Binaural sound in Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (1998)! - Software-rendered positional "3D audio" (HRTF)
1REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE WITH A 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.
Did you know that Jazz Jackrabbit 2 (Epic Megagames & Orange Games, 1998) features pretty advanced spatial/positional audio for a 2D platformer of its time and requires NO hardware-accelerated sound card to make that possible? This video tries to demonstrate that type of audio in action. Headphones are strongly recommended!
One of the torches (specifically the bottom-most one) is emitting a positional looping sound effect that will change frequency characteristics based on where Jazz is standing relative to the sound source. Notice how the filtering of the torch sound makes it sound as if appearing from below or above your head when Jazz moves below or above the looping torch sound. That's the head-related transfer function (HRTF) in full swing! This works the same for ALL sound effects emitted from objects or characters in a scene, including enemies.
The game gives you the choice of two Output Modes (APIs, basically) for audio: Windows MM and DirectSound. Both will allow you to hear binaural sounds just fine, but DirectSound has lower-latency playback of sound effects and is the best option when used with DirectX-compatible sound cards. The Turtle Beach Montego is used as the primary sound card for this test but none of its hardware accelerated audio features are used here. Not that they were ever needed really, as binaural audio and HRTF has been done in 1996 games like POD (Ubisoft) and A-Train 5 (Artdink) before A3D even existed in PC games. Aureal tried to sell customers a feature that could already be done on the CPU and output via legacy sound cards like the SB16 and AWE32, yet the A3D fanatics claim Creative is the evil corporation? That's cute.
This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
- Dell Dimension XPS R400 case and motherboard (manufactured on April 30th 1998)
- Intel 440BX motherboard
- Intel Pentium II 400 Mhz processor
- Matrox Millennium II AGP (8MB) video card
- Creative Labs 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 (CT6670) (12MB) 3D accelerator card
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! (CT4620) sound card
- Turtle Beach Montego (Aureal Vortex) (A3D) sound card
- 192MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM
- Windows 98 (FE) operating system
No third-party software wrapper or HRTF emulation was used on the computer. This is audio straight from the original/unpatched version of Jazz Jackrabbit 2 with no hardware-accelerated 3D sound available.
#jazzjackrabbit2 #windows95 #binaural #hrtf #3daudio #epicmegagames
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