Our Family went straight from the 8088 + cga graphics to the pentium 100mhz (really an overclockerd 90mhz model) + sound blaster card + matrox something and a decent Sony screen .
Quite a big jump :)
Quite a big jump :)
Now there's a jump... that must have been around two orders of magnitude more compute performance (not to mention all the rest of the new capabilities.)
> + matrox something and a decent Sony screen .
One of the things I did with that 486 machine was upgrade to a Sony-17SE1 monitor. This is when 14 or 15 inch CRT's were normal, so the 17 was special, expensive, and a very significant financial stretch. Still worth it for all the reasons you'd expect.
I carried the monitor over to the Pentium, which was its own learning experience. The Pentium machine was built to be a dedicated Linux machine, so I had to be fairly careful about the hardware I used. When I ordered it from Micron, I bought it with the cheapest possible video option the offered, and upgraded it myself to a Number Nine 771 (which had a discrete IBM RAMDAC and was much better supported on Linux.)
The reason I mention this is that I got to see the same monitor driven by two different outputs. Even at the same resolution/etc, the quality of the image was much, much better on the 771, for reasons that I am sure were related to the discrete RAMDAC and a better analog section. It's the sort of thing that's totally a non issue these days (digital link ftw), but mattered a lot back then.
It's the sort of thing that's totally a non
issue these days (digital link ftw), but mattered
a lot back then.
Sometimes monitor cables themselves were the culprits. I remember seeing a very noticeable difference between various VGA cables. Unnoticeable in games, but very significant when working with text. Especially when coding on a cramped CRT monitor with the smallest font size my eyes could tolerate, so I could have the maximum amount of code and documentation onscreen at once.
Differences in analog video output were noticeable in the game console space as well.
For example NEC's PC Engine was known for having really sharp, vibrant composite output. Most models of the Genesis/Megadrive did not. Etc.
The Sony 17SE1 I bought was positioned as a relatively high end display. (Maybe something you'd see on a workstation class machine.). The video cable for it had DB-15 at the video card, but the connection to the monitor itself was five separate BNC connectors. Presumably that allowed better performance with DB13W3 and the like, although I never used that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB13W3
> For example NEC's PC Engine was known for having really sharp, vibrant composite output. Most models of the Genesis/Megadrive did not. Etc.
Interesting... I only used a PC Engine once or twice, but I do remember it having better than average video quality. At the time, I attributed it to the better video processor, but it's easy to believe that the analog section was that much better also. (Particularly given that it was composite video, and all the weirdness associated with that.)
That's actually the time period when I started to fall in love with game music. I'd download MIDI files of songs from 16-bit games. On most setups, they sounded quite bad. But in MIDI software that supported the AWE32's soundfonts a lot of them sounded incredible.
Gravis Ultrasound (?) falls into the same category for me. Really interesting and capable hardware that didn't penetrate the market enough to warrant significant investment by game developers.
And once 16-bit/44KHz audio and powerful enough CPU's became common, the need for hardware accelerated audio generation for games really diminished. It's all now logically pretty similar to the DAC section of a SB16 with a bunch of software driving it.
It's nice that the level of capability is as high as it is, but I do miss some of the unique hardware designs from that era.
I never owned a GUS, but I seem to remember most games having support for it. It always seemed to taunt me from the game's installer.
Or maybe I'm just thinking of demos and modtrackers. A lot of them used to require a GUS for sound, I think?