Yeah, Aureal 3D was amazing. Unfortunately, GTA 3 was the only game I had to support it.

I'm skeptical to your claim on 128 voices in software during the days of the Pentium II/III, unless you are referring to midi. DirectSound software model had extreme latency issues and could hardly render complicated audio and DSP without 'screeching' noises being the final result along with stalling the CPU.

On newer game engines if you dig deep into config files to see that Xaudio2 games are limiting the no. of channels to 32 or less. Manually increasing the channels doesn't appear to work, as there are stilk muted sound cutoffs in situations where more sounds should be playing. At least it mutes/cutoff instead of screeching though.

And forgot to make soundtrack that anyone will actually remember. For the most part at least, hat off for exceptions.

I'd say Payday 2 is an exception. In general, I'm not big on the amount bass dropping, but the music is pretty ear worm when you're in the moment fighting off SWAT, HRT and special units..

Whoops, a bit behind times there Somehow missed that, as I haven't really played any hardware PhysX games since Mirror's Edge or Arkham Asylum, as far as I know.

But I still dislike it on principle. Game tech shouldn't be exclusive to certain hardware, like EAX was for Creative soundcards and how hardware PhysX is for nvidia graphics cards.

No MIDI, but it was in music software, like Impulse Tracker for DOS which used 256 internal channels. I never got up to more than 140 or so though, but that amount of channels worked well on my 200MHz Pentium (while my 66MHz 486 started to stutter around 40 channels IIRC).

Oh okay. I thought you were referring to number of max sounds in a 3d environment. I also agree on the exclusive hardware features. Heck, even with a high end Geforce brand GPU you need a secondary GPU dedicated to Physx to get the most out of it. Havoc physics are good enough in most circumstances. However, DS3D, OpenAL, and EAX 1.0/2.0 hardware support are available on most motherboard chipsets. They do have higher rendering quality than their software counterparts and equivalents. XAudio2 is the literal equivalent of Miles 2D Positional. I know DS3D wasn't available due to the new HAL design, but OpenAL was up for the taking.

Sorry, I'm babbling on too much here.

I blame that Motorhead concert at Leeds Queens Hall, Ace of Spades Tour. Until then the piezo speaker on my ZX Spectrum came through loud and clear.

I'm a compulsive editor. You should see how long it takes me to compose an e-mail.

Eh, no, not in my opinion. As I stated, "good enough" as it relates to most things is subjective...as in, "differs from person to person." The fact that a lot of malware will not be caught by antivirus software is not opinion. It happens all the time.

The only thing I said about EAX was that I liked it, but it wouldn't work anymore after Microsoft changed their hardware abstraction layer/driver model. That's pretty much a verifiable fact...even Creative has said so.

If you're talking about the statements I made about the Windows driver model/hardware abstraction layer, well, you're probably not going to find details about that in discussion forum threads about EAX.

I didn't say that you said that. You said that an antivirus and firewall are "good enough for gaming," and I simply stated that "good enough" is subjective and that an antivirus alone can let a lot of malware slip through.

Anyway, I never said that there's anything about EAX specifically that causes any kind of problems...in fact, I specifically said that I don't think that (putting words in my mouth, eh?). Microsoft changed their driver model in a way that broke EAX. Again, that's an unfortunate casualty of the change. However, the change in the driver model/HAL was good and needed, not because of EAX, but for a lot of other reasons. The Windows XP HAL was very old and in need of updates. It's sad that EAX had to go away as a result. Not sure what else I can say here. I guess I don't understand what we're arguing about at this point.

Yeah, I've gone off-topic replying to you! Seriously, though, no need to get agitated. If you want to continue the conversation, PM me. I'd be happy to continue the discussion.

No thanks.