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FAQs: Vortex I Technical Support FAQ
Vortex 1
Currently, these are cards that use the Vortex 1 chipset:
Currently, these motherboards ship with a Vortex 1 chipset integrated on them:
At this time, Dell, Sony, Compaq, Samsung, and Packard Bell Europe all build systems that feature true A3D. Since new models are constantly added, and model numbers often change, please check with your system vendor for A3D compatibility.
Reference drivers are basic drivers written by Aureal for their Vortex chipsets. Based on these reference drivers, board manufacturers create drivers for their sound cards. In most cases, you should always use your manufacturers’ drivers; however, since the reference drivers will always be the latest, you may want to use the reference driver if it fixes a problem that you’ve been experiencing. You may lose out on any additional functionality incorporated into the manufacturer’s drivers. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that Aureal will not provide support for you and your use of their drivers. It is still up to your sound card manufacturer to provide you with support, and they may not support you either if you are not using their drivers. To download Aureal's reference drivers, you can visit our driver download page or go directly to Aureal's page: http://www.a3d.com/html/download/drivers/
Vortex 1-based cards were designed to take advantage of A3D 1.x games, and the drivers that ship with Vortex 1-based cards support only A3D 1.x functionality. Aureal has released new A3D drivers at their web site to extend most A3D 2.0 functionality to Vortex 1 users as well. The latest A3D drivers can always be obtained from here: ftp://ftp.a3d.com/pub/Public/Drivers/A3D/a3ddrivers.zip This file contains a small install program that will copy over the new files and make changes to your Registry to enable A3D 2.0 to work.
Most likely this is a result of a previous sound card installed on your system. Some newer sound cards provide a "fake" A3D.DLL file in order to emulate A3D. The problem is that their uninstall programs do not remove this file and leave it on your hard drive. When your A3D card’s installation program copies over files, it sees that there is already an A3D.DLL file on the system and if its newer, leaves it there. You can solve this by simply copying the A3D.DLL from your manufacturer’s CD (or Aureal's reference drivers) over to your Windows System folder, overwriting the one currently there. That should solve A3D initialization problems.
There are two ways to do this – before and after the drivers are installed. Before the drivers are installed, copy the drivers to a directory on your hard drive. Load the AU30MMED.INF file in WordPad or Notepad. Navigate down to this section of the file: [AspenOverides.Addreg]. Remove the semi-colon from the line ;HKR,Config,DisableSBFM,1,1 so that it reads HKR,Config,DisableSBFM,1,1 Save the file and exit. Now when you install the drivers, the driver will load but not be initialized and will not use any resources. Sound Blaster emulation will not work. If you already have the drivers installed, you can still disable Sound Blaster emulation via Device Manager. Right click on the My Computer icon on your desktop and select Properties. Click on the Device Manager tab, and then double click on Sound, video, and game controllers to open that section up. Double click on the Sound Blaster Pro emulation listing. On the General tab, check the box that disables the device. A restart is necessary for this to take effect.
The only game controller known not to work is the Thrustmaster Rage 3D. This is due to their driver, and unfortunately, cannot be fixed from Aureal's end. Aureal will continue to work with game controller manufacturers to ensure the highest level of compatibility with their products.
By default, the wavetable header volume is muted. Double click on the mixer icon (yellow speaker) in the System Tray. Select Options | Properties | Playback. In the "Show the following volume controls:" box, make that sure that the wavetable header is selected – it will be the option marked "MPU-401", "VIDEO", or "Ext. Wavetable" depending on the drivers you are using. Once you have checked the box, click the OK button. You will now see a new slider on the mixer for it; remove the check from the Mute checkbox on it, and adjust the slider to the desired volume.
Bass and treble controls are supported in the reference drivers 4.05.1160 and higher. Please note that this is also dependent on the codec used by the manufacturer on your card. If you have the 4.05.1160 drivers (or higher) installed, double click on the mixer icon (yellow speaker) in the System Tray. Select Options, and make sure that the menu item "Advanced Controls" has a check next to it. If it does not, then select it. Select Options again and verify the check is there. Once Advanced Controls is checked, you should have a button marked Advanced beneath the Master Volume slider. Click it, and make sure the "Enable Tone Control" box is checked. You can then adjust the bass and treble to your desired settings.
If you are using Norton Anti-Virus and its boot time program, try moving the two programs far away from each other. In your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, move the Norton Anti-Virus program (usually called NAV.COM) to the very start of the file, and the AU30DOS.COM file to the very end of the file. This should resolve any lock ups.
There were problems with some cards and MIDI playback that caused static when using the wavetable synth at higher volume levels with reverb and chorus effects applied. This was corrected in the 4.05.1160 drivers, so updating your drivers to that release (or a release after that) should solve the problem for you.
This information taken and modified from the excellent document available here: http://www.zefiro.com/vgakills.txt A good number of VGA card manufacturers are squeezing out a few extra points on their benchmarking scores by locking up the PCI bus. This is fine for graphics and most systems on the PC (hard disks and such) don't even notice the problem … Unfortunately this can hurt the audio system in a big way. Most audio cards use ISA/DMA to trickle samples over the bus one word at a time. Even PCI cards can be hurt by this problem because they trickle the data over the bus in tiny transfers. When another device illegally locks up the bus for more than 1/88200th of a second, there's a good chance you will lose audio samples resulting in a glitch in the recording or playback. This glitching can appear in the form of brief, silent pauses in the sound, as well as crackling or popping sounds. It is important to note that this is NOT the fault of the sound card! This is not even the fault of the VGA card ... it is in fact the fault of the VGA driver. For more information on this, and ways to look into fixing it, be sure to read the entire article at the link above.
On the Vortex 1-based products, only one input can be selected at a time. To ensure that the correct input is selected, double click on the mixer icon (yellow speaker) in the System Tray. Select Options | Properties | Recording, then click OK. This is the Recording portion of the mixer. Select the input you wish by checking its box at the bottom of the volume slider. Adjust the slider to the desired recording level.
Right click on My Computer and choose Properties. Click on the Device Manager tab. Double click on Sound, Video, and Game Controllers to open that section up. Double click on Sound Blaster Pro Emulation and check the "Disable in this hardware profile" box. Click OK, and reboot if prompted to. The next time you reboot, Sound Blaster emulation will be disabled (both in Windows and in Real Mode DOS).
Launch the Aureal Control Panel and click on the MIDI tab. Clicking on the Download button will open a dialog box which will allow you to select the wavetable set to load. The Vortex 2-based cards currently support DLS (Level 1) and ARL (Aureal native format) sound banks. You do not need to reboot to use the new sample bank; the change takes effect immediately. Note that sound bank downloading was first introduced in driver set 4.05.1160. Drivers previous to this do not have this capability, so you must update your drivers to at least 1160 in order to get this functionality.
Currently, there is not. The DLS (Level 1) standard does not put a limit on the overall size of the sound bank. Since the Aureal wavetable engine uses system RAM for storing samples, you will be limited to the amount of memory you have in your system. Keep in mind that other applications will need system memory as well; it is probably a good rule of thumb to never load a sample bank that is larger than half of your total system RAM.
The default wavetable sound bank (a file named AUREALGM) is kept in your Windows System folder. To use a different wavetable sound bank as default, simply rename the current one to something different (such as AUREAL.ARL) and then copy the sound bank you wish to become the default in to the Windows System folder. Rename it AUREALGM and when you reboot, it will now load the new one as the default.
Vortex 1-based cards do hardware acceleration of DirectSound and DirectSound 3D. A3D rendering is done on the host, however.
This problem is a result of the VIA chipset implementation on many motherboards (not all). It seems to stem from using an AGP video card and a PCI sound card (and is not limited to just those using Aureal Vortex products). There are numerous core driver updates available on the VIA web site which should be downloaded and installed. You might also want to check with your motherboard manufacturer to see if they have released any updated drivers or BIOS for your particular motherboard that may address these issues. The VIA web site can be found at this address: http://www.via.com.tw/support/index.htm
There are some great shareware programs available to convert sound banks from one format to another. An early version of one of these programs (Audio Compositor) wrote the DLS files incorrectly, and it was the extraneous data in the file that caused Aureal's wavetable driver to crash. That program has corrected the problem on their end. You should contact the creator of the DLS file and ask them to convert the file again with a current program that writes DLS files correctly.
No, there is not. Aureal has no plans currently to release a patch editor for their chipsets. Vortex 1-based cards support DLS (Level 1) sound banks, and there are bank editors and conversion programs available that will allow you to create banks in DLS format. Awave is a great conversion tool that allows you the flexibility to convert almost any known sound bank format over to DLS. It also has advanced tools that rival many patch editors. Be sure to use version 5.0 or higher. http://hem.passagen.se/fmj/awmain.html Audio Compositor combines a MIDI file renderer and software wavetable synthesizer, integrated with a rich graphical environment for editing instrument samples and patches. Be sure to use version 3.2f or higher. http://www.eden.com/~mitchell/ Aureal does not support or endorse either of these programs, but they are great tools that will allow you to expand upon the functionality of your Vortex 1-based product.
No, Vortex 1-based cards do not support EAX, and Aureal does not plan to implement support for EAX in the drivers.
In most cases, you can remove the drivers completely in one easy step. Go to Control Panel | Add/Remove Programs. Select your sound card from the list, and click the Add/Remove button. This will remove the drivers and prompt you to reboot your computer. If you are updating drivers, make sure you have already downloaded and unzipped the new drivers before rebooting. Reboot and when Windows finds new hardware, point to where the drivers were unzipped. If you are removing the drivers and the sound card, do not reboot the system. Click No and got back to the Windows desktop. Select Start | Shut Down | Shut Down the Computer. When the computer is turned off, you can safely remove the sound card.
This problem seems isolated to a few systems and we continue to look as to what causes this. We do not have any other update at this time. If you are experiencing this, please make sure you are using the latest drivers. Report this problem to your manufacturer’s support line – making sure to provide them with your complete system information.
By "WDM ready", Aureal is referring to their hardware architecture and how it is suited for Microsoft’s WDM driver format, as well as its hardware acceleration of DirectSound and DirectSound 3D. We are in the process of developing and testing WDM drivers, but at this time, they are not available for end users. Aureal's goal is to have WDM drivers available for Windows 98 and Windows 2000 at the time that Windows 2000 arrives in stores.
Currently, we support the Vortex 1 completely on the Windows 9x operating systems, and basic audio functions under Windows NT 4.0, Windows 3.x, and OS/2 (native mode). We are working with other developers to develop drivers for alternative operating systems. In the cause of Linux, 4Front Technologies is working on supporting Vortex 2 in their OpenSound package. In the case of BeOS, we are working with Be on supporting Vortex 2 natively in BeOS. There is no planned support for the Macintosh OS at this time.
Windows NT 4.0 does not provide any means to handle hardware acceleration of any DirectX components (except for a few DirectDraw calls). Because of this, there is no support for A3D. A3D will be supported in Windows 2000 (formerly Windows NT 5.0) after its release.
You should contact the manufacturer of your sound card. Aureal provides this information as a courtesy to users of cards with their products. While we strive to provide the best products, we understand you may have questions. These questions should be directed to the manufacturer of your sound card. You may want to post your question in our forum. Aureal is working to make reporting bugs as simple as possible and have implemented a web based bug report form. If you are having issues with your Vortex based sound card this is the best way to get the information to them.
Some questions and Answers provided courtesy of Aureal |
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