"Soundblaster" was such an 80s/90s name for a computer part.
"Soundblaster" was such an 80s/90s name for a computer part.
225 comments
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IRQ 5, I/O 220, DMA 01 🤘🏻
I was poor, so mine was typically running the "or SoundBlaster compatible" card.
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"Your sound card works perfectly."
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And if you kept pressing it, it would tell you off. Back when even installers had more soul than their games do now.
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Most of the time it was IRQ 7 for me.
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Yeah, IRQ7 was also pretty common for sound cards as long as you didn't need to print at the same time. For DOS games, that wasn't a big deal but if you were running Windows and multitasking with something that played sound (I was an early adopter of MP3s), you couldn't use both at the same time.
My first Pentium PC was all kinds of awful because it used that IBM Mwave combo sound card /modem. You couldn't use the modem and play sound at the same time or it would lock the PC up. It was also configured by default to use IRQ7, so if you were online, you couldn't print either. At least I was able to work around the latter by setting it to IRQ5.
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Ugh..
How did PCs beat out the Amiga, Mac and ST with nonsense like that?
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Because I could play the same copies of the same games on my Tandy 1000, the IBM PCs at school, and my friend's Packard Bell. Standardized architecture was, and still is, a huge draw.
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Open and documented APIs.
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How did PCs beat out the Amiga, Mac and ST with nonsense like that?
I think you can ultimately blame Compaq. It was the first "pc clone" that showed the market that a PC not from expensive IBM was viable. After that even if you weren't buying a Compaq your own generic clone was "good enough". So You could access hardware and software built for a $4000 8088 IBM PC with your $1200 clone.
Amiga never was commodity hardware. It was always expensive. It didn't get cheap enough fast enough. Amiga 500 came too late.
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Volume
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Phoenix BIOS/The BIOS Wars
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They couldn't play Doom (until much later). Even to this day, the Amiga ports are lackluster. Hardware wasn't designed for that kind of game.
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They could play Wolfenstein and Doom...
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Sounds poor.
It was the early days of computers, so it's not like that's really saying much. Most of it was a mishmash of stuff
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You just unlocked a memory for me. One of my dad's friends had a super cool keyboard, I think it was a Casio. It had midi, and a bunch of built in instruments. Then he had another friend, who was a huge geek, who figured out how to extract the midi instruments from the keyboard, so we could use them to replace the cheaper sounding midi instruments in windows.
Obviously it didn't sound as good as the keyboard, because it still was dragged behind by inferior hardware on the PC. Not to mention the fact that some of the instruments just didn't play, and that Windows liked to crash and revert all instruments back to the default if it didn't like an instrument we tried to feed it, but I still remember it as something really badass.
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most PCs by that time had built-in MIDI synthesizers
Built-in? You had AdLib cards for FM synthesis, but they were never built-in and most PCs didn't even have them. Adlib cards used the Yamaha OPL2 or OPL3 chip.
Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM
You are skipping a very important part here: cards that could output digital audio. The early Soundblaster cards were pioneers here (SB 1.0, SB 2.0, SB Pro, SB16). The SB16 for example was waaaaay more popular than the AWE32 ever was, even if it still used OPL3 based FM synth for music. It's the reason why most soundcards in the 90s were "Soundblaster compatible".
Digital audio meant that you could have recorded digital sound effects in games. So when you fired the shotgun in Doom to kill demons, it would play actual sound effects of shotgun blasts and demon grunts instead of bleeps or something synthesized and it was awesome. This was the gamechanger that made soundcards popular, not wavetable.
The wavetable cards I feel were more of a sideshow. They were interesting, and a nice upgrade, especially if you composed music. They never really took off though and they soon became obsolete as games switched from MIDI based audio to digital audio, for example Quake 1 already had its music on audio tracks on CD-ROM, making wavetable synthesis irrelevant.
BTW, I also feel like you are selling FM synthesis short. The OPL chips kinda sucked for plain MIDI, especially with the Windows drivers, and they were never good at reproducing instrument sounds but if you knew how to program them and treated the chip as its own instrument rather than a tool to emulate real world instruments, they were capable of producing beautiful electronic music with a very typical sound signature. You should check out some of the adlib trackers, like AdTrack2 for some examples. Many games also had beautiful FM synthesized soundtracks, and I often preferred it over the AWE32 wavetable version (e.g. Doom, Descent, Dune)
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At the time (1995-ish) I was developing a series of Windows applications that let people compose music on their PCs, [...] the actual quality of the music when played through a shitty built-in FM sound chip was depressingly awful
And the a Atari ST and Amiga 500 was released in the late 1980s.
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Thanks for the anecdote. I love reading this kind of context-giving stories on how different our expectations on consumer-grade electronics were.
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Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM.
Creative Labs did wavetable synthesis well before the AWE32 — they released the Wave Blaster daughter board for the Sound Blaster 16, two full years before the AWE32 was released.
(FWIW, I’m not familiar with any motherboards that had FM synthesis built-in in the mid 90’s. By this time, computers were getting fast enough to be able to do software-driven wavetable synthesis, so motherboards just came with a DAC).
Where the Sound Blaster really shined was that the early models were effectively three cards in one — an Adlib card, a CMS card, and a DAC/ADC card (with models a year or two later also acting as CD-ROM interface cards). Everyone forgets about CMS because Adlib was more popular at the time, but it was capable of stereo FM synthesis, whereas the Adlib was only ever mono.
(As publisher of The Sound Blaster Digest way back then, I had all of these cards and more. For a few years, Creative sent me virtually everything they made for review. AMA).
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Most of Creative's AWE32 cards do use a real Yamaha OPL3 chip for FM synthesis, which can produce two-or-four operator voices. The latter of those can approach the quality of the voices in their DX7-family line of musical instruments. Even the older OPL2 chip that is limited to two-operator voices can sound great when programmed well (not that I'd call it realistic-sounding).
The other synth chip on the AWE32 is the Ensoniq EMU8000. That one does sample-based synthesis as you describe above.
Just wanted to note that Creative misappropriated the term wavetable synthesis when they marketed this and other sample-based synthesis cards of theirs, and the misnomer spread widely to the products of other companies and persists to this day.
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That was a super interesting read - thanks for the writeup!
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Not the same thing, but I still have my old Voodoo 2 3D-accelerator card (not the same thing as a video card back then).
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I had the original voodoo 3Dfx in 50lbs Alienware case with a 75 lbs 20+ inch crt.. can’t remember the exact size. Wrong choice for university living at the time
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VESA local bus. It was the shit and nothing was ever going to be better. Until next year.
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I miss my Voodoo 2 3000 AGP card.
I got an ABIT Siluro/ Geforce 2 MX400 after that and Diablo 2 ran worse, the frame rate tanked. I was gutted.
Back in the day I tried to play Morrowind but every time I moved my mouse the game would crash, I started removing hardware until I found out it was my soundcard giving me issues, was an old ISA slot. Got a PCI soundcard after that and no issues.
Those were the days.
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Shitty days, but days nonetheless, when PC gaming was the Dark Souls of gaming.
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It's a good thing you held onto it.
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Shit, I should check my bins
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that's why I sold mine a couple years ago :)
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Wow, I have a bunch of old stuff laying about too that I figured was worth nothing. Original boxes, games, manuals etc which might help too. Hmm
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And of course there was a short period of time where a sound card wasn’t required, but would actually improve performance by offloading audio processing to your sound card if you had one. And onboard audio at that time wasn’t great anyways.
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You can still get discrete sound cards (both internal and USB), though they're more for audiophile stuff. With the PS5 touting big 3d audio improvements and HRTFs I half expected manufacturers to make a push to bring them back or at least feature sound features more prominantly in motherboards but I guess CPUs these days can just spare the cycles if you want fancy audio.
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Generating music still benefits from offloading to discrete devices though. Like using a synth or multitrack stuff.
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Modern CPUs can do all the audio processing you’d ever need (maybe barring some professional use cases like making music or editing a movie).
Audiophile external audio devices are just doing the conversion from a digital signal to an analogue signal.
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And the mind blowing difference in midi quality if you heard the upgrade the first time...
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And of course there was a short period of time where a sound card wasn’t required, but would actually improve performance by offloading audio processing to your sound card if you had one
we are at this point in history, but for graphics cards :)
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I remember Battlefield 2 being a prime example for that. Not only did its performance improve once I added a discrete sound card, it also sounded much better.
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I bought an X-Fi card just for that game.
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It was all fun and games until your thrustmaster and your soundblaster and your modem hit an IRQ conflict.
Plug-and-play was a godsend for gamers.
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Plug and pray
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"The planet Arrakis, known as Dune"
My very first experience with a sound card was watching the Dune 2 intro on my dad's friend's computer. I was so amazed, I just sat in awe as that intro movie played.
On the drive home I tried to remember if what I heard was real, and I just couldn't imagine it. When I tried to recall what I saw and heard, I could only imagine hearing that tinny internal speaker making bleeps and bloops instead of the actual sounds. It just seemed so unreal at the time that I could not recall what I had heard only a few hours earlier :)On a side note, I don't think any studio in the nineties made as memorable tunes and sounds as Westwood did. There was always something enchanting about them. Dune 2, the Kyrandia games, they all had excellent music that really played into the strengths of what was available back then.
Of course I'm talking with pink tinted nostalgia goggles, but still... good memories :)-
Great, now I have the ornithopter theme from Dune 1 stuck in my head.
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Ah the sweet sounds of a simpler, worryfree time ...
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Frank Klepacki, what a fucking gem.
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How quickly we forget the chip tunes of the PC Speaker, I used it in a computer lab one day to play a nearly undetectable high freq wave using logo. The PC Speaker was a pretty flexible little speaker
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Flexible enough that Access Software built a library called RealSound that could do 6-bit PCM audio over it. Which isn't great but is dramatically better than you'd expect. A bit over a dozen or so games used it.
I had one called Mean Streets that used it for things like voice. The game came with instructions for how to build a cable to connect your internal speaker to an RCA cable to run to a stereo or similar.
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Oh man that unlocked a memory of some attempts I heard of voices through PC Speaker that weren't bad but definitely weren't great lol
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At the same time, the Commodore Amiga had built-in stereo 44.1kHz 16-bit sound...
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Magnificent machine. I loved mine so much for so many years.
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I even played Doom and Doom 2 on mine, at some horrendously low resolution.
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8 channels (if they cheated a bit)
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The C=64 SID was even further ahead of its time
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Originally 28 kHz 8-bit.
https://amitopia.com/amiga-was-already-capable-of-14bit-playback-in-1985/
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I don't think that's accurate... Of course it's possible I'm misremembering something from 35+ years ago, but there's no performance benefit for 14 bits over 16- either way, it's a 2-byte fetch, you don't save anything by leaving off two bits. So I'd almost believe it was 8-bit rather than 16, but the difference in sound quality is huge, and the Amigas had a 16-bit data bus so 16-bit fetches took no more effort than 8-bit. The sample rate I'd be more likely to believe I had wrong, but again, there are technical reasons for the 44.1 kHz rate that have to do with recording digital audio to videotape, so I could see it being half that, but not some random number. But again, huge sound quality difference between 44.1 and 22.05.
All that said, I'm not too familiar with the 1000, I had the 500 which was basically the same machine as the 2000 but in a more compact case. My uncle had a 1000, but he used it professionally so he wouldn't let me near it :D
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SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
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Failed. IRQ currently in use.
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Too real :D
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Fuck Creative. Letigious patent troll is the whole reason why 3D audio in games was stuck in the dark ages technologically for the longest time.
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Miss that era and wish that there were more options for PCI “premium” sound cards. All of the fancy DACs and audio interfaces are seemingly USB.
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The inside of the PC is electrically hostile to good sound quality. Loads of electrical noise.
USB is an excellent use of a sound interface.
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And then three things happened at once
- Creative de-facto monopolized the industry often by unethical means (suing Aureal into bankruptcy, etc.), not letting much room for competitors, which in turn lead to diminishing quality on the part of Creative.
- Microsoft didn't put hardware acceleration support into XAudio, which superseeded DirectSound.
- Game publishers realized the vast majority of gamers didn't care about sound quality, so they could spent those resources on making the games look a little bit more realistic.
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What a nightmare it was to have sound AND your CD drive drivers to load and leave enough memory for some of those nasty old DOS games. Felt like being a hacker.
(I might have realized I'm the old guy in the picture)
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I built a config.sys file with a menu that then passed the menu choice on to autoexec.bat so I could choose at boot time between 3 configurations- one with expanded memory for older games that required it, one with extended memory for everyday use and newer games, and one with everything extra (including CD-ROM drivers) stripped away to maximize free conventional RAM for the one or two games that needed that...
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How could you have a menu in config.sys?? I wasn’t aware that was even possible.
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I know that was a thing and I tried to get it done, but never managed to get it to work properly. So back to manual configuration and rebooting it was.
But I like to think that's how I learned how my PC works and what it does when doing so, which helped me identify the cause of many issues over the years.
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Sound typically (*) didn't require "drivers" or any TSR though. The game had to do all the hardware control itself.
It was usually enough to set a BLASTER variable to point it at the correct IRQ, DMA and memory address, and perhaps run a program at boot to initialize the card and set volume levels, but no TSR eating up memory.
(*) Some exceptions are later soundcards of the Win 9x era that did crappy emulation of a real Soundblaster via a TSR in DOS.
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Speaking of memory, I had a weird 486 machine which had baked in 16MB of ram which were accessible through EMS and 16MB of replaceable RAM sticks accessible through XMS interface. The thing is EMS worked faster in DOS, but XMS worked faster in Windows 95. So when booting up into DOS, all the apps would use baked in EMS RAM, but when booting into Windows, all the apps would use XMS RAM.
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Ah, the days of needing a 3D GPU and a 2D GPU...
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I find it really interesting that modern 3D pipelines are so efficient that drawing 2D using 3D part of GPU is faster and better than using 2D part of GPU still present in modern GPUs for backwards compatibility. Maybe 2D is now done in software in drivers though, I'm not sure, haven't checked.
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At least it was a real name. Nowadays it seems like every new company's name is just a random jumble of letters solely because that .com was available.
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blastr by creatv
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Not only that but they also had the serial input for joysticks.
So if you played some Wing Commander with a game pad or stick you probably had this card.
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15 pin d-sub that could support TWO joysticks if you had the splitter cable. Micro machines 2 : 4 player, with 2 gamepads into the soundcard, and one player using each side of the keyboard.
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The motherboard had nothing but the case usually had a speaker just to make a "beep" sound. I had to play Wolfenstein with that shit because my dad didn't have a sound blaster until he also got a CD-ROM drive to play Doom since he could only find a copy on CD and not floppy disk.
And even now, a SoundBlaster32 is better than the in-built audio stuff motherboards do have. Though it's not worth getting one just for games.
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And you had to have the audio cable to connect the cdrom drive if you wanted to listen to an audio CD. It was an interesting time.
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I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn't bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn't matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.
(I'm going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I'm contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there's still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? ...Oh they're still around!? Good.)
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what was really cool were the few games that would give realistic* music and speech from the internal motherboard speaker. No daughterboards or external speakers required. This was 386 era, I think.
realistic as much as could be from that tiny internal speaker and 8 bits of data.
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Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think the PC speaker was literally a 1-bit speaker. Anything that sounded more detailed was PWM on that one bit
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That's correct. Jesus they were awful yokes but they were really mostly intended for letting you know that your hardware was bollixed at boot time.
PC's had mostly been business machines really until the 90s if my memory is correct.
If you wanted gaming you got a more gaming focused machine like an Amiga or console.
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"Old lamps for new! Old lamps for new!"
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I still hear this through my tinny onboard in my deepest dreams.
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Yes, I remember these! Countdown And Tex Murphy: The Martian Memorandum come to mind. I remember being amazed at the sounds suddenly coming out of our internal computer speaker. It even had something close to speech!
The manual also came with some info on making the sound even better using some alligator clips, but that went waaaay over my little head at the time :) -
That’s the only way to listen to the Sim City soundtrack.
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60% of the time, it works every time
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When I was a kid we had 9 planets.
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When I was a kid we had a future to look forward to
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Dr. Sbaitso says "'sup."
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I had one. Besides, I love 80s/90s aesthetics.
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I had to play Wolfenstein 3D with the little wafer speaker on the motherboard.
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Until I upgraded to Linux Mint recently I actually DID use a Soundblaster card (modern one from 2018) to drive my super nice headphones and speakers
Too bad mint weirdly hated it despite recognizing it, but the new speakers have a fine DAC so....
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Still running Creative SoundBlasterX G5
Amazing card, and the series is very much alive
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I wonder what would happen if you tried to run a soundblaster 16 on Linux. Would it work and how shitty would the sound quality be?
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No idea honestly :D
The modern G5 runs perfectly alright though.
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Why? Also isn't that a PCI card not a PCIe card? I don't do much audio but it seems like on board would be easier
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On board is easier and for any audio enthusiast, sounds like trash by comparison.
I have yet to meet an onboard audio solution that didn't give you garbage in the output. Whether it's coil whine, a low hiss or a 60hz him, there's always something.
Onboard, in my experience also distorts way earlier into the volume slider by comparison.
But yeah, onboard is much easier.
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G5 is a USB card. And I'd argue that's the best approach, as sound signal being analog is highly susceptible to interference, and insides of a computer have a lot of that.
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Dr. Sbaitso was the speech systhesis DOS program that was included with most Soundblaster cards. You could tell Dr. Sbaitso about all of your problems.
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What? They did have onboard sound. The problem is that if you used the motherboard speaker to make anything more decent than a beep, you basically needed to build an entire sound engine from scratch and very few games did so. It also wasn't worthwhile because a shitty two pin speaker could not compare to the speakers of a professional sound system which you needed the soundcard to hook up into, and CPU bandwidth was such a limitation back then than even when games could play WAV they would use MIDI to offload the musical instrument synthesizing for the soundtracks to the sound card. Designing a game that used the onboard sound speaker was basically the realm of assembly hacking geniuses.
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It also wasn’t worthwhile because a shitty two pin speaker
All speakers are two pins. 🤔 They were crappy because they were most often little piezoelectric speakers, or otherwise very small where they couldn't play low frequency sounds well.
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I was a rebel and went with the Pro Audio 16
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But you got the connector for a Joystick for free!
Ah, i remember might & magic 3. loved it, because it sent speech through the crappy pc speaker. So cool
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You had to use Voodoo to see the magic 3d graphics
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The Yamaha YM3812 sound chip was the backbone of computer sound & music generation for almost a decade.
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I'm still rocking an Audigy 2 on my main computer for that 1/4" jack on the front bay
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Great card, got one in my 440BX retro rig! Plus an AWE64 Gold and a PnP SB16 with a real OPL3 FM chip. That's just a bit of what's kicking around here...
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In the grand scheme of things they were relatively inexpensive. You could spend a lot but you didn't need to.
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I still use my external soundblaster to connect to my 5.1 amp. I have HDMI to my TV and then toslink to my amp, but it was inconvenient having to have the TV on for listening music.
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My best friend gave me his sound blaster after upgrading to the Pro. Later I upgraded to a Gravis Ultrasound. Offloading sound processing to the sound card (1MB) improved gaming performance significantly.
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Long live the Gravis Ultrasound Max!
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220/5/1
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1000 yard stare
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Gravis Ultrasound with red pcb reporting..
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Did you get the matching Gravis Gamepad or was it late enough that you had a Microsoft Sidewinder?
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Gravis gamepad :-)
Rock solid!
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Wait. When did onboard sound get good enough that you don't need a soundcard? My computer is "only" 12ish years, and it has a soundcard. The reason used to be that internal ones sounded like shit.
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I used to use a sound card until it died. When I researched how to get good sound I found most people use a DAC/amp combo now. But onboard is usually good enough. It was a noticable upgrade but not sure if it was worth the money.
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You should still buy sound cards as they are significantly better, at least the ones in the 100€ range. Just because there are premium mainboards with acceptable sound doesn't mean it is great.
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I doubt it. Unless your motherboard is really old I think it won't matter. Sound is easy to do these days.
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This hasn’t crossed my mind in decades. Not even in a “remember when” sense.
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We had floppy drives but they started making the disks rigid! Rigid!!! If only we could go back to the good old scuzzy times....
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I think the only floppy disk that I know of that I didn't use was the 7"? I think it was 7. The one that's larger than the 5.25" that was really common.
From there I've used or handled just about every type of digital storage. The 5.25" floppy disks are classic, but easily near the bottom of my list for favorites. They're down there with anything on tape (which is useful but always a hassle), and early USB drives when they used the cheapest solid state IC they could find and no matter what you did the IC was always painfully slow and there was nothing you could do about it because every manufacturer did that shit.
3.5" was rigid on the outside, floppy in the middle. Still a floppy diskette in my view.
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Yeah, the inside of a 3.5" was still just a little floppy magnetic thing. I was just trying to be silly and channel my old-man-yells-at-cloud vibe.
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Eight inches, not seven. Got a story with that...
Back when I was in school, I was working on the side on expanding an ERP system for a customer. Said customer got a stack of printouts from their main supplier each January: The new price list. They meticiously typed that 300+ pages list into their own ERP system, and then checked it for errors. This took the boss and his wife a good part of January and February. Every year.
So I told him that the main supplier already has that data in a computer, why does he not ask to get the price list on disk, and I see whether I can get them into the system via a software import. He called them, asked me back if "IBM Format" would be OK, and I said yes. Surprise: The supplier had an IBM mainframe and sent us an 8" floppy. Luckily, the boss knew the right people with the right equipment and got me a copy on 5.25" and in ASCII (the original was in EBCDIC).
It took me one day to figure out the format, write an importer, and run it to completion. Boss and wife were very happy.
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Back when MIDI and the quality of your synthesizer actually mattered!
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Got a second hand ISA interface SoundBlaster 64 at a computer fair in San Diego when I was visiting there for the best summer of my life in 1998. If I remember correctly it was $4.
Money well spent.
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At the Scottish Rite Center in Mission Valley? There’s a good chance I was also there that year. My two most prized possessions I acquired there were a 3dfx Voodoo Rush, and a modded PlayStation 1 in a clear plastic housing.
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Not there but (and I had to google maps this) it was at a place that I think is called "Pechanga Arena" now on the aptly named "Sports Arena Blvd" but I think the arena was called something else back then. About 2 miles from Ocean / Mission beaches and close to my apartment at the time.
You did well with your purchases!
Flippin' LOVE San Diego.
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Oh yeah, I forgot about Soundblaster. They have that stupid card a Transformer name and none of us ever questioned it.
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My fairly modern computer, originally released in 2014 (yes, that's modern compared to a lot of the computers I own), has no sound card.
I picked up a Yamaha AG06, which has a USB connection and creates both audio inputs and audio outputs to/from my PC. I can quickly plug in my phone or a Bluetooth receiver (which my phone connects to), and get other audio into my headphones with very little trouble. I prefer it this way, and if my next PC has onboard audio, I'll probably disable it in favor of the AG06.
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I still use an external Creative sound card so I can switch my speakers over USB between my work laptop and personal desktop!
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I’m using a cheap one of those from amazon for my headphones on my laptop because the audio jack suddenly stopped recognizing when headphones were plugged in. (although I still get a dmesg error log when I stick a q-tip in to the jack? If anyone knows how to debug this, please tell me)
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Can't you just use a barrel jack?
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I still like Xonar cards, like the Xonar DG (though it isn't compatible with my new PC). I always liked their interface more than the competitors, and it puts out excellent volume on my Logitech headset that is otherwise way too quiet for me. Never been a big fan of the simulated 3D environments on any of these cards, though. The only game it ever sounded decent in was No Man's Sky, but even that still had a distant tinny sound to it.
I think most people just use external amplifiers these days, but I'm still using a third-party sound card.
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