IRQ 5, I/O 220, DMA 01 🤘🏻
I was poor, so mine was typically running the “or SoundBlaster compatible” card.
Reading those numbers it’s like I can hear the Duke Dukem intro.
Hail to the king, baby!
Or Star Control 2 Hyperspace theme.
I missed out on that one
“Your sound card works perfectly.”
And if you kept pressing it, it would tell you off. Back when even installers had more soul than their games do now.
Most of the time it was IRQ 7 for me.
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.
Ugh…
How did PCs beat out the Amiga, Mac and ST with nonsense like that?
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.
Open and documented APIs.
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.
Volume
What you did there, I see it.
Phoenix BIOS/The BIOS Wars
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.
They could play Wolfenstein and Doom…
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
Fun Creative Labs fact: the reason soundcards were popular in the '90s was that while most PCs by that time had built-in MIDI synthesizers, the instrument sounds were created with a very cheap version of a synthesis technique known as FM (for frequency modulation) synthesis. The first synthesizers (e.g. the Moog) used analog circuits known as oscillators to produce sounds in the form of sin waves, square waves, triangle waves etc. These were really not able to mimic the complex waveforms generated by real instruments, even when multiple oscillators were combined into one sound - and in those days adding oscillators just increased the cost of the circuitry in a linear fashion. FM synthesis essentially used one oscillator to modulate (aka change the frequency of) another waveform-generating oscillator, and this produced much more complex waveform output that could (sometimes, at least) mimic real-world instruments. So much more realistic sounds could be produced by just doubling the number of oscillators in the circuitry, instead of multiplying the oscillators by 10 or 100 or whatever and still not achieving very much sonically.
When it came time to build sound generators into PC chips, FM synthesis was the natural technique since the manufacturers still wanted it to be as cheap as humanly possible, even though the circuits were now digital instead of analog. And so was born a generation of shitty, tinny-sounding PCs. Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM. Wavetable synthesis stored an actual digitally-sampled sound bank of a real instrument for each of the defined MIDI instruments, with added loop points for instruments (like flute, strings etc.) that needed to be able to produce an arbitrarily long note. By today’s standards, the AWE32 sounded nearly as bad as the cheap FM stuff, but at the time it was fucking mind-blowing. It even had the capacity to load in your own instrument samples to replace the built-in ones, although this was a bit of a pain in the ass to do.
At the time (1995-ish) I was developing a series of Windows applications that let people compose music on their PCs, and while it worked well, the actual quality of the music when played through a shitty built-in FM sound chip was depressingly awful and I had a lot of trouble convincing people it was a worthwhile endeavor (my parents were particularly prone to eye-rolling when listening to the chintzy notes). My first AWE32 improved things massively - the problem was that nobody out in the world had one so it was impossible to target it with my application. I dealt with the problem by essentially giving up until years later when PCs because powerful enough to do wavetable synthesis entirely in code using just the processor itself. And nowadays I can run the stuff on a first-generation iPhone!
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.
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.
I’m old enough to know that but I had virtually no interaction with computers until 1995 when I conceived the idea for my software (after reading Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker) and bought a PC and Visual Basic 3 to try and make it happen. I understand that Ataris and Amigas were pretty damn advanced for their time and I wonder what I could have done with them if I hadn’t been busy smoking dope and trying to be an Anthropologist.
Thanks for the anecdote. I love reading this kind of context-giving stories on how different our expectations on consumer-grade electronics were.
That was a super interesting read - thanks for the writeup!
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)
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).
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).
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
VESA local bus. It was the shit and nothing was ever going to be better. Until next year.
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.
Shitty days, but days nonetheless, when PC gaming was the Dark Souls of gaming.
It’s a good thing you held onto it.
Shit, I should check my bins
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
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.
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.
Generating music still benefits from offloading to discrete devices though. Like using a synth or multitrack stuff.
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.
And the mind blowing difference in midi quality if you heard the upgrade the first time…
Oh god AC97 era onboard audio was just bad, there was always weird glitchy sounds coming from interference elsewhere on the motherboard
Or when your mobile phone was about to ring.
That one was actually down to poorly insulated speakers and 2G phone signals dipping into the audible frequency range
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 :)
I’ll give you 4 characters: 3dfx.
Not in the same way, as you aren’t using the integrated gpu at all if you get an external one. I guess if you’re talking about shared ram this makes sense though.
I seem to recall the integrated sound wasn’t used either, when I had my sound card in - the audio connectors were going directly into the sound card.
yea, IDK how it works as I’ve never had a computer back then, but the quoted reply makes it sound like getting a sound card would take load off of the CPU.
oh - my apologies, I forgot that on-board graphics have a dedicated chipset. Also, no idea whether on-board sound would have used CPU power back in the late days of soundcards, as the comment I responded to was claiming… might have been a sound chip for that, too…
Grandpa said nothing wrong.
The company name was Creative Labs.
I inferred that the “…” meant he was still talking and his granddaughter interrupted him
That’s the hairiest granddaughter I’ve ever seen.
Wow, there’s a template just like this one with a granddaughter and I didn’t even clock this is a different one
Sure grandpa, let’s get you to bed.
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.
Plug and pray
deleted by creator
Wait, he didn’t even get to the part where you had to configure it!!
IRQ 5?
I thought 7 was the magic number
You’re both right! It started as 7 for the default and changed to 5 because 7 was also the default for the parallel port.
Seriously. And they also didn’t cover the part where the damn driver would randomly get corrupted every now and then
I have fond memories of these simpler times…
“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.
Frank Klepacki, what a fucking gem.
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.
At the same time, the Commodore Amiga had built-in stereo 44.1kHz 16-bit sound…
Magnificent machine. I loved mine so much for so many years.
I even played Doom and Doom 2 on mine, at some horrendously low resolution.
8 channels (if they cheated a bit)
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.
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.
i had an internal creative soundcard some 5 years back. sound was pretty perfect with dt990 pro and sz2000. my current creative usb soundcard has more noise :(
What if I put foil all around it
You’d have to put it all the way around it, including near the connector. Obviously you can’t put it inside the connector, but that’s another avenue for noise to get in. Outisde the box of noise with it’s own box of insulation is a much calmer place.
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
Failed. IRQ currently in use.
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)
And that dedicated sound cable for DVD CD drive to your soundblaster
And if that cable’s isolation was crap, you could hear your mouse movement through your speakers.
That also happened with the early onboard sound cards.
Oh wow. I totally forgot about those.
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…
How could you have a menu in config.sys?? I wasn’t aware that was even possible.
I don’t remember at this point… So I googled, this looks familiar: http://smallvoid.com/article/dos-multiple-configurations.html
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.
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.
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.
blastr by creatv
