real_aurgathor 9x and DOS supported more possible API’s, mostly because there was still a variety of such sound API’s before DirectX got refined enough to be performance viable.
Aureal’s A3D was a famous example of one that was basically killed off. The cards technically had drivers to support up to XP, but to actually use any A3D enabled software, you had to be on Win9x. DOS had an ass-ton of other options based on vendor. The amount of discussion on midi capabilities and stuff going on between gravis ultrasound, yamaha OPL2/3 and the various wavetables is itself another quagmire. Though once Microsoft standardized with EAX, that kind of just killed them off in favor of the creative labs monopoly that was going on for a number of years.
Starting with Vista, Microsoft finally took the hint and broke off from EAX and adopted OpenAL for the audio processing. But the problems are two-fold: first, they abstracted the ability to process the stuff away from the silicon and onto the processor. Secondly, they provided no means internally of negotiating the old EAX code from every version of DirectX audio before then. So the vendors still around had to roll their own.
Creative of course figured out a way to still process in their audio hardware, but was already starting to shift. On paper, the Recon3D chip they used for the SB/Z line should’ve been dramatically more capable than the X-Fi it succeeded. In practice, the X-Fi wipes the floor with it in terms of audio fidelity, even without factoring in how it handles games and programs using EAX code. From what I could dig up on the subject, Asus sort of did it for their Xonar cards, but their software only handles the most populous (required) versions, being EAX version 2, and 5 only. A lot of the good Star wars games support other versions that that approach ignores.
Like, I don’t at all claim to be an audiophile. You’ll never see me spend $2k per speaker for a setup even if I had a lottery jackpot backing it. But I do expect a certain correctness from the resulting game audio, and I got spoiled on surround sound and that positional awareness on PC well before I ever had it on console.
