A Sound Card Before Its Time

Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by askvictor on Friday August 17, 2018 @12:01AM (#17780201)

At some point in the 90s a re-make of Zork (with graphics and sound) came out for PC (I think this was DOS era). However, most PCs didn't have sound cards, and it would be a hard sell to require customers to buy one (I think they were upwards of $100 back then?) on top of the cost of the game, so there was an option to purchase a parallel port sound adapter (basically a DAC) for about $20 (these are 90s prices) from the game company. We got one, but never could get it working, neither could some relatives.

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Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by robin_reala on Friday August 17, 2018 @03:25AM (#17780934)

Yeah, sound cards were always that bit too expensive and incompatible with each other. In the end I got my first SoundBlaster because it was also an interface card for a CD drive and they were doing good bundles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_16#CD-ROM_Suppor...

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Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by jfroma on Friday August 17, 2018 @05:36AM (#17781473)

I got this Sound Blaster 16 as christmas present when I was a kid. I always remember it came in a very big blue package with the CD drive and some CDs with a lot of sharewhare applications.

My father told me very exited "I went to a friend's house and he was playing Prince of Persia, you can listen the footsteps "ton ton ton"."

I found a picture of the package: http://blog.hmvh.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/moby_SB16box...

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Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by SmellyGeekBoy on Friday August 17, 2018 @05:54AM (#17781547)

My personal revelation was Wolfenstein 3D. I remember playing it on my Dad's work PC with the PC speaker. I copied it to a friend's PC (using MSBACKUP if I recall correctly) and when we fired it up it sounded glorious. I remember my parents coming to pick me up from my friend's house and we just had to give my Dad a demo.

"Coincidentally" enough shortly afterwards we had a SB16 of our very own. ;)

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Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by madengr on Friday August 17, 2018 @08:18AM (#17782211)

Yep, Wolfenstein was pretty revolutionary. I was in college at the time. A friend and I finished all three packs over a weekend, alternating as controller and navigator.

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Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by Digit-Al on Friday August 17, 2018 @02:10PM (#17784656)

For me, the first game I played that really used sound to it's best effect was Doom (I think, or it could have been Quake - it was a long time ago alright :-) ).

There was one particular demon that you would hear half whispering in the distance. As soon as you heard that sound you knew that one of those demons was lurking around somewhere but you didn't know where, so you would start lookng frantically round, waiting for it to burst screaming out of the shadows and attack you.

To this day I have never played another game that evoked such a sense of tension and dread as that sinister whispering.

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Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by rahimnathwani on Friday August 17, 2018 @06:55AM (#17781804)

I just remembered now. My PC at the time had an IBM Blue Lightning processor, and (I guess) IBM chipset motherboard. The PC wasn't IBM-branded, but had a sticker on it that said it was manufactured by IBM in Scotland.

Anyway, the SB 16 worked fine in Windows 3.1 and in Linux (Slackware, with kernel 1.1.59), but it didn't work properly in DOS for some reason.

I looked online and found that others with the same chipset had the same problem, and no one had found a solution.

So the only way to play Doom with sound on that computer, was to run the Linux version.

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