DOS Days Aureal Vortex 2

Turtle Beach Montego II / Montego II Quadzilla

The Montego II was one of the first cards to support Aureal's A3D 2.0 API.

Released May 1999
Bus PCI
Synthesizer (embedded in Vortex 2)
Chipset Aureal Vortex 2
Standards Ad Lib, Sound Blaster/Pro, WSS and General MIDI
Ports Mic In, Stereo Line In, Stereo Speaker Out, Game/MIDI port
Wavetable (Embedded in Vortex2) + wavetable header for Turtle Beach Cancun or compatible.
Part # AU8830
FCC ID# -
Price May 1999: $99
See Also  

Being a PCI card, it only emulates Ad Lib and Sound Blaster through the running of a TSR called AU30DOS.COM, which looks for a SET BLASTER= line in your environment variables to configure the emulation.

Its onboard wavetable synthesis supported up to 64 voices simultaneously, and used a 4 MB sample set with chorus and reverb effects. It could also use system RAM to load custom .DLS patches. In addition to the hardware 64 voices, the card also had 256 'soft' voices.

The card was known to have an excellent SnR of 97 dB.

The Montego II arrived at a time when most game players were fully into Windows gaming with DirectX 6 and its DirectSound / DirectSound3D. DirectSound was actively supported by many games developers.

The Montego II Quadzilla was the same base card but also had a small daughterboard that gave the Montego II 4-speaker output and S/PDIF input and output sockets. The Quadzilla variant required a different set of drivers to the standard Montego II.

The Montego II Quadzilla was also sold as a bundle called the Montego II Home Studio. This added a full version of Voyetra Digital Orchestrator Pro, AudioStation 32, AudioView, SoundCheck, and a large selection of demo files in .WAV, .MID and .ORC format.

 

Board Revisions

No board revision information is known for the Montego II.

 

Competition

With its 3D positional audio, the Montego II went up against similar cards in 1999 that also supported Aureal's A3D 2.0 as well as cards that used a rival 3D audio tech, such as Sensaura 3D (used by the Yamaha WaveForce 192XG) and ESS Maestro-2 (used by the AOpen AW300).

It was a time when real mode DOS support was very hit and miss, given that these sound cards ran on the PCI bus. Typically PCI sound cards are unusable in pure DOS unless they specifically support it through emulation or have a PCI-to-ISA bridge that allows the card to send interrupt requests and use a DMA channel. An example of a series of PCI sound cards that run very well in pure DOS is the Ensoniq AudioPCI range.

 

In the Media

"Based on Aureal's Vortex 2 chipset, the Montego II offers almost all the must-haves in today's soundcards: DirectSound and DirectSound3D acceleration in hardware, 18-bit DACs, a hardware wavetable connector, and loads of other connectors. Of all the cards in this roundup, the Montego II is the only card to offer support for Aureal's A3D 2.0 wavetracing technology. The Montego II supports DirectSound3D acceleration, as well.

Turtle Beach has promised driver updates to add support for Creative Labs' EAX API.

Like its Vortex 2 sibling, Diamond's fabulous MX300, the Montego II produces first-rate sound, crisp explosions, and MIDI that's a little too neutral at times, but satisfying nonetheless. The Montego II tested well in most of our benchmarks, turning in the lowest CPU utilization scores of any of the shipping products reviewed here. While it lagged by 3fps in Turok 2, the Montego II rendered the best in-game sounds.

Be aware, the board submitted to us for review was the "white box" edition shipped in pre-fab systems and sold through Turtle Beach's web site. The only glaring missing features were full quad-sound support and digital outputs. A header on the Montego II lets you add a S/PDIF, but Turtle Beach has opted not to let Montego II owners buy breakout boards for quad-sound. The missing features appear in the full retail version, called the Montego II Quadzilla, which wasn't available for review at press time. While we like the performance and feature set on the Montego II, we have to advise you to wait for the Quadzilla."

Infoworld, 4th April 1994

 

Setting it Up

The Montego II is a Windows Plug & Play card, so no hardware setup is required. For pure DOS emulation of Ad Lib / Sound Blaster, you must run the AU30DOS.COM utility provided on the driver disk.


Downloads

Operation Manual
(missing)

Get in touch if you can provide this!

Original Application CD
Version 3.0

Serial: MON200-039975-377

 

 

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