Nintendo 64 and Dolby Surround

[DiogenesDirac]

Has anybody ever used this feature on one of the few games that include it? What is it like? Can you set it up with a modern sound system?

[k.vlaros]

Dunno, but I was recently reading about this too and was surprised to learn some SNES games allegedly had Dolby Surround as well. That would have been pretty impressive in your living room at that time!

http://www.mobygames.com/attribute/shee ... ,136/p,15/

[DiogenesDirac]

No way! That's crazy.

[Duke.Togo]

Dolby Surround now falls under Dolby Pro Logic II(x or z on newer models) decoding on modern receivers, so you should have no problems getting the surround effect if the games support it. Just check your receivers documentation, but this is very standard.

[Jontendo]

We're talking 90's era analog surround sound though.

Back then having one speaker on the back wall producing mono audio was typical and there was plenty of bleed-over between speakers (analog decoding being matrixed). Detecting the direction of environmental sounds was imprecise, though you were (more or less) still "surrounded" by sound.

Luckily for us future people in the Y2K, Pro-Logic II decoding came along and did a much more convincing job with the whole analog surround deal. Fully discrete, digital has overthrown PLII of course, but the latter is still pretty darn good when analog surround is the only option.