9 ms·

Sound Blaster (DOS)

111 points by elvis70 4y ago

midislack 4y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20220515173047/http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Sound_Blaster_(DOS) https://web.archive.org/web/20220515173047/http://www.vgmpf.... Doesn't work with Tor Browser so have this archive link.
nu11ptr 4y ago
Pure nostalgia and this defined my teen years. From hours spent messing around with Dr. Sbaitso, to that talking parrot, to being elated to finding a doc on how to program the SB on a BBS, the sound blaster era was when computers were most exciting. We were finally breaking out into major video/sound breakthroughs.
kristiandupont 4y ago
Sound Blaster was my first sound card and it was pure magic, coming from the PC beeper. I wrote a module player for it and since it only had two channels, you had to mix the audio in software. I later moved on to Gravis Ultrasound which had 16 hardware channels and while the audio was orders of magnitude better, it still felt like cheating to me.
- pantulis 4y ago
  Also the Gravis had wavetable synthesis which made it a great MIDI file player. For me the pure magic was Cubic Player which allowed a regular SB to play MIDI files with the GUS patch. I could not wrap my head around how that software could possibly work.
- microtonal 4y ago
  I loved the Gravis Ultrasound. I upgraded the wavetable memory with an additional 1MiB through the DIP sockets with memory that I sourced from a friend's unused video card (IIRC). At some point the GUS died because the card was so heavy that it bended, touched another card and short-circuited. Some time later I got an Gravis Ultrasound Extreme. At some point I also had the Gravis GamePad.
- colordrops 4y ago
  I played a game called mean streets that played recorded audio through the PC speaker. That definitely wasn't cheating. https://youtu.be/WJ4rYt8v--4 https://youtu.be/WJ4rYt8v--4 It used a system called Realsound.
- wenc 4y ago
  I owned an SB16 and GUS Ace. The big thing back then was FM Synthesis vs Wavetable Synthesis for MIDI -- SB had AWE32 but GUS was more entrenched in the demo scene because it was easier to code for apparently (I was only a demo spectator, never an author, so I had no idea). Today, wavetable synthesis seems so quaint -- nobody really fiddles with MIDIs anymore.
sandermvanvliet 4y ago
For some more nostalgia you can build your own Sound Blaster, or: Snark Barker https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker
iforgotpassword 4y ago
It's a funny quirk of the history of home computing how enthusiasts usually dislike the sound blaster for being basically the crappiest hardware design you could somewhat get away with (ie with the original sound blaster, it was impossible to play digital samples without continuously having buffer underruns resulting in crackling), while the average gamer who grew up in the 90s or even 2000s has very fond memories of those cards. And I actually count myself to the latter camp, as like probably most people back then, just having digital sound at all was a miracle, and with those tiny desk speakers back then, it would've been hard to tell the difference anyways.
- bitwize 4y ago
  Compared to the Amiga, Atari ST, or Macintosh, the PC had the charming rinky-dink-ness that the ZX Spectrum had compared to machines like the C64, up until about 1994 or so (later for the Mac). It's kind of sad that no one but Apple wants to make serious quality custom equipment for home users anymore. The PC proved for everyone that "race to the bottom" is a valid business model.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    You do realize PCs and other computers cost much more than they do today. Adjusted for inflation $4000+. The "race to the bottom" was out of necessity because many people couldn't afford paying so much money.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Definitly, during those days buying a PC always meant at least being able to pay a 3 to 5 year credit, and given the rate PCs were changing, when one would be finally done with the credit, it was slowly the time to think about a new one, because buying parts alone would no longer be enough.
    - justsomehnguy 4y ago
      Funny enough, "you need $2000 for a good PC" held from mid '90 up to the end of '00. After that you could assemble "good enough" for less and less each year.
wiradikusuma 4y ago
What a nostalgia. I used to scourge the internet (with a 28.8 Kbps modem nonetheless) for .midi files, put those files in a playlist, and play it throughout the day. Later on I found out MIDI can sound much better using better sound cards, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_AWE32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_AWE32 (mine was SB16) Pure magic.
- danbolt 4y ago
  I really like listening to a game’s MIDI soundtrack with different sound cards. Each almost feel like their own musical instrument interpreting the soundscape. All of my nostalgia for Sonic 3 is different than the official YM2612 renditions.
shdon 4y ago
I recently had a blast (no pun intended) by porting a new point and click adventure currently being in development to DOS. That includes a sound mixer and MIDI player. Was a lot of fun revisiting those skills from 25 years ago.
- elpocko 4y ago
  Return to Monkey Island will have a DOS port? Cool.
  - shdon 4y ago
    lol, I wish. No, mine is Blood Nova, which I ran the Kickstarter campaign for.
AaronBBrown 4y ago
I remember the pure magic of playing Sierra games after adding a Sound Blaster. Dr Sbaitso was also a hoot.
marcodiego 4y ago
I got my first PC around 1997. It was a good machine for the time: 32 MB with a 200 MHz MMX pentium, it got a S3 graphics card with 2MB of video memory and had a modem, cd-rom and a sound card. The sound card was an Aztech Labs aAZTR2316. It came with drivers for windows and DOS. I soon discovered that "compatible with soundblaster" was not the same thing as "100% compatible with soundblaster". To get my sound card working as a soundblaster, I had to load its drivers. They worked but were somewhat buggy and required TSR's all the time. It some memory and, depending on the game, the game just refused to run with such drivers loaded. I never got to run battle chess with sound because of that. Since I had seen some "real computers" running UNIX I soon wanted to run linux on my PC. On linux I could play CD with the cd-rom but the drivers for my aztr2316 was only merged in 2007. By that time I had already bought a more compatible computer. I learned to envy my friends who had Creative Labs Soundblaster's and US Robotics real modems. It had some upgrades. Increased the RAM to 64 MB, replaced to modem with a NE2000 compatible network card, added CD recorder combo, I even got 2 floppy drives and 2 hard disks. The machine was almost fully stuffed internally. Nevertheless, It got replaced and I never heard a single tone from its sound card on linux. Years later I tried to turn on the computer again so I could test the drivers for the sound card. I never completed POST complaining about "parity error". I could have tried other memory chips, but I just gave up on my first machine. Let her rest.
acidburnNSA 4y ago
You could have Dr. Sbaitso say whatever you typed, by telling him to 'say' something. As pre-teens, my sister and I used to laugh maniacally with this basic TTS system. Typing in 'winkle tinkle' like a dozen times and hearing him say it in his special cadence still kind of cracks me up. I also won the middle school science fair with a program that came with the SB Pro, called VEDIT2, if I recall. I set up a tape recording of a standard sound and moved a dish-shaped snow sled different distances from the microphone while recording the standard sound. I used VEDIT2 to measure the peak amplitude and then compared with expectations from a parabolic focusing reflector. Any middle schooler using the word 'directrix' was sure to win in my small town. And yeah my dad helped with the math. Good old SBPro though. EDIT: ah this site has a thing for SB Pro too, and it has vedit2: http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Sound_Blaster_Pro_(DOS) http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Sound_Blaster_Pro_(DOS)
- elvis70 4y ago
  You can still play with Dr. Sbaitso onine: https://oneweakness.com/dr-sbaitso-online https://oneweakness.com/dr-sbaitso-online. Don't say too many insults, otherwise you risk an error of parity.
  - acidburnNSA 4y ago
    Oh I have gotten quite a good number of parity errors in my day. I was just firing it up at archive.org as well to hear that winkle tinkle cadence one more time. https://archive.org/details/msdos_Dr_Sbaitso_1992 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Dr_Sbaitso_1992
- pkaye 4y ago
  A long time ago I would help babysit my young niece and nephew. One of the things they would enjoy was a Eliza program I typed up from a basic listing. A simple program but they would really get a kick out of it and would ask for it for a long time.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  I used VEDIT2 to sample and loop music for my (with friends) triumphant high school Talent Show act way back in 1992.
danjc 4y ago
As a teen in the 90’s I added sound to the games I wrote using SMix. It was a sound mixer that supported Sound Blaster and others. SMix was written by Ethan Brodsky, couldn’t easily find anything about him today. Just another generous internet stranger who played a role in my tech career. https://archive.org/details/smix130_zip https://archive.org/details/smix130_zip
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ» º Programming the SoundBlaster 16 DSP º º Written by Ethan Brodsky º º (ericbrodsky@psl.wisc.edu) º º Version 3.2 º º 8/3/95 º ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ¼ https://archive.org/details/sb16doc_zip https://archive.org/details/sb16doc_zip
- marcins 4y ago
  > Ethan Brodsky, couldn’t easily find anything about him today. Just another generous internet stranger who played a role in my tech career. I got curious - the email address in the reply is "ericbrodsky" - I did find an Eric Brodsky on LinkedIn who was at Wisconsin until '95 - so it's possible Ethan is his son, and he used his dad's email address? Some more digging, and I found this profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanbrodsky/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanbrodsky/ - could be him? Went to Wisconsin a few years later (so was likely in HS when he wrote the SoundBlaster stuff).
bluedino 4y ago
My sound card story: A long time ago we had a bottom of the barrel PC. 386SX 16MHz, 1MB RAM, and 41MB HDD. My parents weren't poor but they were cheap and this was a bargain $899 PC at the time, with 14" VGA monitor and 9 pin printer. The Pentium had just been released, but I had Surplus Software's advertisements (later bought by Egghead). They sold out of date hardware and software on clearance. I picked up an 8-bit Soundblaster compatible sound card, and a 2400bps modem. The parts arrived, I installed them, and my brother and I spent the better part of a Saturday morning downloading, or rather waiting for the download of Duke Nukem 2 Note: Airborne express dropped the package off at 10:00 am when I had placed my order the day before using my moms credit card (with her permission). That alone was amazing. Back to the story...after the download was complete, we ran the installer and we so nervous and excited CD\DUKE2 DUKE2.EXE The cheesy opening cut scene and thundering intro music blew us away. We had never heard any sound like that from the pathetic PC speaker or even our beloved NES. It was amazing.
- jowdones 4y ago
  Not very far from my first PC: 14'' VGA monitor, and a Siemens Nixdorf 386SX 16Mhz, 40Mb HDD but fortunately 2Mb of RAM (which probably made a huge difference on being able to play some games). Something similar to this beast: https://www.ebay.com/itm/172038842293?hash=item280e5067b5:g:jXQAAOSwVMJb~mPj https://www.ebay.com/itm/172038842293?hash=item280e5067b5:g:... Similarly, the Pentium was just released and a friend of a friend of mine had one (wealthy parents). Just once, I got to visit the Pentium's guy home tagging along my friend. The guy played a small VIDEO-CLIP with sound output in a Soundblaster-driven pair of speakers. I had never heard any game sound but PC speakers or NES (Famicom). There was a popular software at the time which I don't recall, which was playing MOD files into the PC speaker and we would listen in awe how that would sound. Now imagine being hit simultaneously with full-blown digital sound AND VIDEO. Flabbergasted is an understatement. The Pentium guy kept saying something about choppy video and crappy quality but I couldn't notice a damn thing, seemed the most amazing video I ever saw and all I could think (but of course couldn't say it out loud) was "shut the fuck up, I can't hear the soundtrack".
- monocularvision 4y ago
  I am so blown away by how close our stories are. Got this exact setup from grandparents for my 13th birthday, which was a HUGE surprise. I remember sitting on the sidelines of my younger brother’s football games while I read the DOS manual. I ended up buying a Sound Blaster Pro and installing that. We were absolutely blown away by the sound coming from that thing, specifically Links 386. Oh, and I ended up working at Egghead Software for a couple years in the mid-90’s.
verst 4y ago
Does anyone else remember having to configure I/O, IRQ, DMA etc? As a kid I had no understanding of what these things were so I always tried random values until the sound worked without distortion. The sound blaster also had a joystick port which back then was also used the emit MIDI signals. I installed a MIDI split cable on the joystick COM port and then configured sound in games to use the Roland Adlib MIDI mode. I hooked up my Yamaha PSR 730 Keyboard to my computer and got to enjoy much higher quality sounding music.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > Does anyone else remember having to configure I/O, IRQ, DMA etc? I totally do. It wasn't fun but in the end, somehow, we always ended up configuring everything correctly!
- elvis70 4y ago
  Yes, and I never managed to configure this so that the Sound Blaster works with my handheld Genius scanner.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Absolutely, there were IRQ & DMA defaults that usually worked pretty well in my experience, and in my friend group everybody had memorized fallback combinations to try. You never knew when you'd suddenly need to change that stuff when visiting a friend's house. It's funny you mention using your Yamaha keyboard for MIDI out. I did this with the SB Live back in the day, it had a pretty cool front I/O panel too. I remember playing Phantasmagoria this way and getting creeped out really fast. Probably didn't help that the music was coming from my keyboard which was in another part of the room.
- jasomill 4y ago
  Older ISA Sound Blaster cards indeed have jumpers to configure I/O ports, IRQ lines, and DMA addresses for the hardware, and traditionally there was no reliable way to auto-detect conflicts with other hardware — such conflicts are a likely source of your distorted audio — so manual reconfiguration was frequently required. Additionally, Sound Blaster-compatible software requires either manual or semi-automatic configuration via the BLASTER environment variable or application-specific configuration mechanisms to determine the hardware configuration. Creative indeed repurposed a couple infrequently-used pins on its implementation of the IBM PC game port[1] to implement a MIDI interface; other vendors followed suit. In addition to computer music applications, external MIDI modules — most notably, the Roland MT-32[2] and Sound Canvas SC-55[3] — were commonly supported by games of the era[4]. Today, all this can be easily emulated in both software[5] and first-party emulated hardware[6]. Additionally, Sound Canvas was the basis for the General MIDI standard, so it's also possible to wire up DOSBox MIDI to other GM-compliant synths for similar results (at least in [relatively] newer games with General MIDI support; attempting to emulate MT-32 via GM rarely works out well). Source: personal experience, though "back in the day" I used a Roland SCC-1, which combined an SC-55-compatible synth and an MPU-401-compatible[7] MIDI interface on an ISA card. For most games, this configuration also required a separate sound card for non-music sound effects, but was otherwise convenient, slots permitting, as it required no external hardware. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_MT-32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_MT-32 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_SC-55 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_SC-55 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MT-32-compatible_computer_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MT-32-compatible_compu... [5] https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3ASetting-up-MIDI-in-DOSBox%E2%80%90X#_roland_mt_32_emulation https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3ASetting-up-MIDI-in-DOSBox%... [6] https://id.roland.com/products/sound_canvas_for_ios/ https://id.roland.com/products/sound_canvas_for_ios/ [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPU-401 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPU-401
jesuslop 4y ago
What I liked most is that it demonstrated direct memory access, so the CPU and the card shared the mastery of the memory bus. You told the card to play such memory block with very little IO, and the play started while you continued running your code. On end you had an interruption handler called.
noipv4 4y ago
Ahh, the fun configuring ISA cards. That's how I learned about DMA, interrupts and addresses. Also learned how COM and LPT ports operated. Also learned to configure a dialup modem using AT command set.
rasz 4y ago
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=59154 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=59154 First dos sound blaster game. >Looking through Mobygames, the total number of retail Dos games released from 1989,1990 and 1991 was a massive 1902 games (this is excluding educational software, shareware games, PD freeware and compilations). The real number is even bigger than this as Mobygames' disclaimer says a large number of retail Dos games are still missing and not catalogued. It's interesting that all other systems, the only computer/console that comes anywhere close from 1989-1991 is the C64 with 1421 retail games. out of those 1900 PC games released between 89-91 only a small fraction (<10%) supported Sound Blaster digitized wave output. It took over two years for true adoption as the de facto standard.
bruce511 4y ago
Like many I got a sound blaster as part of a multimedia kit that included a cdrom, SB card, and some games. Unlike many, I suspect, I also used it as a poor-man's digital oscilloscope at work, simply by sampling the microphone input (or line input? I don't remember.) it worked well enough (although all flat signals reverted to the middle.) But it was enough to show the value of a digital scope over an analogue one, and we made a big of money, and so bought a real digital oscilloscope (for what was then, to us, quite a lot of loot.) Those were the days of miracle and wonder.
blenderdt 4y ago
The experience of the too real 'blood splash' sound in Prinse of Persia. I was shocked after buying a sound card.
foresto 4y ago
Sound setup was one of those fiddly tasks that we came to expect whenever installing a new game. Did I remember the correct interrupt and port? Did I leave the card jumpered with alternate settings last time I played that one game that uses hard-coded values? Will this new game respect the BLASTER environment variable? Does silence when I launch the game mean that I made a mistake, or just that the game has no sound at the title screen? Warcraft II addressed this with a sound setup tool that rewarded the effort with a delightful surprise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slTHHXWNG4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slTHHXWNG4Y
alasdair_ 4y ago
I made the mistake of buying a SoundBlaster Z1 for my last gaming PC build. After two years of constant struggle, I removed it last night and just use the onboard sound which sounds identical. The thing constantly stopped working and I would have to reseat it into a different PCI slot and often reinstall the drivers to make it work again. It also had obnoxious bright red LEDs with no way to turn them off. It often went weeks without being detected at all after any kind of reboot of the system. I will never buy another.
tomduncalf 4y ago
Those screenshots of the DOS applications make me feel nostalgic! I came across a screenshot [1] of WaveStudio recently, which was a wave editor they bundled for Windows, but I’d totally forgotten about the DOS apps that predated it! [1] http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Creative_WaveStudio http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Creative_WaveStudio
Ozzie_osman 4y ago
My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you. Say whatever is in your mind freely, our conversation will be kept on strict confidence. So, tell me about your problems.
- netsharc 4y ago
  A non-techie relative started writing a long paragraph about her problem, thinking the good Doctor was going to understand it like a real therapist/human, and got miffed when she couldn't type beyond 255 characters...
- fatnoah 4y ago
  Tell me something dirty. (Dr. Sbaitso will ask that, on occasion)
threeio 4y ago
How dare they call Sbaitso bad AI... ;)
dhosek 4y ago
Back in the 80s, my brother bought a voice synthesizer chip from Radio Shack and wired it to his Commodore 64. Unfortunately, the voice synthesizer chip would insert an l sound before all vowels so when he had it say, “Hello, Professor Falken, would you like to play a game?” it came out has “Hlello, Prloflesslor Flalklen, wlould ylou like tlo pay la glame?” I hear that any time I encounter something that reminds me of War Games, most recently yesterday when my daughter asked me to play Tic Tac Toe with her on her kid’s menu while we waited for dinner to be served.
nebula8804 4y ago
Anyone remember this "Demo" that Creative Labs made to promote Sound Blaster 16? [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRLb9QDf51o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRLb9QDf51o I guess people didn't realize that they were secretly in the demoscene ha ha! I wonder if it was some overly excited intern developer that whipped this up in his/her spare time? Creative Labs didn't seem like the kind of company that would allow time spent to develop stuff like this but I guess thats just speculation, I was in elementary school when this was released. I remember when my late father came home with a Sound Blaster 16 and installed it because I had been doing alright in school. I then spent a few days not doing my second grade homework but instead trying to figure out how to set up the SET BLASTER requirements for this card and figuring out how to get games to work with it. There was no internet, and I had no idea how I ever learned anything at all back then. The moment when Epic Pinball started playing music was so shocking that it is still imprinted in my head to this day!
- djmips 4y ago
  Let me recall how I learned back then because it's an interesting contrast. Magazine subscriptions (like Byte). Books from the library. Word of mouth (friends, computer stores). Television - there were a few like Bits and Bytes and The Computer Chronicles. And just hands on. A computer club if you were lucky!
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    You were very lucky! All I had was trial and error and the occasional help from my dad. I never did learn to code until High School but when it came to troubleshooting and "IT" related stuff? Thats what I ended up becoming good at. That just required trial and error. Coding would have required me to figure out how to install a compiler. Later on we got TechTv but I think we had internet by then. Not really useful as I recall relying on my collection of webrings instead of search.
larodi 4y ago
I remember seeing Future Crew's Second Reality in a pc-store showroom where someone had connected the SoundBlaster to amplifier with these big speaker. It was just released and some smart ass had managed to put hands on it from some BBS. My mind was blown immediately and I got hooked to computer music, computer audio, graphics and multimedia in general. I knew that C64 had a dedicated audio chip, and my COM port (or maybe printer port) had something called COVOX in it, but this SB thing was beyond any previous measure cool. And the C64s were in fact quite pricey and not being sold at all where I lived. My parents got me a present that was the SoundBlaster as a gift that I managed to get into the elite national school of math and sciences. I started digging scream tracker 3 (by the FC gang), and a school teacher in 10th grade was definitely surprised when I played a demo-tape of self-made recordings. There are many SoundBlaster stories I can tell. Eventually few years later (in 1996/1997) our group of 2 people released 2 demos, and most of the music was composed by myself, while my mate was spitting thousands of assembly lines, and was also proud to implement a tracker of his own making for the production... After having played as a DJ at more than 300 events electronic music is to date important part of my life and SB has a very special place in my heart. I can still remember the touch of the product.
greatartiste 4y ago
I bought an SoundBlaster16 DSP card on the basic premise it had a DSP on it as I wanted to do some audio processing. Not sure if it actually did have a DSP IC in it as Creative never released any info on how to program it. The disappointment was made up for because the day after my card arrived the supplier sent a second one by mistake then the day following a third one. They never realised their mistake so I was able to sell the spare two so had some spare cash for more useful toys.
- rasz 4y ago
  You mean the ASP/CSP right? :-) Because scammy Creative called 8052 microcontroller on all of their cards a DSP = Digital Sound Processors (not Digital Signal Processors!). Card with real DSP was called ASP = Advanced Signal Processor or CSP = Creative Signal Processor. ST18932, a bad one but still a DSP. Enough performance to implement 14.4kbps modem. "Tests/Info welcome: Reverse engineering the SB16 ASP/CSP" https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=86739&p=1051126 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=86739&p=1051126
flamesofphx 4y ago
Man Dr. Sbaitso was the last good Psychologist I knew... Well unless he asked if I was talking about brimstone..
Braini 4y ago
I still remember young, in this regard surprisingly clueless me being soo excited when moving to my first PC (some 486) with a Soundblaster clone, coming from an Amiga 500. The ad said something about 22 voices, how cool would that be (as the Amiga had 4)! Now envision my surprise when I heard the sound of these 22 voices in some of the demos mentioned on this page when I was used to the Amiga. Well, over time with faster CPUs, software mixing, AWE32, GUS or EWS64 etc. the problem solved itself and in the meantime I really like the FM sounds for what they are but man was I disappointed at that time.

111 points by elvis70 4y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220515173047/http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=Sound_Blaster_(DOS) https://web.archive.org/web/20220515173047/http://www.vgmpf.... Doesn't work with Tor Browser so have this archive link.

nu11ptr 4y ago

Pure nostalgia and this defined my teen years. From hours spent messing around with Dr. Sbaitso, to that talking parrot, to being elated to finding a doc on how to program the SB on a BBS, the sound blaster era was when computers were most exciting. We were finally breaking out into major video/sound breakthroughs.

kristiandupont 4y ago

Sound Blaster was my first sound card and it was pure magic, coming from the PC beeper. I wrote a module player for it and since it only had two channels, you had to mix the audio in software. I later moved on to Gravis Ultrasound which had 16 hardware channels and while the audio was orders of magnitude better, it still felt like cheating to me.

pantulis 4y ago
Also the Gravis had wavetable synthesis which made it a great MIDI file player. For me the pure magic was Cubic Player which allowed a regular SB to play MIDI files with the GUS patch. I could not wrap my head around how that software could possibly work.
microtonal 4y ago
I loved the Gravis Ultrasound. I upgraded the wavetable memory with an additional 1MiB through the DIP sockets with memory that I sourced from a friend's unused video card (IIRC). At some point the GUS died because the card was so heavy that it bended, touched another card and short-circuited. Some time later I got an Gravis Ultrasound Extreme. At some point I also had the Gravis GamePad.
colordrops 4y ago
I played a game called mean streets that played recorded audio through the PC speaker. That definitely wasn't cheating. https://youtu.be/WJ4rYt8v--4 https://youtu.be/WJ4rYt8v--4 It used a system called Realsound.
wenc 4y ago
I owned an SB16 and GUS Ace. The big thing back then was FM Synthesis vs Wavetable Synthesis for MIDI -- SB had AWE32 but GUS was more entrenched in the demo scene because it was easier to code for apparently (I was only a demo spectator, never an author, so I had no idea). Today, wavetable synthesis seems so quaint -- nobody really fiddles with MIDIs anymore.

sandermvanvliet 4y ago

For some more nostalgia you can build your own Sound Blaster, or: Snark Barker https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker

iforgotpassword 4y ago

It's a funny quirk of the history of home computing how enthusiasts usually dislike the sound blaster for being basically the crappiest hardware design you could somewhat get away with (ie with the original sound blaster, it was impossible to play digital samples without continuously having buffer underruns resulting in crackling), while the average gamer who grew up in the 90s or even 2000s has very fond memories of those cards. And I actually count myself to the latter camp, as like probably most people back then, just having digital sound at all was a miracle, and with those tiny desk speakers back then, it would've been hard to tell the difference anyways.

bitwize 4y ago
Compared to the Amiga, Atari ST, or Macintosh, the PC had the charming rinky-dink-ness that the ZX Spectrum had compared to machines like the C64, up until about 1994 or so (later for the Mac). It's kind of sad that no one but Apple wants to make serious quality custom equipment for home users anymore. The PC proved for everyone that "race to the bottom" is a valid business model.
- postalrat 4y ago
  You do realize PCs and other computers cost much more than they do today. Adjusted for inflation $4000+. The "race to the bottom" was out of necessity because many people couldn't afford paying so much money.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Definitly, during those days buying a PC always meant at least being able to pay a 3 to 5 year credit, and given the rate PCs were changing, when one would be finally done with the credit, it was slowly the time to think about a new one, because buying parts alone would no longer be enough.
  - justsomehnguy 4y ago
    Funny enough, "you need $2000 for a good PC" held from mid '90 up to the end of '00. After that you could assemble "good enough" for less and less each year.

wiradikusuma 4y ago

What a nostalgia. I used to scourge the internet (with a 28.8 Kbps modem nonetheless) for .midi files, put those files in a playlist, and play it throughout the day. Later on I found out MIDI can sound much better using better sound cards, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_AWE32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_AWE32 (mine was SB16) Pure magic.

danbolt 4y ago
I really like listening to a game’s MIDI soundtrack with different sound cards. Each almost feel like their own musical instrument interpreting the soundscape. All of my nostalgia for Sonic 3 is different than the official YM2612 renditions.

shdon 4y ago

I recently had a blast (no pun intended) by porting a new point and click adventure currently being in development to DOS. That includes a sound mixer and MIDI player. Was a lot of fun revisiting those skills from 25 years ago.

elpocko 4y ago
Return to Monkey Island will have a DOS port? Cool.
- shdon 4y ago
  lol, I wish. No, mine is Blood Nova, which I ran the Kickstarter campaign for.

AaronBBrown 4y ago

I remember the pure magic of playing Sierra games after adding a Sound Blaster. Dr Sbaitso was also a hoot.

marcodiego 4y ago

I got my first PC around 1997. It was a good machine for the time: 32 MB with a 200 MHz MMX pentium, it got a S3 graphics card with 2MB of video memory and had a modem, cd-rom and a sound card. The sound card was an Aztech Labs aAZTR2316. It came with drivers for windows and DOS. I soon discovered that "compatible with soundblaster" was not the same thing as "100% compatible with soundblaster". To get my sound card working as a soundblaster, I had to load its drivers. They worked but were somewhat buggy and required TSR's all the time. It some memory and, depending on the game, the game just refused to run with such drivers loaded. I never got to run battle chess with sound because of that. Since I had seen some "real computers" running UNIX I soon wanted to run linux on my PC. On linux I could play CD with the cd-rom but the drivers for my aztr2316 was only merged in 2007. By that time I had already bought a more compatible computer. I learned to envy my friends who had Creative Labs Soundblaster's and US Robotics real modems. It had some upgrades. Increased the RAM to 64 MB, replaced to modem with a NE2000 compatible network card, added CD recorder combo, I even got 2 floppy drives and 2 hard disks. The machine was almost fully stuffed internally. Nevertheless, It got replaced and I never heard a single tone from its sound card on linux. Years later I tried to turn on the computer again so I could test the drivers for the sound card. I never completed POST complaining about "parity error". I could have tried other memory chips, but I just gave up on my first machine. Let her rest.

acidburnNSA 4y ago

You could have Dr. Sbaitso say whatever you typed, by telling him to 'say' something. As pre-teens, my sister and I used to laugh maniacally with this basic TTS system. Typing in 'winkle tinkle' like a dozen times and hearing him say it in his special cadence still kind of cracks me up. I also won the middle school science fair with a program that came with the SB Pro, called VEDIT2, if I recall. I set up a tape recording of a standard sound and moved a dish-shaped snow sled different distances from the microphone while recording the standard sound. I used VEDIT2 to measure the peak amplitude and then compared with expectations from a parabolic focusing reflector. Any middle schooler using the word 'directrix' was sure to win in my small town. And yeah my dad helped with the math. Good old SBPro though. EDIT: ah this site has a thing for SB Pro too, and it has vedit2: http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Sound_Blaster_Pro_(DOS) http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Sound_Blaster_Pro_(DOS)

elvis70 4y ago
You can still play with Dr. Sbaitso onine: https://oneweakness.com/dr-sbaitso-online https://oneweakness.com/dr-sbaitso-online. Don't say too many insults, otherwise you risk an error of parity.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago
  Oh I have gotten quite a good number of parity errors in my day. I was just firing it up at archive.org as well to hear that winkle tinkle cadence one more time. https://archive.org/details/msdos_Dr_Sbaitso_1992 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Dr_Sbaitso_1992
pkaye 4y ago
A long time ago I would help babysit my young niece and nephew. One of the things they would enjoy was a Eliza program I typed up from a basic listing. A simple program but they would really get a kick out of it and would ask for it for a long time.
fatnoah 4y ago
I used VEDIT2 to sample and loop music for my (with friends) triumphant high school Talent Show act way back in 1992.

danjc 4y ago

As a teen in the 90’s I added sound to the games I wrote using SMix. It was a sound mixer that supported Sound Blaster and others. SMix was written by Ethan Brodsky, couldn’t easily find anything about him today. Just another generous internet stranger who played a role in my tech career. https://archive.org/details/smix130_zip https://archive.org/details/smix130_zip

justsomehnguy 4y ago
ÉÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ» º Programming the SoundBlaster 16 DSP º º Written by Ethan Brodsky º º (ericbrodsky@psl.wisc.edu) º º Version 3.2 º º 8/3/95 º ÈÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍÍ¼ https://archive.org/details/sb16doc_zip https://archive.org/details/sb16doc_zip
marcins 4y ago
> Ethan Brodsky, couldn’t easily find anything about him today. Just another generous internet stranger who played a role in my tech career. I got curious - the email address in the reply is "ericbrodsky" - I did find an Eric Brodsky on LinkedIn who was at Wisconsin until '95 - so it's possible Ethan is his son, and he used his dad's email address? Some more digging, and I found this profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanbrodsky/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanbrodsky/ - could be him? Went to Wisconsin a few years later (so was likely in HS when he wrote the SoundBlaster stuff).

bluedino 4y ago

My sound card story: A long time ago we had a bottom of the barrel PC. 386SX 16MHz, 1MB RAM, and 41MB HDD. My parents weren't poor but they were cheap and this was a bargain $899 PC at the time, with 14" VGA monitor and 9 pin printer. The Pentium had just been released, but I had Surplus Software's advertisements (later bought by Egghead). They sold out of date hardware and software on clearance. I picked up an 8-bit Soundblaster compatible sound card, and a 2400bps modem. The parts arrived, I installed them, and my brother and I spent the better part of a Saturday morning downloading, or rather waiting for the download of Duke Nukem 2 Note: Airborne express dropped the package off at 10:00 am when I had placed my order the day before using my moms credit card (with her permission). That alone was amazing. Back to the story...after the download was complete, we ran the installer and we so nervous and excited CD\DUKE2 DUKE2.EXE The cheesy opening cut scene and thundering intro music blew us away. We had never heard any sound like that from the pathetic PC speaker or even our beloved NES. It was amazing.

jowdones 4y ago
Not very far from my first PC: 14'' VGA monitor, and a Siemens Nixdorf 386SX 16Mhz, 40Mb HDD but fortunately 2Mb of RAM (which probably made a huge difference on being able to play some games). Something similar to this beast: https://www.ebay.com/itm/172038842293?hash=item280e5067b5:g:jXQAAOSwVMJb~mPj https://www.ebay.com/itm/172038842293?hash=item280e5067b5:g:... Similarly, the Pentium was just released and a friend of a friend of mine had one (wealthy parents). Just once, I got to visit the Pentium's guy home tagging along my friend. The guy played a small VIDEO-CLIP with sound output in a Soundblaster-driven pair of speakers. I had never heard any game sound but PC speakers or NES (Famicom). There was a popular software at the time which I don't recall, which was playing MOD files into the PC speaker and we would listen in awe how that would sound. Now imagine being hit simultaneously with full-blown digital sound AND VIDEO. Flabbergasted is an understatement. The Pentium guy kept saying something about choppy video and crappy quality but I couldn't notice a damn thing, seemed the most amazing video I ever saw and all I could think (but of course couldn't say it out loud) was "shut the fuck up, I can't hear the soundtrack".
monocularvision 4y ago
I am so blown away by how close our stories are. Got this exact setup from grandparents for my 13th birthday, which was a HUGE surprise. I remember sitting on the sidelines of my younger brother’s football games while I read the DOS manual. I ended up buying a Sound Blaster Pro and installing that. We were absolutely blown away by the sound coming from that thing, specifically Links 386. Oh, and I ended up working at Egghead Software for a couple years in the mid-90’s.

verst 4y ago

Does anyone else remember having to configure I/O, IRQ, DMA etc? As a kid I had no understanding of what these things were so I always tried random values until the sound worked without distortion. The sound blaster also had a joystick port which back then was also used the emit MIDI signals. I installed a MIDI split cable on the joystick COM port and then configured sound in games to use the Roland Adlib MIDI mode. I hooked up my Yamaha PSR 730 Keyboard to my computer and got to enjoy much higher quality sounding music.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
> Does anyone else remember having to configure I/O, IRQ, DMA etc? I totally do. It wasn't fun but in the end, somehow, we always ended up configuring everything correctly!
elvis70 4y ago
Yes, and I never managed to configure this so that the Sound Blaster works with my handheld Genius scanner.
themodelplumber 4y ago
Absolutely, there were IRQ & DMA defaults that usually worked pretty well in my experience, and in my friend group everybody had memorized fallback combinations to try. You never knew when you'd suddenly need to change that stuff when visiting a friend's house. It's funny you mention using your Yamaha keyboard for MIDI out. I did this with the SB Live back in the day, it had a pretty cool front I/O panel too. I remember playing Phantasmagoria this way and getting creeped out really fast. Probably didn't help that the music was coming from my keyboard which was in another part of the room.
jasomill 4y ago
Older ISA Sound Blaster cards indeed have jumpers to configure I/O ports, IRQ lines, and DMA addresses for the hardware, and traditionally there was no reliable way to auto-detect conflicts with other hardware — such conflicts are a likely source of your distorted audio — so manual reconfiguration was frequently required. Additionally, Sound Blaster-compatible software requires either manual or semi-automatic configuration via the BLASTER environment variable or application-specific configuration mechanisms to determine the hardware configuration. Creative indeed repurposed a couple infrequently-used pins on its implementation of the IBM PC game port[1] to implement a MIDI interface; other vendors followed suit. In addition to computer music applications, external MIDI modules — most notably, the Roland MT-32[2] and Sound Canvas SC-55[3] — were commonly supported by games of the era[4]. Today, all this can be easily emulated in both software[5] and first-party emulated hardware[6]. Additionally, Sound Canvas was the basis for the General MIDI standard, so it's also possible to wire up DOSBox MIDI to other GM-compliant synths for similar results (at least in [relatively] newer games with General MIDI support; attempting to emulate MT-32 via GM rarely works out well). Source: personal experience, though "back in the day" I used a Roland SCC-1, which combined an SC-55-compatible synth and an MPU-401-compatible[7] MIDI interface on an ISA card. For most games, this configuration also required a separate sound card for non-music sound effects, but was otherwise convenient, slots permitting, as it required no external hardware. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_MT-32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_MT-32 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_SC-55 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_SC-55 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MT-32-compatible_computer_games https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MT-32-compatible_compu... [5] https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3ASetting-up-MIDI-in-DOSBox%E2%80%90X#_roland_mt_32_emulation https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3ASetting-up-MIDI-in-DOSBox%... [6] https://id.roland.com/products/sound_canvas_for_ios/ https://id.roland.com/products/sound_canvas_for_ios/ [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPU-401 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPU-401

jesuslop 4y ago

What I liked most is that it demonstrated direct memory access, so the CPU and the card shared the mastery of the memory bus. You told the card to play such memory block with very little IO, and the play started while you continued running your code. On end you had an interruption handler called.

noipv4 4y ago

Ahh, the fun configuring ISA cards. That's how I learned about DMA, interrupts and addresses. Also learned how COM and LPT ports operated. Also learned to configure a dialup modem using AT command set.

rasz 4y ago

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=59154 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=59154 First dos sound blaster game. >Looking through Mobygames, the total number of retail Dos games released from 1989,1990 and 1991 was a massive 1902 games (this is excluding educational software, shareware games, PD freeware and compilations). The real number is even bigger than this as Mobygames' disclaimer says a large number of retail Dos games are still missing and not catalogued. It's interesting that all other systems, the only computer/console that comes anywhere close from 1989-1991 is the C64 with 1421 retail games. out of those 1900 PC games released between 89-91 only a small fraction (<10%) supported Sound Blaster digitized wave output. It took over two years for true adoption as the de facto standard.

bruce511 4y ago

Like many I got a sound blaster as part of a multimedia kit that included a cdrom, SB card, and some games. Unlike many, I suspect, I also used it as a poor-man's digital oscilloscope at work, simply by sampling the microphone input (or line input? I don't remember.) it worked well enough (although all flat signals reverted to the middle.) But it was enough to show the value of a digital scope over an analogue one, and we made a big of money, and so bought a real digital oscilloscope (for what was then, to us, quite a lot of loot.) Those were the days of miracle and wonder.

blenderdt 4y ago

The experience of the too real 'blood splash' sound in Prinse of Persia. I was shocked after buying a sound card.

foresto 4y ago

Sound setup was one of those fiddly tasks that we came to expect whenever installing a new game. Did I remember the correct interrupt and port? Did I leave the card jumpered with alternate settings last time I played that one game that uses hard-coded values? Will this new game respect the BLASTER environment variable? Does silence when I launch the game mean that I made a mistake, or just that the game has no sound at the title screen? Warcraft II addressed this with a sound setup tool that rewarded the effort with a delightful surprise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slTHHXWNG4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slTHHXWNG4Y

alasdair_ 4y ago

I made the mistake of buying a SoundBlaster Z1 for my last gaming PC build. After two years of constant struggle, I removed it last night and just use the onboard sound which sounds identical. The thing constantly stopped working and I would have to reseat it into a different PCI slot and often reinstall the drivers to make it work again. It also had obnoxious bright red LEDs with no way to turn them off. It often went weeks without being detected at all after any kind of reboot of the system. I will never buy another.

tomduncalf 4y ago

Those screenshots of the DOS applications make me feel nostalgic! I came across a screenshot [1] of WaveStudio recently, which was a wave editor they bundled for Windows, but I’d totally forgotten about the DOS apps that predated it! [1] http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Creative_WaveStudio http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Creative_WaveStudio

Ozzie_osman 4y ago

My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you. Say whatever is in your mind freely, our conversation will be kept on strict confidence. So, tell me about your problems.

netsharc 4y ago
A non-techie relative started writing a long paragraph about her problem, thinking the good Doctor was going to understand it like a real therapist/human, and got miffed when she couldn't type beyond 255 characters...
fatnoah 4y ago
Tell me something dirty. (Dr. Sbaitso will ask that, on occasion)

threeio 4y ago

How dare they call Sbaitso bad AI... ;)

dhosek 4y ago

Back in the 80s, my brother bought a voice synthesizer chip from Radio Shack and wired it to his Commodore 64. Unfortunately, the voice synthesizer chip would insert an l sound before all vowels so when he had it say, “Hello, Professor Falken, would you like to play a game?” it came out has “Hlello, Prloflesslor Flalklen, wlould ylou like tlo pay la glame?” I hear that any time I encounter something that reminds me of War Games, most recently yesterday when my daughter asked me to play Tic Tac Toe with her on her kid’s menu while we waited for dinner to be served.

nebula8804 4y ago

Anyone remember this "Demo" that Creative Labs made to promote Sound Blaster 16? [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRLb9QDf51o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRLb9QDf51o I guess people didn't realize that they were secretly in the demoscene ha ha! I wonder if it was some overly excited intern developer that whipped this up in his/her spare time? Creative Labs didn't seem like the kind of company that would allow time spent to develop stuff like this but I guess thats just speculation, I was in elementary school when this was released. I remember when my late father came home with a Sound Blaster 16 and installed it because I had been doing alright in school. I then spent a few days not doing my second grade homework but instead trying to figure out how to set up the SET BLASTER requirements for this card and figuring out how to get games to work with it. There was no internet, and I had no idea how I ever learned anything at all back then. The moment when Epic Pinball started playing music was so shocking that it is still imprinted in my head to this day!

djmips 4y ago
Let me recall how I learned back then because it's an interesting contrast. Magazine subscriptions (like Byte). Books from the library. Word of mouth (friends, computer stores). Television - there were a few like Bits and Bytes and The Computer Chronicles. And just hands on. A computer club if you were lucky!
- nebula8804 4y ago
  You were very lucky! All I had was trial and error and the occasional help from my dad. I never did learn to code until High School but when it came to troubleshooting and "IT" related stuff? Thats what I ended up becoming good at. That just required trial and error. Coding would have required me to figure out how to install a compiler. Later on we got TechTv but I think we had internet by then. Not really useful as I recall relying on my collection of webrings instead of search.

larodi 4y ago

I remember seeing Future Crew's Second Reality in a pc-store showroom where someone had connected the SoundBlaster to amplifier with these big speaker. It was just released and some smart ass had managed to put hands on it from some BBS. My mind was blown immediately and I got hooked to computer music, computer audio, graphics and multimedia in general. I knew that C64 had a dedicated audio chip, and my COM port (or maybe printer port) had something called COVOX in it, but this SB thing was beyond any previous measure cool. And the C64s were in fact quite pricey and not being sold at all where I lived. My parents got me a present that was the SoundBlaster as a gift that I managed to get into the elite national school of math and sciences. I started digging scream tracker 3 (by the FC gang), and a school teacher in 10th grade was definitely surprised when I played a demo-tape of self-made recordings. There are many SoundBlaster stories I can tell. Eventually few years later (in 1996/1997) our group of 2 people released 2 demos, and most of the music was composed by myself, while my mate was spitting thousands of assembly lines, and was also proud to implement a tracker of his own making for the production... After having played as a DJ at more than 300 events electronic music is to date important part of my life and SB has a very special place in my heart. I can still remember the touch of the product.

greatartiste 4y ago

I bought an SoundBlaster16 DSP card on the basic premise it had a DSP on it as I wanted to do some audio processing. Not sure if it actually did have a DSP IC in it as Creative never released any info on how to program it. The disappointment was made up for because the day after my card arrived the supplier sent a second one by mistake then the day following a third one. They never realised their mistake so I was able to sell the spare two so had some spare cash for more useful toys.

rasz 4y ago
You mean the ASP/CSP right? :-) Because scammy Creative called 8052 microcontroller on all of their cards a DSP = Digital Sound Processors (not Digital Signal Processors!). Card with real DSP was called ASP = Advanced Signal Processor or CSP = Creative Signal Processor. ST18932, a bad one but still a DSP. Enough performance to implement 14.4kbps modem. "Tests/Info welcome: Reverse engineering the SB16 ASP/CSP" https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=86739&p=1051126 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=86739&p=1051126

flamesofphx 4y ago

Man Dr. Sbaitso was the last good Psychologist I knew... Well unless he asked if I was talking about brimstone..

Braini 4y ago

I still remember young, in this regard surprisingly clueless me being soo excited when moving to my first PC (some 486) with a Soundblaster clone, coming from an Amiga 500. The ad said something about 22 voices, how cool would that be (as the Amiga had 4)! Now envision my surprise when I heard the sound of these 22 voices in some of the demos mentioned on this page when I was used to the Amiga. Well, over time with faster CPUs, software mixing, AWE32, GUS or EWS64 etc. the problem solved itself and in the meantime I really like the FM sounds for what they are but man was I disappointed at that time.