And then three things happened at once
- Creative de-facto monopolized the industry often by unethical means (suing Aureal into bankruptcy, etc.), not letting much room for competitors, which in turn lead to diminishing quality on the part of Creative.
- Microsoft didn't put hardware acceleration support into XAudio, which superseeded DirectSound.
- Game publishers realized the vast majority of gamers didn't care about sound quality, so they could spent those resources on making the games look a little bit more realistic.
"The planet Arrakis, known as Dune"
My very first experience with a sound card was watching the Dune 2 intro on my dad's friend's computer. I was so amazed, I just sat in awe as that intro movie played.
On the drive home I tried to remember if what I heard was real, and I just couldn't imagine it. When I tried to recall what I saw and heard, I could only imagine hearing that tinny internal speaker making bleeps and bloops instead of the actual sounds. It just seemed so unreal at the time that I could not recall what I had heard only a few hours earlier :)On a side note, I don't think any studio in the nineties made as memorable tunes and sounds as Westwood did. There was always something enchanting about them. Dune 2, the Kyrandia games, they all had excellent music that really played into the strengths of what was available back then.
Of course I'm talking with pink tinted nostalgia goggles, but still... good memories :)The motherboard had nothing but the case usually had a speaker just to make a "beep" sound. I had to play Wolfenstein with that shit because my dad didn't have a sound blaster until he also got a CD-ROM drive to play Doom since he could only find a copy on CD and not floppy disk.
And even now, a SoundBlaster32 is better than the in-built audio stuff motherboards do have. Though it's not worth getting one just for games.
What? They did have onboard sound. The problem is that if you used the motherboard speaker to make anything more decent than a beep, you basically needed to build an entire sound engine from scratch and very few games did so. It also wasn't worthwhile because a shitty two pin speaker could not compare to the speakers of a professional sound system which you needed the soundcard to hook up into, and CPU bandwidth was such a limitation back then than even when games could play WAV they would use MIDI to offload the musical instrument synthesizing for the soundtracks to the sound card. Designing a game that used the onboard sound speaker was basically the realm of assembly hacking geniuses.
Fuck Creative. Letigious patent troll is the whole reason why 3D audio in games was stuck in the dark ages technologically for the longest time.
Ah, the days of needing a 3D GPU and a 2D GPU...
I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn't bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn't matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.
(I'm going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I'm contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there's still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? ...Oh they're still around!? Good.)
I still like Xonar cards, like the Xonar DG (though it isn't compatible with my new PC). I always liked their interface more than the competitors, and it puts out excellent volume on my Logitech headset that is otherwise way too quiet for me. Never been a big fan of the simulated 3D environments on any of these cards, though. The only game it ever sounded decent in was No Man's Sky, but even that still had a distant tinny sound to it.
I think most people just use external amplifiers these days, but I'm still using a third-party sound card.
To this day I use a Creative Labs emu 0404 sound card weekly and just purchased a replacement when the present one started having issues every now and then. One of the great underrated pieces of hardware IMO.
Hi/Lo Z in, digital IO, optical IO, analog IO, USB, 24/192, preamps and one hell of a solid clock and it can be used as a stand alone mixer without a PC.
I had one. Besides, I love 80s/90s aesthetics.
Dr. Sbaitso says "'sup."
My best friend gave me his sound blaster after upgrading to the Pro. Later I upgraded to a Gravis Ultrasound. Offloading sound processing to the sound card (1MB) improved gaming performance significantly.
Dr. Sbaitso was the speech systhesis DOS program that was included with most Soundblaster cards. You could tell Dr. Sbaitso about all of your problems.
I was a rebel and went with the Pro Audio 16
The Yamaha YM3812 sound chip was the backbone of computer sound & music generation for almost a decade.
My fairly modern computer, originally released in 2014 (yes, that's modern compared to a lot of the computers I own), has no sound card.
I picked up a Yamaha AG06, which has a USB connection and creates both audio inputs and audio outputs to/from my PC. I can quickly plug in my phone or a Bluetooth receiver (which my phone connects to), and get other audio into my headphones with very little trouble. I prefer it this way, and if my next PC has onboard audio, I'll probably disable it in favor of the AG06.
In the grand scheme of things they were relatively inexpensive. You could spend a lot but you didn't need to.
I still use my external soundblaster to connect to my 5.1 amp. I have HDMI to my TV and then toslink to my amp, but it was inconvenient having to have the TV on for listening music.
Long live the Gravis Ultrasound Max!
I still use an external Creative sound card so I can switch my speakers over USB between my work laptop and personal desktop!
Back when MIDI and the quality of your synthesizer actually mattered!
This hasn’t crossed my mind in decades. Not even in a “remember when” sense.
I remember having the Extigy, and having problems getting it work properly with basically every single game I owned.
The first upgrade I ever made to a PC was having to get a sound card to run Morrowind.
The GUS for the win!
Pro Audio Spectrum 16 gang represent.
Soundblaster? Pfff, Covox users club assemble!
You had to use Voodoo to see the magic 3d graphics
But you got the connector for a Joystick for free!
Ah, i remember might & magic 3. loved it, because it sent speech through the crappy pc speaker. So cool
