Upfront: AI was a major part of my workflow here.

I've long wanted a way to properly enjoy A3D audio on a modern PC but to my knowledge although there were attempts none were fully completed. A few years ago I was given an original Aureal Vortex SQ2500 (aka the Vortex 2), and after making a emulated PowerVR in 86Box and as a wrapper I wanted to try the Vortex 2 next.

It turns out that it hasn't been quite as easy, in part because it's a lot harder to pin down differences in audio. That said, after a few revisions this is version 0.3 of the 86box fork I've made and...this matches the real card rather well: https://github.com/z2k-retro/86Box/releases/tag/vortex-v0.3

My goal here is accuracy first - others can and should build on this in things which may be more useful for actually playing games, but I wanted to create a sort of synthetic baseline so people can test their projects against what it actually sounded like. There are numerous options for logging in the card configuration, including both a basic log option and a full trace dump option for advanced debugging. Comparing those trace dumps to running the real card traced in QEMU - and also comparing the recordings - has been the basis of much of the project.

As with the PowerVR project I've created a tools repository with information about the project and card. The goal is to allow others to build on this and make their own things: https://github.com/z2k-retro/aureal-vortex2-tools

All of that said, if you have a fairly recent PC install Windows 98 with a Voodoo3 for video and the Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500 for sound, and try playing some Half-Life, or your other favorite game with A3D support. There were a lot of them: https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/3daudio_games.php