The (Almost) Definitive PC Sound Card Article (Pre-1990) | Hacker News Reader

The (Almost) Definitive PC Sound Card Article (Pre-1990)

brassicgamer.blogspot.com

79 pointstodsacerdoti37 comments

In 1993 I bought the bespoken Sound Blaster from 1989 on a flea market for around $60. It was already considered old. It could only process 8bit sound, but the OPL voices chip was cream. This Sound Blaster was also known as Sound Blaster 1.5 later, if I remember correctly.

Some months (sic!) ago I got an Sound Blaster 16 with SCSI interface at Ebay for $100. Oh man, the OPL2 chip has such a nice and warm sound. Superb quality. The additional SCSI interface makes this Sound Blaster perfect for retro computing.

AHA1542CPs are available for cheap. You can splurge and get the best ISA SCSI card to be had.

Good card, but be aware, this is a plug and play card, which is not working on older systems.

>(sic!)

What?

It means "written as intended": https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/sic-meaning-us...

I'm not sure the definition explains the usage in this case.

it makes sense to me; it's somewhat out of the ordinary to have bought a sound blaster recently, thus the author is verifying that that is indeed what they meant to write.

Makes sense with the context, but at first I, too, was confused. And it's not the first time I see such usage of "sic!" as confusing. <joke>Perhaps it should be "(sic! sic!)" in less obvious contexts to clarify that the first "sic!" is actually intended there.</joke>

Buying a SoundBlaster 16 in 2023 is well past it's prime. He's clarifying that this isn't a story about months after in 1993 era, but a story in the present day.

I think OP is just highlighting that yes, they indeed bought a 30 year-old sound card only few months ago, and that they did not mean to write "many years ago", or "a few months later" instead.

I currently have a 486 with Sound Blaster 16 for sale on eBay! https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/195638491826

The Sound Blaster 16 actually has the OPL3 chip, which is OPL2-compatible, but also has extra waveforms and allows combining 4 waveforms per instrument, rather than just two.

Thanks, I was a little bit puzzled.

But then came the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravis_UltraSound 1992

I never realised they gave away cards for free, and always assumed it was because it was ideally suited to the demo tracker format.

Edit:6000 cards just for the demoscene seems like a lot to me though.

Agreed. I don't think the PC demoscene at that time even had 6000 sceners that were well-known enough for Gravis to send them sound cards.

I remember coveting a friend’s MT-32 setup, but when the GUS came out it was gold. It could do amazing wave-table synthesis in an affordable card. The first time I played Doom with the GUS-rendered soundtrack I was blown away at how great it sounded. I long since parted with my own GUS that I had in the 1990s, and I often wish I held on to it. They seem to be much sought after collector’s items now.

Problem with a GUS (or any 30 year old PC part) is it's more likely to break which means you'd have to invest time and/or money in keeping it running. I sold off mine when I didn't have a working machine with ISA slots anymore.

There’s Pi Pico GUS project now

https://github.com/polpo/picogus

I bought one just for Second Reality.

Did you? Second Reality worked fine on a Sound Blaster, and sounded only marginally different/better on a Gravis if at all. It was somewhat later than that, roughly around winter 1994-1995, that some demos started to work with the GUS only for music or used larger wave samples to make use of its RAM.

I believe I had read that the GUS was preferable for Second Reality, and coming from the Amiga it seemed like the cooler hardware, so that’s what I bought.

The gus offloads audio processing, whereas the sb16 requires more work from the cpu. Hence, the 3d scene at the end of Second Reality should be smoother on gus assuming a typical system of the era, e.g. 486.

This is true, but it's a small difference. It took only about 10% of a 486's CPU time to mix four to eight channels of wavetable audio. You'd never be able to notice or measure if that 3d scene was running at 11 fps instead of 10.

I had the first Gravis Ultrasound and I loved that card so much. I think I had the PnP version also later. Too bad the sound card industry kind of died when basic audio got good enough on motherboards.

I think the difference between sound cards was made irrelevant when CD-ROM games started using digitised audio instead of MIDI soundtracks.

Excellent work! Thoughts:

* Usenet post, not "FidoNet post". (The quoted author has a FidoNet email address, but that's not the same thing.)

* I realize that the article isn't intended to discuss the PCjr/Tandy 1000 because their release dates are well known, but given how important they were to 1980s PC gaming, and there is already a discussion of the PC speaker's workings, a cursory discussion of what became "Tandy sound" seems appropriate.

(Tandy missed out on a big opportunity by not releasing an inexpensive soundcard for non-Tandy PCs. It would have further encouraged software developers to support Tandy sound. The sound card boom of the late 1980s showed just how much of untapped demand existed. A Tandy sound card c. 1985 could have completely taken over the market and more or less preempted the sound card boom because Tandy sound would have been "good enough" for most casual users.)

Also, Creative Technology was founded by Sim Wong Hoo [1], not Sim Wong Woo. Interesting character.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim_Wong_Hoo

I have some extremely rare PC digital audio cards which predate the DigiSound 16. True Sound Technologies True Sound Card, to be specific.

> Through more advanced coding techniques, it became possible later on to playback digital audio by using pulse width modulation. The first time I heard this was when playing Pinball Fantasies - I absolutely could not believe what I was hearing at the time.

Digitized PWM was well known. Nazis were shouting "Achtung!" on the Apple II before the IBM PC ever shipped.

> I'm not interested in similar computers that had built-in audio such as the PCjr and the Tandy

Gah, even worse. I mean, it's true, these cards weren't "cards", but this hardware (the TI SN76486) was the standard for game audio in the PC world until the Ad Lib shipped. This would be like writing a history of PC graphics and skipping VGA.

I had a PAS-16-SCSI (pro audio spectrum 16).

What was the intersection there - between sound cards and SCSI interfaces ?

I was very happy to have it and actually made it work with external SCSI (apple!) peripherals but, looking back, why did this combination make sense ?

Why did these exist ?

I believe the answer is "CD-ROM drives" but the SCSI ones were a bit before my time.

Definitely. There were other flavours of PAS26. I had one which accepted the weird Philips/LMSI interface which supported a specific 1X drive (CM 205) that didn't work on mainline Linux without a patch that didn't really make it past the 1.3 kernel series.

By putting the interface on the sound card, they could sell you a "multimedia in one box" kit without dealing with too many footguns of compatibility.

Eventually, by the late 486/Pentium era, most newer machines had two ATA/IDE channels and you could more or less sell basre drives and expect people could support them without too much hassle.

I wonder if people still buy discrete sound cards today.

I bought one that's not only discrete, but external: I wanted S/PDIF output, and neither my laptop nor my dock had it. While we hit diminishing returns on output sound quality a long time ago, the occasional physical footprint advantage of a discrete part can be useful.

It’s fairly common to get external audio interfaces either for the number of inputs and outputs they can provide or for the interface types.

There are still some that also include DSPs which used to be extremely useful for taking some load off the system, but that a normally only helpful if those are being run on the inputs or you can do all the other parts of the mixing that follows that processing on the card itself.

It’s noticeable that those plugins are generally being ported to run on host CPUs these days because we are much less constrained than we use to be in that regard.

I think the PC internal ones are quite rare, but still there are some on the market. The USB ones are much more prevalent, I suspect because of laptops with broken sound cards. And I personally bought one because the headphones on the lappy would get interference otherwise.

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