What card do you have? Does your driver software have an equalizer? I know the control panel for the Diamond MX300 does as well as a few other settings...might want to play around with them to see the effect.

Its a Xitel storm platinum (vortex 2) with 2048 reference drivers.

Updated my post with the card and driver version.

Depending on the game, A3D parameters can be tweaked. Here's the links..

Sin:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080829205848/htt … n_commands.html

For more games, heres the entire list.
http://web.archive.org/web/20000615022250/htt … elp/helpgm1.htm
All Unreal 1 engine games should support A3D, so even if Deus Ex for instance isn't on the list, the UT commands should work for it.

Yes thank you!

Btw it seems like some a3d 2.0 games dont like the Quad speaker option.

Heavy metal fakk 2 for example the gun sounds are mute when selecting 4speaker.
The game even has this option in its own menu but still it wont work.
Stereo option however works great.

Heretic II has awsome Quad speaker support i think.

SiN seems to be a little worse, but only when firing your weapon wich is kinda muffled 85% of the time.

I havent done more testing yet but i bet SiN will sound great if i set the vortex 2 menu on satelite speakers instead of Quad.

Anyone can give more detailed info in layman terms on what each a3d command does?.

In SiN, A3D 2.0 requires 1.01 patch and then 1.03 patch over it. Without these it will use A3D 1.0. There is also several more patches after those you could try (one by one).

I would also recommend trying 2041 drivers because 2048 caused me a lot of random problems in general.

And you can also try various A3D console commands as outlined below. Edit: just noticed tgod already posted these, sorry 😊

Console Variables

To access the console, press the tilde "~" key in the game. Use any of the console variables below to change the audio options in the game, and to tweak the sound to your liking.

1;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
2;; Brief description of the A3D console variables
3;;
4;; Key
5;; ---
6;; "variable name, in quotes"
7;;  - default value
8;;  - brief description
9;;  - value range
10;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
11
12Vars
13----
14"disable_a3d"
15- disables A3D
16
17"enable_a3d"
18- enable A3D
19
20"snd_restart"
21- restarts the entire sound system
22
23"s_buffersize"
24- 65536
25- size, in bytes, of sound data to buffer ahead.  Currently, each secondary buffer has 65536 bytes of data.
26
27"s_rolloff"
28- 0.9
29- adjusts the rolloff factor - when the rolloff value is increased, the effects of distance are increased: high frequencies are filtered and volume is lowered.
30- 0.0 -> 1.0
31
32"s_doppler"
33- 0.00
34- adjusts doppler. 
35- 0.0 -> 1.0
36
37"s_distance"
38- 23
39- adjusts the ratio of game units to meters. This affects velocity, positioning, and distance. The higher this number, the closer everything gets to each other (in audio terms).
40
41"s_min_distance"
42- 11
43- minimum distance before rolloff is applied to a source.
44
45"s_max_distance"
46- 10000.0
47- maximum distance before a source is muted.
48
49"s_2dvolume"
50- 0.88
51- the maximum volume which 2D sounds are played at. By the nature of the filters being applied to the A3D buffers, they are quieter then their 2D counterparts.  Hence it is important to quiet the 2D sounds to make up for this.
52- 0.0 -> 1.0
53
54"s_watereq"
55- 0.1
56- Amount of high frequency rolloff to apply when Blade goes underwater.  1.0 is air.
57- 0.0 -> 1.0
58
59"s_geometry"
60- 1

61- Toggles geometry rendering on/off. When disabled, geometry is not processed at all.
62- 0 or 1
63
64"s_occlude"
65- 1
66- Status of occlusions - 1 enables; 0 disables.
67- 0 or 1
68
69"s_reflect"
70- 1
71- Status of reflections - 1 enables; 0 disables.
72- 0 or 1
73
74"s_refgain"
75- 0.38
76- Adjusts the gain on each reflection, where higher number means louder reflections. Remember very loud reflections could cancel out the effect of HRTFs.
77- 0 -> 1
78
79"s_refdelay"
80- 1.2
81- Delay between a source and its closest reflection.  The higher the delay, the more time it takes between when the source and its first reflection are played.
82- 0 -> 100
83
84"s_occfactor"
85- 0.4
86- Transmission value of material - the smaller the number, the more occluded the sound is (less sound passes through the material).
87- 0.0 -> 1.0
88
89"s_numpolys"
90- 400
91- Maximum polygons to be rendered. Polygons will stop being rendered either when there are no more polygons left or s_numpolys polygons have been rendered. Setting this to 0 is the same as turning s_geometry off. 
92- 0 -> infinity
93
94"s_bloat"
95- 1.0001
96- Bloat factor for polygons. This effectively scales each polygon by a certain amount. This is a rough way to fill holes left by unrendered small polygons.

Just tried the game and the audio is indeed very bad in the 1.00 version. So I have installed the largest 1.00 to 1.11 patch and it solved it for me. Weapon sounds are now fine, voice dialogues are present, and even some graphical issues such as high gamma in OpenGL is okay now. Awful default controls and poorly chosen typeface are still there though. Note that I only have headphones and use older 2041 A3D drivers. Patch link: https://www.patches-scrolls.de/patch/3700/7/50110/download

Thanks alot for your input.

I use the 1.11 retail version of SiN.

When using stereo the game sounds ok.

But i really wish the Quad setting would work better.

Update!!

I solved it.

It was the windows 98 that was the problem all along.

In advanced Audio properties just leave the sample rate conversion quality on good instead of best and all my problems went away.

Damn!
The game sounds amazing now.

Is this sample conversion rate quality really important at all in some games for sound quality etc?

What issues did you have with the 2048 that is not present in 2041?
Are you using the a3d support pack 3.1.2?

About sample rate conversion, I dont know what all those sound settings are really, I almost always have nearly all sound settings on their defaults and just roll with it. But I will check out that option later, nice find!

2048 issues - Half-life voice dialogs being cut too short or some of them being almost inaudible, Diablo 2 not possible to activate DS3D 3D audio, and more various quirks I dont recall anymore. Your mileage may vary of course. If I remember correctly, 2048 is mainly about supporting EAX (which wasnt possible to activate in Red Faction anyway, but was possible in other games - resulting effects were pretty poor though, subjectively). So I downgraded to 2041, most of the problems disappeared (I dont really remember having a single issue now, aside from unpatched games of course) and I dont need EAX support at all (have better cards for that) so 2041 is a keeper for now. I will consider trying 2048 again only when I encounter a problem where I exhaust any other possible solutions first.

I dont think I run A3D support pack 3.1.2, what is that? I have the A3D demos package installed but thats probably something different.

edit and OT: also try Call of Duty 1, a good test is crawling under the barbed wires in first level with max volume and listening to suppressive fire over your head - its really something (with headphones at least). Late edit: I remembered wrong, it was EAX in Call of Duty 1, not A3D.

I got myself a copy of cod1+exp yesterday i will check it out for sure, but cod1 doesnt support a3d right? I thought it was just eax.

The A3D support pack (atleast i think that was the name) is an update to the existing drivers with additional fixes and tweaks i guess.

I have experimented a bit with and without it installed, and ofcourse i have compared the 2041 to 2048.

In half life as an example the 2041 to me makes alot of sounds muffled beyond belief.

I probably have had more luck with 2048 than 2041.

Also you can disable eax support im the 2048 control panel menu.

I really really am starting to love my Xitel storm platinum card.

A really neat thing is that it has digital optical out so i can connect the retro htpc to my big living room reciever.

Pure digital signal with no noise 😀

Oh btw the sample conversion quality setting that i mentioned earlier really made SiN shine.

But it is not perfect.

I wonder what A3D console command or win98 tweak that can make it 100%

I think it is a windows bug that gave me these sound problems with a3d quad (4speaker) option turned on.

If only i can figure this out as there really is no alternative way to play the games as driver support is worse on later windows versions.

There is no way i will get rid of win98se either as it is the perfect os otherwise for my needs.

About the sample rate setting.
I have not tried any other games with this setting changed yet so i cant say if it will work on more games.

Quad mode on SiN is amazingly better when that setting is turned down instead of up to the max.

I tried to google about the sample rate conversion quality on win98/win98se but i cant find shit.

Im really curious about what it does/does not do.
And about any bugs etc regarding it.

SiN is one of my absolute favorite games and i never had an Aureal vortex 2 back then so im really amazed that SiN can sound this good.

Unrealdevon wrote:

A really neat thing is that it has digital optical out so i can connect the retro htpc to my big living room reciever.

Pure digital signal with no noise 😀

Unrealdevon wrote:

About the sample rate setting. I have not tried any other games with this setting changed yet so i cant say if it will work on m […]
Show full quote

About the sample rate setting.
I have not tried any other games with this setting changed yet so i cant say if it will work on more games.

Quad mode on SiN is amazingly better when that setting is turned down instead of up to the max.

I tried to google about the sample rate conversion quality on win98/win98se but i cant find shit.

Im really curious about what it does/does not do.
And about any bugs etc regarding it.

I was curious so I did a bit of Google searching. You may have already found these:

This link says that "Good" (the default) does linear interpolation, and "Best" does "high-end multipoint interpolation" (which this link describes a bit more).

This link describes some of the problems, including something that might possibly be relevant to you since you are using digital optical out (although it sounds like it should have been fixed in Win 98SE).

Unrealdevon wrote:

I got myself a copy of cod1+exp yesterday i will check it out for sure, but cod1 doesnt support a3d right? I thought it was just eax.

You are right, I was confused there. The pcgamingwiki states it does support A3D but after testing it now it does not, even after updating to 1.5 and trying the mss_3d_provider console commands. It was EAX all along then... but still - I was impressed by the "liveness" of the audio there (under XP with EAX on Creative Labs X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro). I have tried installing Call of Duty 2 as well because pcgamingwiki states that one supports A3D "too", but I got an error saying Windows NT/95/98/ME are not supported so I will assume A3D does not really work there either.

late edit: Just tested CoD1 with Aureal 2048 drivers and its EAX1, its not very good. Then I tested the above mentioned X-Fi card under WinXP with EAX1 and thats a lot better but where it really shined was EAX3 (at max volume).

jonpol wrote:

I was curious so I did a bit of Google searching. You may have already found these: […]
Show full quote

Unrealdevon wrote:

A really neat thing is that it has digital optical out so i can connect the retro htpc to my big living room reciever.

Pure digital signal with no noise 😀

Unrealdevon wrote:

About the sample rate setting. I have not tried any other games with this setting changed yet so i cant say if it will work on m […]
Show full quote

About the sample rate setting.
I have not tried any other games with this setting changed yet so i cant say if it will work on more games.

Quad mode on SiN is amazingly better when that setting is turned down instead of up to the max.

I tried to google about the sample rate conversion quality on win98/win98se but i cant find shit.

Im really curious about what it does/does not do.
And about any bugs etc regarding it.

I was curious so I did a bit of Google searching. You may have already found these:

This link says that "Good" (the default) does linear interpolation, and "Best" does "high-end multipoint interpolation" (which this link describes a bit more).

This link describes some of the problems, including something that might possibly be relevant to you since you are using digital optical out (although it sounds like it should have been fixed in Win 98SE).

Very intresting.

Thanks!

Maybe the unofficial sp3 v3.64 has messed up the kmixer.

I will try a clean instaliation with only official packs.