Aureal Semiconductor

Next on the list was Aureal Semiconductors, the sound engineers who brought us A3D, Vortex hardware, and wavetracing technology. Aureal has been working hard on expanding the reach of the Vortex 2, primarily into the OEM and integrator market (seems like everyone is heading there, doesn't it). Some particular OEM motherboard wins are from Iwill, and more prominently, Sony. Aureal claims a Vortex 2 installed base of 4-5 million in only 4 months on the market, and growing by .5 million a month. Given the popularity of MX300 and Montego II, that's certainly believable.

Aureal has also recently announced the "8810," essentially a "Vortex 2 Lite" with a big focus on cost-optimization. The 8810 has no hardware wavetable capabilities, opting instead to offload MIDI reproduction completely to the host. It does however retain hardware mixing, equalization, and wavetracing, and it incorporates some new power-saving functionality.

A3D marches on

I then asked about immediate plans for A3D, as Creative has recently announced EAX 2.0, and now 3.0, with support for some geometry-based processing of sounds. Currently, Aureal's software plans closely mirror their hardware goals, namely pushing out A3D 2.0 and helping developers to utilize and optimize for it. The next revision of A3D should happen in Q3 1999, and it will be more of a refined, evolutionary step, adding more features and functionality on top of A3D 2.0.

The Phantom Menace

One announcement Aureal was not able to make before the E3 show was their involvement in the Star Wars: Racer game. Built completely from A3D, Aureal's API actually serves as the sound engine for the game. Having scalable support from DS3D all the way to A3D 1.0 and 2.0 was a big bonus for LucasArts, who benefited by needing to work with only one interface and API. Unfortunately, the announcement was not to be made, and could only be discussed when a LucasArts blunder made public that tidbit of information.