I know the love and respect for the Aurreal Vortex 2 Soundcard, but what is the opinion of the Vortex 1? Buliding a Window 95 PC with a P166 and was going to install an AWE64 as well as this Vortex 1 I have as my Vortex 2 is installed in another PC..
Thoughts on the 1?
Pretty much inferior in every way, so no practical reason to use it.
I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.
Is it on par with / better / worse than a SB Live! that would be used for Windows 95?
Vortex cards can't do EAX and that's a bummer for some games. Vortex cards on the other hand do better positional sound with headphones or 2 speakers. So really you want a Live/Audigy or a Vortex 2 depending on game.
I would never pick a Live over an Audigy 1/2 besides for nostalgia or whatever. The Live has noise on its front output. Though it is a bit of a pain to set up a an Audigy with the VXD drivers you need to use.
I was gonna go with the SB AWE64 for DOS Games on the P 166 and Vortex1 or Live for Windows 95 games....
I could go with an Audigy, I thnk I have another one in my parts as I know I have one Audigy and one Audigy2 in use...
Its a pain to setup in Windows 95?
wrote:Its a pain to setup in Windows 95?
Not really, for my (admittedly overkill) Windows 95 rig, my only sound card is a Sound Blaster AWE64 Value (with 28MB of RAM via Simmconn) and it gets the job done on either platform of gaming - both DOS and Windows.
I think the only scenarios where you would need both an ISA and a PCI sound card on a Windows 95-era rig are if you want to either play games that use A3D/EAX or watch DVD Video movies (depends on how your ISA card handles 44.1KHz down-sampling, I doubt you'd want to watch DVDs on a P166 anyway 😜 ).
Thanks for the info...
Yeah, no plans to watch DVDs on the P166!! I think I am gonna install the AWE64 with some RAM like you said and install the Vortex1 just to test it out and see how it sounds, but rely on the AWE64 for most everything.
To expand on what KCompRoom2000 said, if you're doing a period-correct build for 1997, the first Vortex card may be worth having.
It was one of the first PCI sound cards, arriving way ahead of Creative to the interface. One of my favorite games, Jedi Knight (US release: October 1997), had an advanced sound mode exclusive to A3D. Sound Blaster dominated at this time, so the card was widely advertised to work alongside SB ISA cards. Whether this worked well in practice, I don't know. I have an original Diamond Monster Sound that I will be testing, eventually, for this very purpose.
