What a nightmare it was to have sound AND your CD drive drivers to load and leave enough memory for some of those nasty old DOS games.
Felt like being a hacker.
(I might have realized I'm the old guy in the picture)
I built a config.sys file with a menu that then passed the menu choice on to autoexec.bat so I could choose at boot time between 3 configurations- one with expanded memory for older games that required it, one with extended memory for everyday use and newer games, and one with everything extra (including CD-ROM drivers) stripped away to maximize free conventional RAM for the one or two games that needed that...
I know that was a thing and I tried to get it done, but never managed to get it to work properly.
So back to manual configuration and rebooting it was.
But I like to think that's how I learned how my PC works and what it does when doing so, which helped me identify the cause of many issues over the years.
Speaking of memory, I had a weird 486 machine which had baked in 16MB of ram which were accessible through EMS and 16MB of replaceable RAM sticks accessible through XMS interface. The thing is EMS worked faster in DOS, but XMS worked faster in Windows 95. So when booting up into DOS, all the apps would use baked in EMS RAM, but when booting into Windows, all the apps would use XMS RAM.
Sound typically (*) didn't require "drivers" or any TSR though. The game had to do all the hardware control itself.
It was usually enough to set a BLASTER variable to point it at the correct IRQ, DMA and memory address, and perhaps run a program at boot to initialize the card and set volume levels, but no TSR eating up memory.
(*) Some exceptions are later soundcards of the Win 9x era that did crappy emulation of a real Soundblaster via a TSR in DOS.
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 don't think that's accurate... Of course it's possible I'm misremembering something from 35+ years ago, but there's no performance benefit for 14 bits over 16- either way, it's a 2-byte fetch, you don't save anything by leaving off two bits. So I'd almost believe it was 8-bit rather than 16, but the difference in sound quality is huge, and the Amigas had a 16-bit data bus so 16-bit fetches took no more effort than 8-bit. The sample rate I'd be more likely to believe I had wrong, but again, there are technical reasons for the 44.1 kHz rate that have to do with recording digital audio to videotape, so I could see it being half that, but not some random number. But again, huge sound quality difference between 44.1 and 22.05.
All that said, I'm not too familiar with the 1000, I had the 500 which was basically the same machine as the 2000 but in a more compact case. My uncle had a 1000, but he used it professionally so he wouldn't let me near it :D
I find it really interesting that modern 3D pipelines are so efficient that drawing 2D using 3D part of GPU is faster and better than using 2D part of GPU still present in modern GPUs for backwards compatibility. Maybe 2D is now done in software in drivers though, I'm not sure, haven't checked.
You should still buy sound cards as they are significantly better, at least the ones in the 100€ range. Just because there are premium mainboards with acceptable sound doesn't mean it is great.
Yikes. Depends on your priorities, I guess. I love music and sound in general so I've put some funds into some decent gear. You don't need to break the bank, especially if you go the iem/headphone route.
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 :)
G5 is a USB card. And I'd argue that's the best approach, as sound signal being analog is highly susceptible to interference, and insides of a computer have a lot of that.
On board is easier and for any audio enthusiast, sounds like trash by comparison.
I have yet to meet an onboard audio solution that didn't give you garbage in the output. Whether it's coil whine, a low hiss or a 60hz him, there's always something.
Onboard, in my experience also distorts way earlier into the volume slider by comparison.
I always hear interference, especially from a mouse, in onboard audio.
I'm happy you haven't had this problem, but I consider that to be an outlier in the grand scheme of things.
I'd also be willing to bet you have the problem but just haven't noticed it. Which is fine. If the issue isn't one you have noticed, and you're fine with onboard, go ham. Have fun. That's not me though.
Take a look at your board. How many sources of interference do you see? Historically a lot of the board was analog. Now they are digital. Unless your board is a fire hazard that shouldn't happen. It just isn't how it works. If USB affects audio you machine is probably toast and fuses should of blown.
Considering how many systems I've heard this on, not just my own, and how long I've been able to hear it, no. Definitely not.
Some newer boards have gotten wise to the issue and generally shield or provide an exclusion area around audio carrying circuits. Not all of them do it.
Above and beyond that, the amps used are generally crap and distort at high volume levels, so no matter how good your headphones are, the audio always sounds like hot trash at high volume levels regardless of pretty much everything else.
My AG06 costs as much as a cheap motherboard. There's no doubt that the audio hardware, designed and produced by Yamaha, a well known name in audio equipment, had been built with better components than you'll find in your average onboard audio solution, and with more attention to detail about interference sources.
Considering the AG06 is on their low end of equipment, compared to some stuff out there, it's complete trash. There are audio interfaces and headphone amps that cost 5-10x what I paid for the AG06, and some that cost more. I promise you they sound better than my dinky little audio interface/mixer.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if you're happy with your audio solution, cool. Use it. I'm not here to judge you for what you like. For those who hear the distortion and interference from onboard audio, they already know what I'm talking about and likely have their own audio setup which eliminates any trouble they might have with their onboard audio. As long as they're happy with theirs, cool, they should use it.
I'm happy with mine.
Please don't argue that the problem doesn't exist because your limited experience hasn't noticed it. That kind of subjective anecdotal evidence proves nothing beyond the fact that you don't have a problem with your setup.
That's cool. But don't tell me that it's not a problem just because you don't have that problem.
At the time (1995-ish) I was developing a series of Windows applications that let people compose music on their PCs, [...] the actual quality of the music when played through a shitty built-in FM sound chip was depressingly awful
And the a Atari ST and Amiga 500 was released in the late 1980s.
You just unlocked a memory for me. One of my dad's friends had a super cool keyboard, I think it was a Casio. It had midi, and a bunch of built in instruments. Then he had another friend, who was a huge geek, who figured out how to extract the midi instruments from the keyboard, so we could use them to replace the cheaper sounding midi instruments in windows.
Obviously it didn't sound as good as the keyboard, because it still was dragged behind by inferior hardware on the PC. Not to mention the fact that some of the instruments just didn't play, and that Windows liked to crash and revert all instruments back to the default if it didn't like an instrument we tried to feed it, but I still remember it as something really badass.
Most of Creative's AWE32 cards do use a real Yamaha OPL3 chip for FM synthesis, which can produce two-or-four operator voices. The latter of those can approach the quality of the voices in their DX7-family line of musical instruments. Even the older OPL2 chip that is limited to two-operator voices can sound great when programmed well (not that I'd call it realistic-sounding).
The other synth chip on the AWE32 is the Ensoniq EMU8000. That one does sample-based synthesis as you describe above.
Just wanted to note that Creative misappropriated the term wavetable synthesis when they marketed this and other sample-based synthesis cards of theirs, and the misnomer spread widely to the products of other companies and persists to this day.
most PCs by that time had built-in MIDI synthesizers
Built-in? You had AdLib cards for FM synthesis, but they were never built-in and most PCs didn't even have them. Adlib cards used the Yamaha OPL2 or OPL3 chip.
Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM
You are skipping a very important part here: cards that could output digital audio. The early Soundblaster cards were pioneers here (SB 1.0, SB 2.0, SB Pro, SB16). The SB16 for example was waaaaay more popular than the AWE32 ever was, even if it still used OPL3 based FM synth for music. It's the reason why most soundcards in the 90s were "Soundblaster compatible".
Digital audio meant that you could have recorded digital sound effects in games. So when you fired the shotgun in Doom to kill demons, it would play actual sound effects of shotgun blasts and demon grunts instead of bleeps or something synthesized and it was awesome. This was the gamechanger that made soundcards popular, not wavetable.
The wavetable cards I feel were more of a sideshow. They were interesting, and a nice upgrade, especially if you composed music. They never really took off though and they soon became obsolete as games switched from MIDI based audio to digital audio, for example Quake 1 already had its music on audio tracks on CD-ROM, making wavetable synthesis irrelevant.
BTW, I also feel like you are selling FM synthesis short. The OPL chips kinda sucked for plain MIDI, especially with the Windows drivers, and they were never good at reproducing instrument sounds but if you knew how to program them and treated the chip as its own instrument rather than a tool to emulate real world instruments, they were capable of producing beautiful electronic music with a very typical sound signature. You should check out some of the adlib trackers, like AdTrack2 for some examples. Many games also had beautiful FM synthesized soundtracks, and I often preferred it over the AWE32 wavetable version (e.g. Doom, Descent, Dune)
Along came Creative Labs with their AWE32, a synthesizer card that used wavetable synthesis instead of FM.
Creative Labs did wavetable synthesis well before the AWE32 — they released the Wave Blaster daughter board for the Sound Blaster 16, two full years before the AWE32 was released.
(FWIW, I’m not familiar with any motherboards that had FM synthesis built-in in the mid 90’s. By this time, computers were getting fast enough to be able to do software-driven wavetable synthesis, so motherboards just came with a DAC).
Where the Sound Blaster really shined was that the early models were effectively three cards in one — an Adlib card, a CMS card, and a DAC/ADC card (with models a year or two later also acting as CD-ROM interface cards). Everyone forgets about CMS because Adlib was more popular at the time, but it was capable of stereo FM synthesis, whereas the Adlib was only ever mono.
(As publisher of The Sound Blaster Digest way back then, I had all of these cards and more. For a few years, Creative sent me virtually everything they made for review. AMA).
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.
