Who would have thought that so many Win9x titles actually support that. Some of those 7.0 games were even made at the tail end of the '90s.
Yup! I should have splurged a little bit more back in the day. Oh well, it makes experiencing them for the first time now just that little bit more fun!
Unfortunately, my own Turtle Beach Montego II (Aureal Vortex 2 card) doesn't have a rear speaker jack. It's on the add-on daughterboard which I don't have, so I can't test surround sound in such cases.
Likewise, I have the same model of Vortex 2 as well, so I can’t check native A3D surround sound either. I should have done more research… I just snapped up the first cheap Vortex 2 card I found, and the only ones I can find these days with both speaker jacks are $150+. Have you ever seen the daughterboard for sale by itself?
Anyways, I’ve got a few more for the list:
Star Trek: Klingon Honor Guard – supports at least 5.1 surround. I needed to install the v1.1 patch just to get this one to not crash went navigating the menus so I couldn’t test v1.0. The patch notes mention that v1.1 adds “Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live support” so I assume it’s using EAX. Just like Unreal, open the advanced options panel, go to the “Audio” tab, and set “UseSurround”, “UseSpatial” and “Use3dHardware” to “True”.
Requiem: Avenging Angel – supports at least 5.1 surround. I also had to patch this one to get it to work since it requires DirectX 6, and only DirectX 6, until version v1.03. With this I could hear sounds coming from all five speakers, but the 3D positioning was… kinda off. Some sounds would pan correctly when I moved around a source, while lots of other sounds would stay fixed to certain speakers regardless of orientation. Also some sounds, like the player’s starting lighting attack, were very quiet when EAX was enabled, but fine otherwise. I tested A3D as well and that didn’t have the later problem, but some of the 3D positioning still seemed weird. This one might benefit from someone else also testing it, especially if they have a A3D capable card.
Dungeon Keeper 2 – supports at least 5.1 surround. There are options in-game for “environmental effects” and “Q Sound” but neither is needed to enable surround sound.
A few extra notes:
I’ve seen in a few places online that Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation supposedly supports A3D but I couldn’t confirm that, in-game, in any menus, or any read me files or patch notes. It seems to only support stereo sound from what I can hear.
I also briefly tested Star Wars: Dark Forces II - Jedi Knight, since it does have an A3D option, but it doesn’t seem to enable multi-speaker surround sound, or have any effect at all that I could tell, at least with the Audigy 2 ZS. Hopefully someone else with compatible hardware and a suitable set up could give this one a try as well!
Win98: PII 400 | 440BX | Voodoo3 | Live + SB16
WinME: P4 HT 641 | 865G | Geforce4 Ti4400 | Audigy2ZS
WinXP: C2 Q9400 | G41 | Geforce GTX 280 | X-Fi
Win7: i7 2600K | P67 | Geforce GTX 980ti | X-Fi
Win10: R7 5800X | X570 | Radeon RX 6800 | X-Fi Titanium