Aureal A3D Enhanced Games

Aureal A3D Enhanced Games drops into the hardware pile today, which means another driver, card, audio update, or 3D oddity for those of us still fighting with Windows 95 and 98 boxes.

The important bit: Aureal Semiconductor announced over 35 A3D enhanced game titles will be available in retail stores for the holiday buying season. Software titles with A3D support continue to pave the way for 3D audio, led by hot new games such as Half-Life from Sierra and Heretic II and Sin from Activision. In contrast, support for competitive 3D audio technologies appears to be limited to just a handful of titles, according to company and independent Websites devoted to those technologies.

Driver news is not glamorous, but when a card suddenly stops choking on a major game, nobody complains. This is the unsexy stuff that keeps the whole beige circus running.