I'm far from a gamer but I tend to collect stuff and love having a few games on my Mac.
I have some ancient DOS games installed (out of pure nostalgia, think Phantasmagoria, King's Quest, Larry, 7th Guest) as well as some newer games (to me at least, think Dragon Age, Tomb Raider, CoD, Grid) that were released for OSX.
I do know OSX isn't an ideal game platform but that's not what my question is about.
I also know that many Windows games support 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound.
For the rest I'm pretty much a noob when it comes to sound from games.
So what I would like some info about is:
- Are there games for Mac that do actually have surround sound or do only the windows versions have that? I usually can't tell from the system requirements of a game so should it be an option in the settings of the game?
- How does one get the surround sound out of the Mac. In Audio-Midi setup there are options under speaker setup for multichannel sound. What does one need to use that? A surround receiver connected via HDMI? Are there any external sound cards that can handle it? I did have an external SB Reckon at one time but never experimented much with it. I'm not sure it could handle true 5.1 channel support like DD, I think it was more of a Pro-Logic thingy that made 6 channels out of two. Not sure though.
- Obviously, if a soundcard like that exists, one can connect a multichannel speaker set to it. But can one enjoy that multichannel sound through headphones. Multichannel headphones do seem to exist from brands like Razer but I think they're only for Windows. How real is that multichannel sound handled by such headphones then or is it just trickery? Any surround phones you can recommend for OSX?
- And if I simply use a good pair of headphones and don't care about surround sound, what's the best way to connect it to the Mac then to get nice sound from a game?
Prolly a lot of dumb questions for the gamers among you but I'd love to hear from those who do have experience with it.
I have some ancient DOS games installed (out of pure nostalgia, think Phantasmagoria, King's Quest, Larry, 7th Guest) as well as some newer games (to me at least, think Dragon Age, Tomb Raider, CoD, Grid) that were released for OSX.
I do know OSX isn't an ideal game platform but that's not what my question is about.
I also know that many Windows games support 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound.
For the rest I'm pretty much a noob when it comes to sound from games.
So what I would like some info about is:
- Are there games for Mac that do actually have surround sound or do only the windows versions have that? I usually can't tell from the system requirements of a game so should it be an option in the settings of the game?
- How does one get the surround sound out of the Mac. In Audio-Midi setup there are options under speaker setup for multichannel sound. What does one need to use that? A surround receiver connected via HDMI? Are there any external sound cards that can handle it? I did have an external SB Reckon at one time but never experimented much with it. I'm not sure it could handle true 5.1 channel support like DD, I think it was more of a Pro-Logic thingy that made 6 channels out of two. Not sure though.
- Obviously, if a soundcard like that exists, one can connect a multichannel speaker set to it. But can one enjoy that multichannel sound through headphones. Multichannel headphones do seem to exist from brands like Razer but I think they're only for Windows. How real is that multichannel sound handled by such headphones then or is it just trickery? Any surround phones you can recommend for OSX?
- And if I simply use a good pair of headphones and don't care about surround sound, what's the best way to connect it to the Mac then to get nice sound from a game?
Prolly a lot of dumb questions for the gamers among you but I'd love to hear from those who do have experience with it.
