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).
I had the original voodoo 3Dfx in 50lbs Alienware case with a 75 lbs 20+ inch crt.. can’t remember the exact size. Wrong choice for university living at the time
I got an ABIT Siluro/ Geforce 2 MX400 after that and Diablo 2 ran worse, the frame rate tanked. I was gutted.
Back in the day I tried to play Morrowind but every time I moved my mouse the game would crash, I started removing hardware until I found out it was my soundcard giving me issues, was an old ISA slot. Got a PCI soundcard after that and no issues.
And of course there was a short period of time where a sound card wasn’t required, but would actually improve performance by offloading audio processing to your sound card if you had one. And onboard audio at that time wasn’t great anyways.
You can still get discrete sound cards (both internal and USB), though they're more for audiophile stuff. With the PS5 touting big 3d audio improvements and HRTFs I half expected manufacturers to make a push to bring them back or at least feature sound features more prominantly in motherboards but I guess CPUs these days can just spare the cycles if you want fancy audio.
And of course there was a short period of time where a sound card wasn’t required, but would actually improve performance by offloading audio processing to your sound card if you had one
we are at this point in history, but for graphics cards :)
Not in the same way, as you aren’t using the integrated gpu at all if you get an external one. I guess if you’re talking about shared ram this makes sense though.
yea, IDK how it works as I've never had a computer back then, but the quoted reply makes it sound like getting a sound card would take load off of the CPU.
oh - my apologies, I forgot that on-board graphics have a dedicated chipset. Also, no idea whether on-board sound would have used CPU power back in the late days of soundcards, as the comment I responded to was claiming... might have been a sound chip for that, too..
I remember Battlefield 2 being a prime example for that. Not only did its performance improve once I added a discrete sound card, it also sounded much better.
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 :)
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
How quickly we forget the chip tunes of the PC Speaker, I used it in a computer lab one day to play a nearly undetectable high freq wave using logo. The PC Speaker was a pretty flexible little speaker
The c64 could do all sorts of music over the TV speakers, even voices. Who can forget Impossible Mission "Another visitor, stay a while, stay forever!"
Flexible enough that Access Software built a library called RealSound that could do 6-bit PCM audio over it. Which isn't great but is dramatically better than you'd expect. A bit over a dozen or so games used it.
I had one called Mean Streets that used it for things like voice. The game came with instructions for how to build a cable to connect your internal speaker to an RCA cable to run to a stereo or similar.
i had an internal creative soundcard some 5 years back. sound was pretty perfect with dt990 pro and sz2000. my current creative usb soundcard has more noise :(
You'd have to put it all the way around it, including near the connector. Obviously you can't put it inside the connector, but that's another avenue for noise to get in. Outisde the box of noise with it's own box of insulation is a much calmer place.
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.
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.
