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
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.
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
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
This hasn’t crossed my mind in decades. Not even in a “remember when” sense.
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.
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
You had to use Voodoo to see the magic 3d graphics
I’m still rocking an Audigy 2 on my main computer for that 1/4" jack on the front bay
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…
IRQ 5, I/O 220, DMA 01 🤘🏻
I was poor, so mine was typically running the “or SoundBlaster compatible” card.
“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 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.
Reading those numbers it’s like I can hear the Duke Dukem intro.
Or Star Control 2 Hyperspace theme.
I missed out on that one
Hail to the king, baby!
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.
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.
Volume
What you did there, I see it.
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.
They could play Wolfenstein and Doom…
Phoenix BIOS/The BIOS Wars
Open and documented APIs.
Pro Audio Spectrum 16 gang represent.
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 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.
VESA local bus. It was the shit and nothing was ever going to be better. Until next year.
It’s a good thing you held onto it.
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
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.
They’re still around and they still make cards. The onboard audio in my PC broke, so I bought an Audigy FX and it’s served me ever since.
I think these days most people use their video card as a sound card because monitors/displays generally have audio out as well.
But yeah. I remember having endless problems getting one of the Splinter Cells to run (I want to say Pandora Tomorrow?). After literally weeks of googling and discussing the issue on forums with others with the same problem, we found out that it had issues with the onboard sound for certain motherboards. Went out to Best Buy, bought the cheapest soundblaster they had, and no problems.
