Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

My sound card story:

A long time ago we had a bottom of the barrel PC. 386SX 16MHz, 1MB RAM, and 41MB HDD. My parents weren't poor but they were cheap and this was a bargain $899 PC at the time, with 14" VGA monitor and 9 pin printer.

The Pentium had just been released, but I had Surplus Software's advertisements (later bought by Egghead). They sold out of date hardware and software on clearance. I picked up an 8-bit Soundblaster compatible sound card, and a 2400bps modem. The parts arrived, I installed them, and my brother and I spent the better part of a Saturday morning downloading, or rather waiting for the download of Duke Nukem 2

Note: Airborne express dropped the package off at 10:00 am when I had placed my order the day before using my moms credit card (with her permission). That alone was amazing.

Back to the story...after the download was complete, we ran the installer and we so nervous and excited

    CD\DUKE2
    DUKE2.EXE

The cheesy opening cut scene and thundering intro music blew us away. We had never heard any sound like that from the pathetic PC speaker or even our beloved NES.

It was amazing.

Not very far from my first PC: 14'' VGA monitor, and a Siemens Nixdorf 386SX 16Mhz, 40Mb HDD but fortunately 2Mb of RAM (which probably made a huge difference on being able to play some games). Something similar to this beast: https://www.ebay.com/itm/172038842293?hash=item280e5067b5:g:...

Similarly, the Pentium was just released and a friend of a friend of mine had one (wealthy parents). Just once, I got to visit the Pentium's guy home tagging along my friend. The guy played a small VIDEO-CLIP with sound output in a Soundblaster-driven pair of speakers.

I had never heard any game sound but PC speakers or NES (Famicom). There was a popular software at the time which I don't recall, which was playing MOD files into the PC speaker and we would listen in awe how that would sound.

Now imagine being hit simultaneously with full-blown digital sound AND VIDEO. Flabbergasted is an understatement. The Pentium guy kept saying something about choppy video and crappy quality but I couldn't notice a damn thing, seemed the most amazing video I ever saw and all I could think (but of course couldn't say it out loud) was "shut the fuck up, I can't hear the soundtrack".

I am so blown away by how close our stories are. Got this exact setup from grandparents for my 13th birthday, which was a HUGE surprise. I remember sitting on the sidelines of my younger brother’s football games while I read the DOS manual.

I ended up buying a Sound Blaster Pro and installing that. We were absolutely blown away by the sound coming from that thing, specifically Links 386.

Oh, and I ended up working at Egghead Software for a couple years in the mid-90’s.

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