XP to support Aureal SQ2500??

[Electric Amish]

Saw in a thread at Anandtech that Windows XP will support the Aureal SQ2500.

Can anyone here confirm/deny this??

tia

amish

[Gurm]

Define "support".

Yes, it will work in XP, and it will "support" DirectX 8.1 - as all WinXP drivers will.

However, it won't be "supported", as in driver fixes and updates.

Although I am given to understand one company still does driver updates for their Aureal-based cards? I forget which one.

- Gurm

[EchoWars]

Turtle Beach still sells the Montego II, which uses the AU8830 chipset. Their drivers are useless to any other Aureal owner as the rear speakers are powered through a daughter card which requires a different codec. AFAIK, they pretty much just re-wrote Aureal's drivers to accomodate the new codec. Also, AFAIK, they still haven't caught up to the last driver revision released by Aureal...

[Novdid]

Videologic still has driver support for the aureal boards. I have a SQ2500 and I use drivers from videologic.

Their Vortex2 card is named Sonic Vortex2.

[Electric Amish]

Do the Videologic drivers work in Win2K???

Will the A3D work in XP?

I can't get my SQ2500 to work in any games in Win2k. The sound will work and then just lock up a few minutes into the game.


amish

[EchoWars]

Are you using the WPSET program to set the proper registers for the Aureal on boot? If not, need to do that first...

[Electric Amish]

I'm back to running 98 now. I never tried that.

amish

[Novdid]

I'm running 2K for the moment. The latest via 4 in 1 4.32 fixes that 686B issue.

The card works good but I notice that the performance is not that good (slows down the computer a little bit) and that I can't get the A3D to work in any game (HL, Q3, UT, etc).

I'm considering a Game Theater XP, experiences anyone???

[Gurm]

Game Theater XP... sounds great, runs great... in Win9x.

In Win2k there are several outstanding issues, virtually all of which seem to be related to the GTXP using a memory range that Win2k doesn't allow...

Windows XP actually ENFORCES that memory range, therefore the GTXP doesn't work AT ALL in Windows XP...

Hercules has promised working drivers by the time WinXP is released (Sept/Oct), but refuse to admit that this is the source of the Win2k problems as well.

Also the card has real issues with DX8.

Last but not least, because of the breakout box, you can't use the generic drivers, or the Turtle Beach or Videologic drivers.

All in all, I recommend the Santa Cruz or Philips AE.

- Gurm

[Novdid]

I can't find either of those here in sweden. Does anybody know were i can find those???

[dZeus]

Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is sold in Europe as Videologic Sonic Fury (well... they're not the same company, but it IS the same board anyway :-)

[Novdid]

Thanks.

[Novdid]

It's the same chip that's on the Game theater XP. Shouldn't this one suck in 2K too.

Just wondering.

[EchoWars]

Hmmm..that it is. I didn't know that.

Regardless, the memory problem is a software thing, and doesn't seem to be present with the Santa Cruz. It isn't perfect in W2K, but it's about the best there is (which, I realize, isn't saying much).

[bacon]

Novdid, I use a Videologic sonic fury on Win2K, and have had no problems with it at all, but this is just my personal experience with it. . All EAX and A3D 1 work fine as well as all the other features it has.
I can't see any support for Aureal 2 chips in WinXP, although i never did get around to using that hack for Win2K because i replaced it withe the Sonic Fury, theres no guarnetee it'll work in XP.

Gurm do you know where i can get generic drivers for the Cirrus Logic 4630?


Novdid I beleive you can buy Sonic Furys from ekab in sweden.