Until I upgraded to Linux Mint recently I actually DID use a Soundblaster card (modern one from 2018) to drive my super nice headphones and speakers
Too bad mint weirdly hated it despite recognizing it, but the new speakers have a fine DAC so....
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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Dr. Sbaitso says "'sup."
I had one. Besides, I love 80s/90s aesthetics.
Those whippersnappers have it so easy these days! They don't even know what an interrupt is any more!
Anyone else remember having to set interleave on an RLL hard drive? "First you have to low-level format..."
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I had to play Wolfenstein 3D with the little wafer speaker on the motherboard.
Back in my day, there was a little speaker in the case that connected to the motherboard by a couple of wires.
It sounded terrible and we liked it, because it was better than nothing.
Still running Creative SoundBlasterX G5
Amazing card, and the series is very much alive
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What? They did have onboard sound. The problem is that if you used the motherboard speaker to make anything more decent than a beep, you basically needed to build an entire sound engine from scratch and very few games did so. It also wasn't worthwhile because a shitty two pin speaker could not compare to the speakers of a professional sound system which you needed the soundcard to hook up into, and CPU bandwidth was such a limitation back then than even when games could play WAV they would use MIDI to offload the musical instrument synthesizing for the soundtracks to the sound card. Designing a game that used the onboard sound speaker was basically the realm of assembly hacking geniuses.
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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.
You had to use Voodoo to see the magic 3d graphics
I was a rebel and went with the Pro Audio 16
But you got the connector for a Joystick for free!
Ah, i remember might & magic 3. loved it, because it sent speech through the crappy pc speaker. So cool
The Yamaha YM3812 sound chip was the backbone of computer sound & music generation for almost a decade.
I'm still rocking an Audigy 2 on my main computer for that 1/4" jack on the front bay
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In the grand scheme of things they were relatively inexpensive. You could spend a lot but you didn't need to.
I still use my external soundblaster to connect to my 5.1 amp. I have HDMI to my TV and then toslink to my amp, but it was inconvenient having to have the TV on for listening music.
Wait. When did onboard sound get good enough that you don't need a soundcard? My computer is "only" 12ish years, and it has a soundcard. The reason used to be that internal ones sounded like shit.
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My best friend gave me his sound blaster after upgrading to the Pro. Later I upgraded to a Gravis Ultrasound. Offloading sound processing to the sound card (1MB) improved gaming performance significantly.
220/5/1
1000 yard stare
Long live the Gravis Ultrasound Max!