 2 different motherboards in that PC (with fresh OS installs both times), and the card in every available PCI slot. I also tried WinME and I tried every Vortex 2 / MX300 driver version I could find on the net, and every relevant bios setting.
Did a bit of a search on the net and seems there were other people with the same problem so I'm just going to assume this card was a bit picky about what hardware it worked with.
Can anyone recommend another old soundcard card I can try, one that's maybe a bit easier to get working, but still fully supports A3D 1.0/2.0? I still really want to hear A3D working in Thief. From the brief few seconds it would work for before going wrong, it did sound excellent, the best positional audio/reflections I've heard.
An interesting side note is how much better the sound quality was on the ancient MX300 compared to my Audigy 2 ZS
If anyone has any suggestions to get the MX300 working under WinMe/Win98SE btw, please suggest away, but I really did try everything. I also tried various versions of the games in question via patches. The drivers did install, it's just that A3D seemed to go wrong.
Cheers for any insight
Simon.
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