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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 h
by 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 agoAlso 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoI 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.