It's amazing to me how many games from this era had some form of Dolby Surround support... and yet I'm not sure I've ever seen an actual Win 98-era 5.1 setup. I've done some looking and it's not even 100% clear to me how one would assemble such a setup. Has anyone done 5.1 surround gaming from this era?
Sound storm was the first
That's cool! Isn't Dolby Surround now retro actively being called Dolby Pro Logic?
Please forgive my ignorance, but I was too young to own my own Dolby equipment back then. 😅
However, I noticed that awesome Dolby Surround logo in shows like Star Trek Voyager..
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
//My video channel//
Going from memory, I don't think there were many games with explicit 5.1 speaker support before the WinXP era.
The Sound Blaster Live 5.1 came out in late 2000, and after that point, games started offering the 5.1 option in their setup menus. Before that, it was mostly labeled as "surround sound" which is less specific about the speaker setup.
You need a receiver that supports Dolby Prologic II/IIx/IIz. Your PC sound card will connect to the receiver with 2 channel stereo, preferably SPDIF. The receiver will upmix the audio to your 5.1/7.1/9.1 speakers.
You should be able to select gaming mode in the receiver for best results in terms of channel separation. Windows should be set to 2 speaker configuration in the control panel and sound card driver.
If the game supports matrixed Dolby Surround, the receiver should have an indicator that detects the input is matrix encoded.
If you don't see the indicator, check the game setup options and enable Dolby Surround.
Win 11 - Intel i7-1360p - 32 GB - Intel Iris Xe - Sound BlasterX G5
I ran a 4 speaker setup in the early 2000's using the SBLive! It really made a big difference in NFS Porsche, it was pretty good in NFS4 but NFS3 despite all the splash screens didn't make that much difference.
Annoying thing about Creative, 5.1 and 9x supported cards is for best results you need to run analogue cables unless you paid extra for the Dolby licence. Even then getting true 5.1 with EAX still enabled seems a bit hit or miss.
I've had a 5.1 setup for about 10 years now using Logitech Z5500 speakers. Sounds good when I'm allowed to use them
