i've seen some great statistics here on video cards (that Alien Flux log thing).
i'm wondering where i can get similar information about customer's sound systems.
perhaps a percentage of people with on-board sound. their speaker or headphone types. Broken SBLive drivers issues and all that.

i would be very thankful for any experiences and stats you could point me to.

I have a creative sb live card.

I think creative will probably the most popular brand sound card for your potential customers since a lot of computers now come with it.

I think that many, many PCs have onboard sound though. And many SB cards are very bottom-of-the-range. Some have EAX, some don't. Etc.

I was thinking about collecting stats but I have no trouble with soundcards so I decided against it.

Cas :)

Indeed, sound is generally trouble free to integrate. Remember though that PC's will work fine without a sound card... I was reminded of this a while back and now I make sure that if the device creation fails the game will work fine with no sound.

My old card was a Chinese ESS audiodrive £6 ISA bit of tat but it worked faithfully with every soundblaster supported game and even had midi sounds... ish...better than a tiny Casio keyboard which would cost £30 anyway... not as nice as my VL1 though :)

Mark
Cornutopia Games
http://www.cornutopia.net
Sound Effects For Game Developers
http://www.indiesfx.co.uk