In case you like to play games with sound like I do, perhaps you've wondered why can't you enable the 3D sound and environmental effects.
The reason is because old sound cards had hardware support for these and the majority of current hardware does not provide it.
However, these days our computers are powerful enough to actually be able to emulate this without any drawbacks. The only thing you need is a certain DLL file that will 'tell' the game that your hardware supports 3d sound/EAX and then handle it in the software.
The DLL file I'm talking about is a custom dsound.dll and such a file can be obtained from:
http://www.indirectsound.com/
DISCLAIMER: I am in no way affilated with http://www.indirectsound.com/ or its author. I've been running this for a few months and it's been okay for me - no weird network traffic or fps/lag spikes encountered.
If you'd like, you can give it a go - the audio really does make a difference, at least for me!
To install, just unpack dsound.dll and dsound.ini into your Diablo II folder and restart the game - that will enable 3D Sound for you. To enable Environmental Effects, you need to edit dsound.ini with your favourite text editor (notepad works just fine!) and change the line
Code: Select all
eax2 = false
Code: Select all
eax2 = true
Thanks for taking the time to read all this and good luck!
See you in Sanctuary!
Best regards,
~~Axtroz