I have SWAT 3 GOTY Edition on CD (bought it way back when it came out) and am trying to get the game working in Windows 10. Using the "Last Resort" mod and replacing the video files with the DIVX versions, I was able to get the game running and can play missions. However, I've noticed that in-game sound is all in mono - there's no way to tell which direction a sound effect is coming from.

Does the SWAT 3 engine support stereo sound? Anyone had any luck getting stereo sound in the GOG edition? I'd gladly re-purchase the game if I know it would give me two-channel audio, but I'd be surprised if the GOG version worked any differently than the CD version.

I've tried Googling this but don't get any relevant results. There are some threads about the sound effects themselves being mono, but that doesn't mean the engine shouldn't be able to support stereo positional audio.

All sounds in the game were recorded mono so at best you can get two track mono I imagine. I don't think it did positioning in any way. There certainly isn't anything about that in any of the game's configuration or .DAT files.

It shouldn't matter if the sound effects themselves are mono. Many games use mono sound effects - for the most part, there is no reason for the sound effects to be in stereo if the game engine supports stereo or surround (meaning that the engine decides which channel(s) to play the effect in based on where it is relative to you).

I'm surprised that a first-person shooter released in 1999 would only have mono sound. Doom had stereo for God's sake.

The Sierra developers originally built a prototype using Quake but then switched to a custom engine.

It sounds like they had time and budget difficulties:


http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131843/postmortem_sierras_swat3_close_.php?page=1

I just tried playing again today and now the stereo sound is working. I'm not sure what was wrong last time, but apparently it was a fluke.