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.
When in doubt just select Soundblaster Compatible and default IRQs.
60% of the time, it works every time
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.
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.
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?
Open and documented APIs.
Volume
What you did there, I see it.
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…
Phoenix BIOS/The BIOS Wars
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
Failed. IRQ currently in use.
Too real :D
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
Shit, I should check my bins
that’s why I sold mine a couple years ago :)
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.)
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.
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.
If you want good sound, buy an external usb DAC. It will be away from all electro magnetic interference and will be way better than any consumer stuff.
Modern built-in DACs are insulated well enough for good sound. You only want to spend money on an external one if you want excellent sound.
Except your analog cables going from your PC?
Which should be shielded for any decent sound equipment. Also they come from the front panel, away from major interference sources.
Lol how do you think they get to that front panel?
I mean sure go ahead and shield this and that (and still get em interference in the DAC card because it’s hooked up to the friggin PCI express bus on the motherboard) instead of using a simple USB cable.
You’re delusional.
“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.
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
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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.
The C=64 SID was even further ahead of its time
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
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…
