/vr/ - Retro Games

Fact #1: Sound Blaster was around and popular for a long period of time when everyone in-the-know knew it was pointless.
Fact #2: If you install/configure an old Forgotten Realms DOS game, you will see the kind of shit that made people think this kind of shit was necessary.

As for the answer your questions, I don't know.

bros i wish 3dfx was still in business...

Dr. Sbaitso, by Creative Labs
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>>8085550
t. tranny that has zero experience

Why do cunts post when they literally have no idea what they're talking about.

>>8085539
most people just had PC speaker sound

>>8085539
AdLib came first. Creative did some scummy shit in the market to keep AdLib down.

The only use I had for my soundcard back in the day was because my onboard sound was completely fucking broken.

>>8085550
>Fact #1: Sound Blaster was around and popular for a long period of time when everyone in-the-know knew it was pointless.

retarded poorfag detected

>>8085539
>Back when the Sound Blaster first came out, was it an instant hit or did it take some time to be that?
it became the default sound card in a lot of builds, as the manufacturer were paying OEMs to ship their cards over a competitors. it wasn't any better than the competitors. It couldn't compete against cards like gravis for years. it became a forced meme. each release of the soundblaster fucked with the OPL synth core - making people furious in the process.
>>8085550
>Fact #1: Sound Blaster was around and popular for a long period of time when everyone in-the-know knew it was pointless.
i'd wager you didn't know about its existence until you frantically googled for an answer.

>>8086275
>It couldn't compete against cards like gravis for years.
Yeah, 3. Because the Gravis wasn't on the market yet.

>>8085550
you probably got into them too late. they were a performance boost for some games.

What games had good soundblaster support? I know I used mine mostly for games that were designed for Roland, and they sounded "off".

You'd generally only find them in high end gaming builds.

Back in the DOS days, you'd have to go into your game's settings and actually select the sound card you owned.

>And when did the first clone came out?
Creative wasn't the first sound card company, they were just the most market aggressive, signing contracts that shouldn't have been legal in the first place, so they got all the marketshare. If you're asking when actual competition started coming out against them, that was motherboard manufacturers that just started putting sound chips on board. Kinda sucks, really, because Realtek does not give a shit about audio features.

>>8087374
Soundblaster support only means that the game has digitised samples like laser shots or explosions. The rest of the music was still adlib midi, and even some popular games like Wing Commander used midi instruments to generate all their sound fx.
>designed for Roland, and they sounded "off"
Soundblaster only supported adlib. Roland is a different league, tho it's still midi.

>>8087389
>You'd generally only find them in high end gaming builds.
This isn't the Roland MT-32 or two Voodoo cards in SLI.

>>8087406
No, anon, just having a Voodoo alone was a high end build in those days. If you bought an OEM machine with a sound card, it probably cost something like $2500-$2000 around 1995.

>>8087415
Maybe in the EU or something. I got my first PC in the early 90's. The RAM was $50 a MB, the HDD I had was about 270MBs and pricey, and it had a SB1 or 1.5, and the whole thing was still under $1000. Where the hell did you live where only high-end systems had SB cards in the 90's?

>>8087674
lmao a good Intel CPU alone in those days would run you $400 minimum. And the sound card alone is $100. For a $1000 build. Sure.

>>8085580
sounded like a guy inhaling to talk.

>>8085539

no posts yet mentioning that SB came with a friggin joystick port and not all IBM/AT types came with one as they shipped.

Between that, and being FM synth compatible with Adlib, and with a midi controller you could connect through the joystick port, the choice was obvious.

it was magic going from pc speaker to sound blaster. never had adlib, roland, or a gravis

>SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1

>>8087691
>a good CPU
Not everyone was buying the top of the line the moment it came out. It was a 386, but it got the job done. CPU+Mobo, case, PSU, SB, a particularly sad and slow VGA card, 4MBs of RAM, and two floppy drives, 270MB HDD, one 3 1/2 one 5 1/2. Later on I put more money into it to get a CD ROM drive. The base price was $1000, and I spent another $300 for the CD drive a year later.

This wasn't uncommon either. Some people never went 486 or Pentium for DOS, and just went straight to Win95 when they finally upgraded.

>>8085539
They were a big deal because they came packaged with the most expensive computers back then

So if you had one then people knew you were loaded or something idk something like that. Most computers just had basic soundcards

>>8087723
>going from pc speaker to sound blaster
most people here wouldn't understand that feeling.
>I5
I always wonder about this choice between 5 and 7. I personally used 7, but it seems there's a lot of people using either one.

>>8085539
There's probably a lot of information on the internet about it already.

>>8087828
There was no difference, in most cases you'd choose any free hardware interrupt number for the expansion card, then set that convenient environment variable just to tell programs which settings you had set up with jumpers or in the BIOS instead of configuring each program independently. If you motherboard was picky about certain combinations of slots and cards, you had to scratch your head a bit, and if you had a lot of cards, you had to figure out how to make them all share resources without conflicts.

Then Plug'n'Play came, and Microsoft got in position to tell manufacturers how hardware and drivers must work with their system, too.

>>8087374
There's 1 specific track in system shock (when you're in machinery areas) that sounds like shit played through an SC-55 or other GM devices but sounds good on Soundblaster. Rest of the soundtrack is good though.

>>8085539
Sound Blaster is the clone. It copied Adlib and added extra abilities. You can track them both back to the IBM PC-Jr via Tandy 1000.

>>8085550
>>8085539
>>8086038
For me its the ENSONIQ

>>8086049
That's hardly "back in the day" if it served no purpose.

>>8087374
Most dos games i played had options for all the popular cards, adlib, gravis, soundblaster. I only had a soudblaster so i could only compare PC speaker to soundblaster, which was obviously far superior. I'm not sure if any of these games would have sounded slightly better on another card.

>>8087828
>be playing sidescroller with sharp unappealing pc speaker sounds
>dad passes by and asks if i configured SB
>change game settings
>FUCK YEAH
I remember that feeling anon.

>>8088325
>added extra abilities
digitized sound was THE breakthrough back then

>>8087374
>What games had good soundblaster support?
All of them pretty much, unless they were made by Sierra or somebody else who goes hard on supporting enthusiast audio hardware almost nobody has. If you played those adventure games with adlib/soundblaster you got watered down farts compared to the real soundtrack on Roland. Seriously play them with MT32 emulation, if you're too brainlet to set it up in dosbox use ScummVM.

>>8088598
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IewACeMzkJo&t=195s

>>8087828
>going from pc speaker to sound blaster
>most people here wouldn't understand that feeling.
Most people had played game consoles or used other computers at some point. PC speaker was the worst sound ever made by a computer. I never had an oi Speccy but just looking at the videos you can tell it's bad but not PC speaker bad. Sound cards for PC were more like "about time it got sound".
If your only exposure to "gaming" was janky 80s era software on a pre-sound card PC, I feel bad for you.

>>8088628
>when you though the soundtrack was good, years later you find out you were listening to the shit version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdd2CNlcqn0

>>8088662
Damn, I didn't know it was suppose to sound so good.

>>8088629
>"about time it got sound"
It's more like "finally this thing can make cool sounds". And went on to try all those games that we saw had the "Sound Blaster" option we never picked in the setup. THAT feeling.

>>8085539
It was pretty awesome to have 16-bit sound, I'll tell you that. Configuring that shit was a nightmare though, and it either worked or you would have to spend an assload of time trying to make it run. I still don't know what a DMA channel is, but it sure was important to select the right one.

>>8090698
You set the right jumper on the card, and then put the setting into an environmental variable in your autoexec.bat file. From that point forward just don't fiddle with it.

>>8090698
It means that your memory controller knows what processor to send sound towards.

one time like 10 years ago i tried neuromancer for DOS and the music started playing out of the pc speaker. i had forgotten the pc speaker was a thing and it spooked me

>>8085539
>Which games did people play when they want to show off their Sound Blaster cards?
Coming from an Amiga household, the Soundblaster was never something to call home about.

>>8087404
I think I'm thinking of a later Soundblaster card from the AWE series that would allow use of the "Roland" option in games.

>>8093238
that's because western devs sucked at fm synth

>>8085551
No.

In the early half of the 90s a SB also doubled as a way to add CD-ROM support before they became standard. MIDI was hit and miss because it all depended on what hardware "sound/feel" the composer was targeting for a particular game and how that translated to a particular given card. In any case most people showed off by running the voice-acted versions of point and clicks or any games with speech, really.

>>8085539
>Which games did people play when they want to show off their Sound Blaster cards?
Not sure about games. The best way to show off your Sound Blaster would be to run Second Reality (which actually was better with a GUS...).

Tyrian is probably one of the only western games that properly utilized the OPL chip instead of cheaply converting MIDIs

My first contact with an SB card was via the SB Discovery CD16 multimedia kit. It bundled a 2x CD-ROM drive, the SB16 sound card, and a bunch of software and games, like the Grolier Encyclopedia (this was before MS Encarta was a thing), Ultima 8, Wing Commander 2 and Syndicate Plus. Good times.

Fun fact: I live a couple of blocks away from Creative's HQ in the US (Milpitas, CA). The place is a ghost town, even before COVID-19 hit.

>>8095804
That's FPS I imagine? For MDK2 specifically. That chart really could do for slightly more labels.

>>8085539
I jumped in with my 286-12 and almost immediately got the SoundBlaster 2.0 due to the word of mouth from friends. The first game I played and was impressed with was Wing Commander 2, so much that I bought the speech pack addon as soon as I could afford it. In that time, I do not recall any competitors, it was just SoundBlaster or stick with the PC speaker. I experimented choosing other options like PC speaker, like I did with choosing EGA or CGA, but the experience was always with SoundBlaster. The Yamaha OPL2 is how I remember games like Ultima sounding, despite everyone opting to emulate Roland these days. Kept the SoundBlaster 2.0 through the 286-12 to 386DX-40 to 486DX4-100, it was the one part that served me very well across systems.

>>8085580
I think I entered "Oooooooooooo ..." for funny sounding name for Dr.Sbaitso. It would give me a lot of parity errors for all the swearing.

220 7 1

>>8098013
based

>>8085539
LGR, is that you?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a6I0FBo0O4

>>8100091
MDK2 is heavy on T&L, which filters 3dfx hard.