3DsoundSurge FAQ Manager v1.0


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3DsoundSurge FAQ Manager Version 1.0

Below are our most common Frequently.Asked.Questions along with our best available answers.

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A3D Console Variables: If you are looking to tweak your A3D audio in games using the Quake 2, Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament engine then this is where you will find the commands.; What are the variables for Half-Life?; What are the variables for Sin and Wages of Sin?; What are the variables for Heretic II; What are the variables for Soldier of Fortune?
Aureal Technology FAQ: All about Aureal's technology including the APIs (A3D 1.0, 2.0, 3.0), sound cards, chips (including the Vortex 2 and Motorola DSP), speakers and anything else you can think of with respect to Aureal's technology. For support questions check out our support FAQ.; A3D 3.0: When will A3D 3.0 be released?; A3D 3.0: Can you elaborate more about the upcoming A3D 3.0?; A3D 3.0: What is volumetric sound?; A3D 3.0: Will A3D 3.0 require a new chipset, or will it be able to be implemented on the current Vortex 2.x boards?; A3D 3.0: What will the performance of A3D 3.0 be like?; A3D 3.0: Sony has mentioned doing A3D 3.0 in software on their new game console being introduced next year. Is the current sound hardware on the PSX2 capable of hardware A3D support, and is Aureal in talks at all about the PSX3 having an actual Aureal chip for sound?; A3D 2.0: What is wavetracing?; DRIVERS: Where can I get Linux drivers?; DRIVERS: The Vortex products are WDM ready … does that mean you have WDM drivers for them?; DRIVERS: Will the upcoming drivers for alternate OS's include A3D 2.x, 3.x and/or EAX?; DRIVERS: What's up with BeOS compatible drivers for Vortex1 and 2?; DRIVERS: When will we have access to feature complete drivers in Windows 2000?; DRIVERS: When will Aureal's Vortex cards support SMP NT systems?; DRIVERS: Will Aureal support 3D-Now! or any other SIMD set in their future drivers?; DRIVERS: How closely involved is Aureal in making drivers for different OS's such as Linux, BeOS, etc?; EAX/REVERB: What is the status of the EAX/2 support for Vortex 2 based sound cards?; EAX/Reverb: Are new drivers for Vortex 1 based cards being developed with reverb support?; EAX/REVERB: Will there be a performance hit from Aureal's reverb drivers?; GENERAL: What sound cards use the Vortex 2 chipset?; GENERAL: Will there be a TOSLink in future products?; GENERAL: What computer systems feature A3D?; GENERAL: Will Aureal continue to sell to OEMs and board manufactures, now that the direct market sell had been introduced?; GENERAL: Will current A3D 1.x and 2.x titles work with hardware T&L Cards or will they need to be patched?; GENERAL: Why do Vortex 2-based cards use more CPU time than the SB Live?; GENERAL: Will the new T&L accelerations of new cards coming out like GeForce and Savage2k affect how a3d wavetracing works?; GENERAL: What is Aureal doing to help get more advanced A3D support from developers?; GENERAL: When will Aureal release their next chip/card?; GENERAL: Is there going to be any support for hooking more devices to current or future Vortex hardware?; MP3: Does Aureal plan to offer hardware mp3 decoding?; OUTPUT: Aureal has noted that A3D 2.0 and the Vortex 2 have gone beyond 4 speaker panning and now use HRTFs. Can you talk about the 4 speaker HRTF? Is the HRTF used on all 4 speakers? What about up/down virtualization?; OUTPUT: Is there a negative impact on the HRTFs from using 4 speakers?; SPEAKERS: How does A3D technology handle the placement of sound to the side of the listener with a four speaker system?; SPEAKERS: What configuration is the A3D algorithms optimized for?; SPEAKERS: Will the Vortex 2 allow you to play music CDs through four speakers?; SPEAKERS: What is the projected release date for Aureal's new speakers?; VORTEX 2: What are the new features of the Vortex 2 over the Vortex 1?; VORTEX2: What can you tell us about the streaming capabilites of the Vortex 2?; SQ3500: What can you tell me about the SQ3500's DSP?
General Audio FAQs: Everything that we can't find a specific home for.; How can I run two (or more) sound cards in my system?; I cant seem to get DOS sound to work correctly even though the system says that DOS support is enabled. What's up?; What do you mean by dynamic range?; I’ve heard about PCI bus hogging by video cards – what is that all about?; SPEAKERS: What’s the ideal height for the 4 speakers relative to the listeners head?
Sound Blaster Live!: A growing collection of questions and answers for Creative Labs 10K1 based cards including the original Live and Live Value, the MP3+, the X-Gamer, the Player 1024 and the Platinum. Our FAQ is intended to supplement but not replace Creative's own extensive FAQs.; How to I get rid of the Live!News update program in the system tray so that it does not reappear everytime I reboot my machine?; Can the Live! SPDIF out worth with the Cinemaster DVD Player?; In terms of the acutal board, what is the difference between Sound Blaster Live! Platinum, X-Gamer, mp3+ and Player 1024? What about the new 5.1 versions of the cards?; When I enable the Digital Only setting in the SBLive mixer, I only get sound from the rear speakers. What am I doing wrong?; How do I apply an effect to the microphone and not to the other inputs (ie TAD in)?; I am having trouble installing the EAX demo that I download from Creative Labs. What can I do?; How can I get LiveWare 3.0 to work in Windows 2000?; Can a Live!Drive be used with the original Sound Blaster Live! cards?; Does the EAX setting have to be the default 'no effects' in order to get EAX to work correctly in games and secondly, do I have to have the Creative Launch installed on my system for EAX to work correctly?; I have an SB Live! and a Dolby ProLogic Receiver with L/R RCA inputs. I cannot get the EAX directional sounds to work, only the environments. What is the best way to hook up the card to my stereo?; I have one of the original Sound Blaster Live! Value cards. Will Creative be releasing a version of the LiveDrive or LiveDrive 2 that can connects to my card?; I am having a problem running the EAX demo. What should I do?; I have installed LW 3 on and when I try to play MP3's, the player crashes giving the message that MPLAYER2 caused a divide error in module IVIAUDIO.AX with a bunch of other details. It does this for both playcenter and windows media player. What can I do?; How many IRQ's does the SB Live use?; I noticed a sblink on my mainboard. Am I supposed to connect it to my Sound Blaster Live?; What is a Live!Drive?; Why can't I connect the DIN connector on my FPS2000 or DTT2500 to my Sound Blaster Live?; I have a Sound Blaster Live MP3+, X-Gamer, or Player 1024. Do I have to get Creative's Digital Output Module or LiveDrive to get a COAX SPDIF out?; I just installed LW 3.0 and I can't find all the legacy game presets. Where are they?; I had a bunch of custom environmental presets and since installing LW 3.0 I can't find them. Where did they go?; My LW 3.0 - LAVA / Playcenter installation ends complaining about lack of disk space and I still have plenty of space. What do I do?; I have the LW 3.0 / Playcenter/LAVA full download and it won't install. What should I do?; I am going to get the LW 3.0 web download. Do I need LW 2.x or anything else installed on my system before I install LW 3.0?; I have installed LW 3.0 and my 8 or 12 MB SoundFonts go back to 4 MB SoundFonts and the SoundFont cache keeps going back to 12 MB after I reboot my computer. What can I do to stop this?; I have installed LW 3.0. Now how do I find movie mode?
Vortex 2 Technical Support FAQ: A collection of technical support questions and answers for soundcards based on Aureal's Vortex 2 chip. Many questions and answers are provided courtesy of Aureal but are not the official position of Aureal Inc.; AC3/DVD: Is there any way to use a hardware DVD decoder and have the Vortex 2 board do the 4 speaker output?; DOS: How do I disable Sound Blaster emulation?; DOS: How do I disable the Sound Blaster Pro emulation permanently?; DRIVERS: What are reference drivers and why should I use them?; EAX: Does this card support EAX?; ERRORS: Why is A3D failing to initialize on all my games?; ERRORS: Why does the Wavetracing Demo report that I don’t have a Vortex 2 chipset and that reflections will not be enabled?; ERRORS: What is the bass problem I’ve heard about on the Vortex 2-based cards?; ERRORS: Why does my system lock when the AU30DOS.COM line executes?; ERRORS: Why doesn’t this card work well with motherboards that use the VIA MVP3 chipset?; ERRORS: I am getting a Blue Screen with an error in VXD AU30CORE(01) after installing the latest Vortex 2 Reference Drivers. What can I do?; ERRORS: My games are crashing with DirectX7. Whats up?; ERRORS: My Diamond Monster Sound MX300 exhibits problems after switching from the MX300 drivers to the reference drivers. What can I do?; EQUALIZER: Can the multiband equalizer be used discretely between the front and rear channels to compensate for the different speakers?; EQUALIZER: How do I get bass and treble controls?; INSTALL: I have an IBM 300GL or Sony VAIO USB and my system hangs during Vortex driver installation. What can I do?; INSTALL: My Vortex/Vortex 2 board won't install properly with the latest drivers. What can I do?; INSTALL: How do I remove / update drivers?; JOYSTICKS: What joysticks and other game controllers are known not to work on the Vortex 2 products?; JOYSTICK: How can I get joystick acceleration on my Vortex 2 board?; JOYSTICK/MIDI: Can you use a MIDI daughtercard and the MS feedback sticks at the same time or will there be conflicts?; MIDI: Will users be able to seleect preset reverbs and/or create reverb setting for playing MP3s or MIDI files?; MIDI: Will the Vortex 2 MIDI implementation support any kind of sysex?; MIDI/DLS: Why am I not getting any sound from my wavetable daughterboard?; MIDI/DLS: How do I load a different wavetable set at boot time?; MIDI/DLS: Why does DirectX 6.1 Diagnostics say that the Vortex wavetable does not support DLS?; MIDI/DLS: How do I download new sound banks to my card?; MIDI/DLS: Is there a limit to the size of sound banks I can download?; MIDI/DLS: Why does loading some DLS files cause my system to crash?; MIDI/DLS: Is there a patch editor available for Vortex 2-based cards?; MIDI : Does the Vortex II offer a connector for a MIDI daugher board?:; MIDI: Can I use my external wavetable card and an external midi device at the same time? Is this a driver issue or does an external midi device have to be physically pluged into the Vortex 2 board for the option of a second midi port to be available? (like how it is able to detect which audio out jack is being used).; MIDI: I have a wavetable daughterboard. Since I won't be needing the Vortex2's midi capabilities, is there anyway to completely disable it and recover the memory by unloading the sample midi set?; MIDI: The Vortex 2 supports both a waveblaster header as well as a joystick midi port. Are these separately addressable (appear as separate ports) to a sequencer or are they ganged together?; MIDI: What is the general memory size of the Vortex II for downloaded instruments?; MIDI: When I play MIDI files using the Vortex 2 wavetable I get four speaker playback but when I hook up a wavetable daughterboard the MIDI files only playback on 2 speakers. Is that normal?; NT: Why does sound go away under Windows NT 4.0 on my multi-processor machine?; OUTPUT: Why does audio from my wavetable daughterboard, MIC input, LINE IN input, and AUX input only play out to the front two speakers when I am in quad mode?; OUTPUT: What is the difference between Quad mode and 2-Speaker modes?; RECORDING: Why am I having trouble recording from my LINE IN and MIC jacks?; S/PDIF: The S/PDIF port is treated as just a simple output for the front channels during normal usage (not dvd playback). Does Aureal plan to send the 4 speaker channels through the S/PDIF port in AC-3 Dolby Digital 2/2 mode or even 3/2 mode(front/rear) to allow a S/PDIF connection to a Dolby Digtal home theatre setup to use four speakers?; SPDIF: I installed the 2040 reference drivers and now my SPDIF out is not working. What can I do?; My question was not answered here – whom do I contact for support?
XG-Movie 5.1 Digital surround Card: In this FAQ we had started the most complete source of info on the XG-Movie 5.1. In our prevew we had taken a hands on first look at Yamaha’s now cancelled XG-Movie 5.1 sound card. Thats right - we said now cancelled. The bad news hit us on December 9, 1999, when Yamaha respectfully asked us to remove our preview as they did not want to built anticipation for a card that will no longer hit the market. For those of you who were looking forward to the advanced movie features of the XG-Movie 5.1 the one glimmer of hope is the company that apparently did some (if not all) of the board design (StarUSA -http://www.starusa.com) will be carrying forward with their own movie focussed board. The specifications of their board are clearly subject to change but we are in contact with them and will offer you new information as it comes available. Both Yamaha and all of us at 3DsoundSurge apologize for any inconvenience and disappointment resulting from this announcement.; What happened to your XG-Movie 5.1 FAQ and Preview?
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