Game Theater 64 Dynamic 3D Edition

Mark Muschett

First Impressions:

I have to admit a fair bit of scepticism upon opening up the box. The reason was simple. At 3DsoundSurge we were weaned on a steady diet of PCI cards and the Maxi Gamer Dynamic 3D is an ISA card. Having said that, I was actually quite excited to get this card into my system and get a first hand experience of what on paper was actually a pretty nice set of features. The other thing that jumped out at me was the documentation which is fantastic. One detailed manual for the hardware, another for the bundled software.

Technical Overview:

As I noted this card is an ISA card. The Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 lists a 486/66 as its minimum requirement. However, the card is powered by a RISC-based 50 MIPS DSP and uses the ESS 1868 Audiodrive codec (For perspective, the Sound Blaster Live! sports a 1000 MIPS DSP).

Unlike the newer PCI cards the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 sports 2 meg of memory on board for storing wavetable. This includes 128 General MIDI instruments, 70 variation sounds and a total of 207 percussion sounds divided into 9 drum kits. The sound bank is expandable to 18 Mb using standard 60 Ns SIMMS.

The card offers the option of setting up four discrete channels, another great feature for a first generation 3d sound card. There is also a choice on the front channels of an unamplifed or amplified speaker out which will play back at 4kHz-44.1 kHz

Again, as I noted above, the 3d audio is powered by the Dream DSP which according to the specifications from Guillemot frees the CPU from all 3D sound processing duties. The Dream DSP can position up to 30 sounds simultaneously using DS3D! Pretty impressive for a first generation card.

The Dream DSP also provides real time effects processing similar (but much less complex) to what is now available on the Sound Blaster Live! The card ships with 50 presets for existing games and through a driver upgrade, many more presets are available. Like the SB Live! presets these are not dynamic, but offer a fuller sound to legacy games by adding reverb, echo, chorus as well as flanger. Reverb effects, chorus and echo can all be customised within the excellent control panel.

All that effects processing can also be applied to MIDI files and the card offers a 64 voice hardware wavetable engine which offers 405 real instruments including 128 General MIDI sounds, 70 instrument variations, 207 drum sounds divided into 9 drum sets. The card also supports DLS. The card offers a 4 band equaliser and pumps out sound at a respectable signal-to-noise ration of >85 dB.T (compared to better than 92 dB Turtle Beach Montego A3D Xstream and 96dB for the Sound Blaster Live! and MX300. This difference in s/n ration is noticable at high volumes, but not a normal playing levels.

Bundle:

The Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 comes bundled with the software:

Cakewalk Express, Sound Impression (which lets users create and modify MIDI and Wave audio files. This uses the now typical stereo rack interface offering an integrated mixing panel, wave file recorder and player, MIDI player and CD-audio player, plus multi-session Wave editor) Internet Phone, Maxi Bank Downloader (downloads new sound banks to the Game Theater’s on board memory and a 3D Audio enhanced version of POD Gold.

Installation:

The card ships with two great printed manuals. One for the hardware and another that covers the supplied software (except POD). If you have read my reviews before you will have caught on that I like good manuals and these are well above average.

Despite being an ISA card its fully plug and play compliant and installed quickly and flawlessly into my system. In fact, the installation did not even require my Windows 98 CD!

Configuration:

Following the instructions in the manual I entered multimedia properties and selected the Dream 9407 Direct Sound Driver to fully take advantage of the boards hardware acceleration and sound processing. This is a good spot to note that the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 is almost like two cards in one as the ESS 1868 Audio Drive codec can be selected for direct sound (put provides inferior playback and recording to the Dream 9407)

To confirm a good installation, I tried to run a few 3d games with the shipping drivers and ran into a few problems (Unreal would immediately lock-up). A quick upgrade to the latest drivers from the Guillemot web site solved that problem

I tested the card using Cambridge Sound Works FourPoint Surround system which were connected to the surround output and the non-amplified line out on the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 and the Latec APX4620s for two speaker testing.

Gaming Impressions:

Before checking out 3D sound titles I wanted to see what the gaming presets (reverb, echo)would do for legacy titles.

Quake 2 was quite nice with some blanket reverb effects. However, there was some irritating static when playing with the audio set to "maximum performance" which was corrected by moving the slider to "maximum compatibility" See more on Quake 2 under performance further on.

Next I checked out Ultimate Race Pro (prior to the 1.4 patch being released). While there were no compatibility issues, the sound to me was somewhat muddy. Wondering if there was a problem with the card I switch over to the demo of Need For Speed III. The sound in NFS III was crisp and clean exhibiting absolutely no problems.

So what about POD? Unfortunately I could not get the 3D Sound executable to run as it locked up my system with each attempt. I really should have spent more time getting it to work, but to be honest, POD is not really my cup of tea so I moved on to Unreal.

As I noted earlier, Unreal would lock up with the shipping drivers, but worked fairly well after upgrading to the latest drivers. I say fairly well as while the 4 speaker 3D audio definately worked, I did not find it as definitive as on the newer chip sets such as the Monster Sound MX300 or the Sound Blaster Live!. Looking at some statistics from Aureal’s Minerva we may see a reason for this. Minerva identifies 256 static 3d hardware buffers and zero streaming 3d hardware buffers where as it detects 32 static 32 hardware buffers and 32 steaming 3D hardware buffers on the Sound Blaster Live! Having said that, I did not notice any drops from hardware to software rendering of sounds with the 3D streams set to 16. I also did not find the two speaker 3D effects particularly effective.

In summary, the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 worked fairly well in all my game tests. Some were great (2D), some were adequate (3D) but none were poor.

Performance:

This card is an ISA sound card. As such, in tackling the high bandwidth demands of today’s advanced 3D sound titles it is limited to the 8 MHz ISA bus speed. As you likely know by now, PCI helps the sound card by improving data transfers, which are slower on ISA slots.

So does it hurt the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64? Well that depends. Using the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 in Quake 2 (640 *480 3Dfx Open GL - 8 bit textures - high quality audio, maximum compatibility)on a Celeron 266 oc to 333 MHz (83*4) my benchmark with audio disabled was consistently in the 70 frames per second realm. With audio enabled and the Sound Blaster Live in the system, the frames per second were consistently around 68. With the Game Theater's Dream DSP doing the direct sound processing the frames per second dropped to 50.6 and increased to around 55 fps with sound quality in Quake 2 changed to low. In Unreal with the Sound Blaster Live I got 36.1 FPS and with the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 the FPS dropped down to 27.1. Hence my statement of "that depends". If you are playing Quake II or Unreal on a high end machine then a few frames per second won’t kill you. On the other hand, those playing on slow machines may not be able to afford the performance hit. Note that I repeated these tests with effects processing on and off and there was no difference. I also reinstalled the drivers to see if I had a problem with my first installation and the numbers still did not go up.

As far as 3D sound performance goes, I found that for effective positioning on the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 you definitely want 4 speakers. The two speaker offerings from the competition using algorithms from Aureal and Creative are much more effective at creating the illusion of 'sound from behind' than the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64's algorithms.

Compatibility:

DOS titles...I actually don't have any but since this is a ISA card that has Sound Blaster Pro compatibility there should be no problems what so ever.

Next to test gaming devices. I tested my Microsoft Sidewinder 3D Pro (a digital device) and it which worked flawlessly in all games I tested it in using the 3.02 Game Controller Software.

3D software is a bit of an issue. With Creative Labs, Qsound and Sensaura now championing DS3D we should start to see a lot more titles that don’t require A3D support, but today the majority of 3D audio titles are still looking for A3D hardware. Other companies have worked around this by including A3D.dll files in their driver suites that re-route the A3D calls back to DS3D. The most recent drivers for the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 does not do this so your options for titles are currently pretty limited.

Summary:

The Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 to me is a little late to our party. If we had been around to review it when it was launched it could have been considered a great 3D sound card. However, I did not get a chance to run this card through its paces until long after I have had a chance to become familiar with the next generation technology from Creative Labs and Aureal. Guillemot has obviously spent a lot of time on this card.

The 4 speaker support, the Dream DSP, the manuals, the game presets and the descent bundle all could have added up to a great score. But its bottlenecking ISA bus, along with a $99.00 price tag that puts it in direct competition with the Sound Blaster Live! Value and the Diamond MX300 say otherwise.

If you have a 486 with no PCI slot and just have to check out 3D sound (despite the fact that all the titles you will want will overpower a 486) or if you have a Pentium system and are PCI slot limited or are really into the DOS MAME scene, then this is the card for you. As a 2D card, this is a card that is more than equal to an AWE64 but as a 3D card it only qualifies as possibly the best 'also-ran' that we will have the chance to review. If you have a free PCI slot and are into 3D audio, then there are many much better cards available for the same or less money.

As a 3D sound card the score could have been worse, but the Maxi Sound Game Theater 64 does so many other things well that it ends up with a respectable 7/10 and we look for big things from Guillemot with their new Isis Sound Card.

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January 13, 1999

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