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
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.
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 :)
Shit, I should check my bins
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.
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 the mind blowing difference in midi quality if you heard the upgrade the first time…
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…
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.
I bought an X-Fi card just for that game.
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.
“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.
Ah the sweet sounds of a simpler, worryfree time …
Frank Klepacki, what a fucking gem.
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)
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
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.
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
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.
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
Oh wow. I totally forgot about those.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah, the days of needing a 3D GPU and a 2D GPU…
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.
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.
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.
