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Comment by deckard1 | Hacker News Reader

same here. We had an 8088 with AdLib, which only had FM synthesis. We stepped up to a Pentium 75Mhz with SoundBlaster AWE32 and 16-bit 44.1kHz audio. And CD-ROM drive! Those were amazing times. Shortly after that the internet hit mainstream and MP3s became a thing, and the world changed forever.

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The AWE32 was amazing. I remember being so frustrated that essentially no games seemed to take advantage of it.

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.

> The AWE32 was amazing. I remember being so frustrated that essentially no games seemed to take advantage of it.

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.

That was somewhat surprising to read!

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?

Yeah... Demos and mod trackers made a lot of GUS use. From what I remember, the audio synthesis model was fairly similar. I bet there was a lot of overlap between mod tracker authors and GUS enthusiasts. (And from what I remember, the MOD format itself was strongly derived from the capabilities of the Amiga audio hardware.)

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