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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.
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.
That was a super interesting read - thanks for the writeup!
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).
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.
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.
It’s a good thing you held onto it.
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
that’s why I sold mine a couple years ago :)
“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 :)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.
8 channels (if they cheated a bit)
Originally 28 kHz 8-bit.
https://amitopia.com/amiga-was-already-capable-of-14bit-playback-in-1985/
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
The C=64 SID was even further ahead of its time
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
Failed. IRQ currently in use.
Too real :D
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
I used the Amiga disk drive to play music. It sounds like you would imagine. And will destroy the drive if you play too much.
Nice I couldn’t imagine playing music on my c64’s 1541 drive the thing made scary knocking noises when it worked properly!
The c64 could do all sorts of music over the TV speakers, even voices. Who can forget Impossible Mission “Another visitor, stay a while, stay forever!”
That laugh still haunts me. Also the SAM application for text to speech which was pretty good for the era
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)
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
That’s crazy. It’s like some ghetto DOS version of grub.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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60% of the time, it works every time
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.
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
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.
“Old lamps for new! Old lamps for new!”
I still hear this through my tinny onboard in my deepest dreams.
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.
