There's no way to get 5.1 surround sound out of a Windows game on the Mac Pro to a set of surround speakers. The optical audio port sure does do surround but only for DVD movies according to all my travails.

The question is does anyone know of a hardware solution to provide my Mac Pro Windows games with 5.1 audio?

I'm investigating the M-Audio Revolution PCI cards with feelers out for further information. But initial impressions are that they lack a MacOSX universal binary driver. And there is also the question about the Mac Pro's expansion slots that I have no answers for. These Revolution cards are PCI-X compatible but does that only refer to Winboxes and not the PCI-Extreme slots in the Mac Pro?

I would love a FireWire or USB solution but these appear rare as hen's teeth. An external interface can of course be disconnected at any time so I would not need MacOSX UB drivers, just needing it to work in Windows.

Why the heck doesn't Apple have a surround card? I checked Apple's Made4Mac listings: Nothing. There are entries for the M-Audio Revolution 5.1 and 7.1 PCI cards but there is no Universal Binary icon attached and no indication of compatibility with anything later than the PPC Macs.

This frustration has me tending to once again favour gaming on my PC and looking for a buyer for my Mac Pro.

If you get an external USB soundcard and don't intend to use it in OS X, you can get any external one you like as you're using it in Windows and can install the Windows drivers.
The SoundBlaster Live! External should do the trick at a reasonable price (can be had for $100 easily).

I was always under the impression that in Windows, the soundcard acts as your generic 5.1 sound via it's optical out and if a game can spit audio out in 5.1, it can spit it out via the optical connector on the back of the Mac?

I thought so too

I have spent years trying to nut this one out. The optical out should work to provide the signal for a set of surround speakers with an appropriate decoder and give the surround experience.

Yep, it works fine for DVD movies. But it doesn't work for games. This one is difficult because there are not many games for Mac with surround capability. Aspyr told me they strip out the surround capablity because Macs are only 2-channel machines and porting the 5.1 info over to the Mac OSX could cause conflicts and crashes.

So okay I never any more play Mac versions of games and that's why I run superior Winboxes— to game, and to game in surround sound. Here's a little secret: The optical digital audio on PCs also fails to drive a surround speaker system in games. On the PC, a sound card with discrete analog sound out channels is the way to go. I have no idea why SPDIF is such a pain in the neck but It's taken me years to confirm that it ain't compatible with games.

So what a guy needs is hardware on the Mac that uses a game's audio and can direct it to discrete surround channels of a 5.1 or 7.1 speaker system.

I just remembered that a long time ago, I ordered an Audigy 2 NX external 5.1 USB2 interface. These only work with Windows and are easily unplugged when running the MacOSX.

I had completely forgotten that this order had been placed and that it had not been filled. This gadget is still going to be the answer to my prayers if my dealer can extract his digits.

I'm sorry for starting this topic. If my memory had been working, blah, blah, blah ...

I haven't tested this, but from what I know:

- Surround in OS X... should work via the digital optical output on ANY mac that has one, Mac Mini and Mac Pro included. It's up to the game to use it, but the drivers are DEFINITELY there.

- Surround on a Mac running Windows via Bootcamp... should work via the digital optical output, provided Apple has created good drivers. I'm pretty sure this works on an Intel Mac Mini today. I don't know about the Mac Pro. Either way, it's ONLY a windows driver issue, so should be coming as soon as Apple create the drivers. You'd think that might be with 10.5 when Bootcamp gets a 1.0 release (assuming the drivers don't do it today... and they might).

- Surround on a Mac running Windows via Bootcamp with audio hardware... should work, provided you have the right Windows drivers for the hardware.

That sounds like such BS. Core Audio does it, and has for ages.

From Apple's site:
And there's extensive surround support in Core Audio:
http://developer.apple.com/documenta...ositePage.html

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/M-Audio/99004090600/

Looks like what you're after has been around since "Mac OS 9.2.2 or later". It's another story if the games use it though.

There is not a dickie-bird of circuitry or software on an Intel Mac that is capable of processing PC games surround sound when it is encoded, as many of them are, with DolbyDigital EX, EAX Advanced HD, or DirectSound3D. You need a Winbox sound card for that.

So a Mac Pro running Windows and running Windows games is required by this games fan to offer the full gaming surround sound experience. This cannot happen by simply connecting the optical out to a speaker decoder, and not forgetting Apple's basic (incomplete) Windows drivers in beta. Dare I mention the PCI-Extreme cock-up which prevents the use of an internal sound card in Windows?

The good news: the Audigy 2 NX USB2 external sound card which I thought I had ordered a couple of months ago WAS picked and packed by a previous employee of my PC parts reseller and left sitting on the warehouse floor to await the inevitable customer gripes. The items will ship today.

I have scoured the world on the internet in the last few days, made many phone calls, emailed lots of stores, trying to find someone who would sell me one of these cards. Oh, but they are all advertising the thing. Nobody has any. No stocks in the world. Not even E-Bay or Amazon. I may be receiving the last Audigy 2NX on the planet. There's a sense that Creative are no longer making this product. Perhaps, an updated new model is imminent?

Anyway, I'll be using mine in a couple of days, in my Windows games. What if it doesn't work in the Mac Pro???

I'll report back here on my findings, later this week. If this card works on my MP, it must work on every model of Intel Macs because they all possess USB2 and the ability to run Windows.

I was going to let that one through to the keeper. But after consideration, I won't. It was rather rude to link me to pages of code, code of which I have no understanding.

My comment was what I passed on from a fellow who should know, one of the games developers at Aspyr. I'm only repeating what he told me. So he's a liar? Why would he lie? Yes, and quite probably, other games devs for the Mac might have different policies and are prepared to do a better job of porting.

Anyway, PC games contain a stack of audio code in formats such as EAX and DirectSound3D. Macs cannot and never could use this code because they lack the onboard hardware DSPs which Windows games rely on.

So what happens when a Windows game is ported to the Mac? What happens to all this fantastic surround sound information that cannot be used on a Mac without serious programming effort to modify and adapt? As well as running the game on the Mac's CPU now you are saying that the Mac must devote a lot of cycles on that same CPU, that on a PC needed a separate set of DSPs to process, to provide us with what? A psuedo or virtual surround sound? Certainly not the original DirectSound3D or EAX or whatever it started out as? It is far easier to combine all that into simple left and right channel info and leave it at that. As does Aspyr.

Okay, so you're talking about Open AL, the "Cross-Platform 3D Audio". It's new. Vista will use it. Some devs probably ARE using this but Aspyr certainly does not and is claiming it adds too much to what might have been a simple inexpensive porting job otherwise.

Oh and I'll, repeat, on the many PCs I have owned, the many PCI sound cards I have used, and the many different speaker surround decoders I have used, optical audio never works in games. I used to always go for the optical connection first to see if my luck had changed. It never did. I always needed to direct wire the sound card to the surround speakers master control via individual 5.1 channel inputs.

And of course, this experience has forced me to choose a sound card for the Mac Pro which is capable of decoding EAX, DirectSound3D and the rest, and sending the resultant analogs to individual audio channels.

And I really don't care any more about gaming on the Mac. Basically Mac gaming is pathetic. Why would I wait up to a year for the Mac ported version to arrive when I could be into a game immediately it is first published for the PC. Why would I limit myself to the few games that are ported and miss out on some wonderful titles like The Elder Scrolls series and many others? And why would I subject myself to a pot luck kind of pseudo surround when the original real thing comes in PC games? A few Mac games can do surround? Lovely. Most don't. The Mac is a terrible computer for games and nothing has changed in my opinion.

Do you think a time might come when some very good, mass appeal games might be written for Mac and six months later ported to the PC? It'll never happen. Modern games take many years and tens of millions of dollars to develop. They will only ever originate for the most popular of computers, the Winbox. So we are destined to only ever see a limited number of late arriving, ported-from-Windows-at-cut-rate-investment games.

For a few, like X-Plane, which began its life on Macs, it's pretty easy to recompile them for a Windows version. But not all are as easy. What is X-Plane? It is nothing more than a texture and mesh library and a set of flight algorithms. It's damn good though.

Oh and PS. I had previously checked out the M-Audio Revolution 5.1 and 7.1 series. Thanks anyway. The Mac Pro cannot use this card. In the BootCamp beta, Apple's Windows drivers don't bother providing drivers for the computer's PCI-Extreme slots. And to add insult to injury, M-Audio do not provide an Intel version of the MacOSX driver for these cards. So, the card cannot be used in either of the Mac Pro's environment, Windows or MacOSX. I wish...

Apologies for the ever-expanding size of this post. It's a problem I cannot overcome.

I don't see how that's rude (that wasn't my intention). I was only showing that the frameworks exist in OS X, and have for some time. Ie. It's definitely possible.

If it helps, I don't understand the code either

I'm not making any judgement on his character, but... "Macs are only 2-channel machines and porting the 5.1 info over to the Mac OSX could cause conflicts and crashes" is straight-up BS. If it helps, I use a mac with 24 audio outputs daily.

Again, I'm not making a statement if there's OS X or Windows games that take advantage of that when running on a Mac, but there's no doubt at all that it's technically possible.

The audio hardware on Macs is either almost identical (PPC Macs) or identical (Intel Macs), so DSPs etc isn't an issue. What is an issue is the frameworks (EAX & DirectSound3D etc). These should work as well in Windows on a Mac as they do running Windows on a PC. I don't see why that's an issue.

Seems like your biggest problem is getting a 5.1 optical output from a Mac when in Windows. I know this works in 2.0 for Intel Mac Minis... I haven't tried 5.1.

I wasn't talking about OpenAL at all (where did I mention it????!?!).

I'd say "The Mac is a great computer for games, but not many exist" is a more accurate statement.

I'm happy to report full surround sound is possible on an Intel Mac playing Windows games.

The 24-bit Creative SB Audigy 2 NX external USB2 sound card works okay. There are lots of Chinese and Taiwan trash USB thingies that offer something called virtual surround through pseudo-surround headphones. The Audigy is not one of these. Yep, I have the full surround effect in games that offer it, and it's as good as any PC with a suitable surround sound card.

Of course the Audigy only has Windows drivers and so when running the MacOS, it has limited value. In the MacOS I see that the Audigy is recognised for its USB input functions but there is nothing regarding its use as an output device, so speakers connected via the Audigy are mute.

So what do you do for audio in the Mac OS? At worst, you run a second speaker set. LOL! A suitable set of speakers with switchable inputs is the go. In Windows, I use the discrete 5.1 analog wired connections from the Audigy to the Logitechs. In the Mac OS, I switch the speaker inputs to the optical line. Yes, it's an added step when changing OSs but I'm already accustomed to it.

Even though, the Audigy has no Mac OS drivers, the Mac OS accepts its presence without a hiccup. It would be nice for Creative to offer MacOS drivers but I won't be holding my breath.

Oh and the street price is around A$200.

There are a couple of interesting issues with surround sound under OS X. For example playing movies with Quicktime. If you've got a movie with a 5.1 channel AC3 sound track, there's no way to get Quicktime to pass-out the unencoded sound to an external decoder, instead it passes it out as 2.0. vlc will allow you it to pass it out and use surround sound. To get the same in Quicktime you need to spilt the sound up and add it as individual channels.

Thanks. Interesting ideas but irrelevant to the this topic. This topic was started as a quest to obtain information on surround sound in Windows games on Intel Macs.

Id get a creative xmod for this