Game:

Outlaws (1997)

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REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.

Here is what Outlaws (Lucasarts Entertainment Company, 1997) sounds like on the very first Aureal A3D sound card; the Diamond Multimedia Monster Sound! This footage of Outlaws (patched to version 1.1) is being played with the Aureal A3D Interactive driver selected from the sound options and with the DirectDraw driver (software graphics renderer) selected from the video options.

The quality of the positional (3D) audio is quite excellent for its age. You can even hear elevation filtering based on whether a sound is emitting from above or below the player's point of view. Tilting the view (looking up/down) doesn't have any effect on the elevation filtering, possibly because of how hacky (i.e. simplified for the sake of performance) view tilting used to be in a lot of pseudo-3D/2.5D shooters from this time-frame. However, the player's Z-axis position relative to a sound source will affect the elevation filtering, allowing you to hear a difference in sound location by jumping over it or standing above/below it.

Because I'm playing with software rendered graphics at 640x480 (with a slightly shrunken view), Outlaws doesn't run as smoothly as it can with a 3D card. Why not use Glide rendering then? Because it somehow interferes with the Monster Sound and causes static/crackling noises to appear after loading a couple of levels. The A3D driver predates the Glide renderer, which is likely why it has issues. The driver was introduced in the Diamond Multimedia OEM version of Outlaws, distributed with the Monster Sound as bundled software, and dates back to April 1997 (a month prior to the version 1.1 patch containing the 3Dfx/Glide renderer).

Drivers used for Diamond Monster Sound: version 1.01 drivers (original CD-ROM image can be found on the Internet Archive; search for "Monster Sound Driver Installation CD 3D Audio").
Drivers used for Matrox Millennium: some late 1996 drivers, I forgot exactly! Either the standard OSR 2.0 drivers or DirectX drivers from the Outlaws CD.

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Dell OptiPlex GXPro case and motherboard (manufactured in July 1996 according to case label)
Intel 440FX chipset
Intel Pentium Pro 200 Mhz (256KB L2 cache) processor (manufactured around the same time as motherboard; shortly before July 1996)
Matrox Millennium IS-STORM/MGA-2064W (2MB) video card (manufactured in late 1995)
NEC PC 3DEngine (NEC PowerVR PCX1) accelerator card (NEC serial number starts with 6Y, with the first character denoting year and second one the month (1-9 = Jan to Sept and X/Y/Z = Oct/Nov/Dec), meaning that it's from November 1996)
Orchid Righteous 3D (3dfx Voodoo) accelerator card (Rev C, board manufactured week 40 1996)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 (CT3900) sound card (manufactured week 15 1995)
Diamond Multimedia Monster Sound (MX100, basically) PCI sound card (manufactured around week 13 1997)
128 MBs of EDO DRAM/memory (not quite contemporary in age but I'm working on finding some)
Microsoft Windows 95 (OSR 2.0 OEM) operating system

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