[HN Gopher] Sound Blaster (DOS)
___________________________________________________________________
Sound Blaster (DOS)
Author : elvis70
Score : 73 points
Date : 2022-05-15 14:16 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vgmpf.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vgmpf.com)
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| What a nostalgia. I used to scourge the internet (with a 28.8
| Kbps modem nonetheless) for .midi files, put those files in a
| playlist, and play it throughout the day.
|
| Later on I found out MIDI can sound _much better_ using better
| sound cards, e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_AWE32 (mine was SB16)
|
| Pure magic.
| midislack wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220515173047/http://www.vgmpf....
|
| Doesn't work with Tor Browser so have this archive link.
| shdon wrote:
| I recently had a blast (no pun intended) by porting a new point
| and click adventure currently being in development to DOS. That
| includes a sound mixer and MIDI player. Was a lot of fun
| revisiting those skills from 25 years ago.
| elpocko wrote:
| Return to Monkey Island will have a DOS port? Cool.
| verst wrote:
| Does anyone else remember having to configure I/O, IRQ, DMA etc?
| As a kid I had no understanding of what these things were so I
| always tried random values until the sound worked without
| distortion.
|
| The sound blaster also had a joystick port which back then was
| also used the emit MIDI signals. I installed a MIDI split cable
| on the joystick COM port and then configured sound in games to
| use the Roland Adlib MIDI mode. I hooked up my Yamaha PSR 730
| Keyboard to my computer and got to enjoy much higher quality
| sounding music.
| colordrops wrote:
| I'm still cargo culting with Linux kernel parameters to fix
| various graphics and hardware issues.
| mortenlarsen wrote:
| The earliest Sound Blasters had IRQ7 as default. This
| conflicted with LPT1 so the default was changed to IRQ5. There
| are a few games like "Gods (1991)" and "Space Quest III (1989)"
| that have IRQ7 hardcoded, so for best compatibility with older
| games IRQ7 is needed.
| elvis70 wrote:
| Yes, and I never managed to configure this so that the Sound
| Blaster works with my handheld Genius scanner.
| rpeden wrote:
| I definitely remember SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 in my
| autoexec.bat.
| verst wrote:
| I somehow got away with never adding this in my autoexec.bat.
|
| I don't remember much with regards to tweaking that stuff..
| running memmaker.exe comes to mind. Also loading the CD
| driver in extended memory mode (MSCDEX.exe /E). Then there
| was himem.sys etc
|
| I would really love to see a good blogpost on all these
| things so I can finally learn what all these things actually
| did -- back then it was just trial an error. All the tweaks I
| had to make to free up "conventional memory" despite having a
| lot of RAM.
| axiolite wrote:
| > configure I/O, IRQ, DMA etc? As a kid I had no understanding
| of what these things were so I always tried random values until
| the sound worked without distortion
|
| I got my start in the Win9x days. I cannot begin to describe
| how confusing it was (with no knowledge of PC computing
| history) to have sound working perfectly in Windows, only to
| start a game where sound would not work. Only to be greeted
| with a settings menu with hundreds of possible sound
| configuration options with no clue what to try to get sound
| work. If I actually got my start in the old 386 PC days,
| opening the case, reading the brand of sound card and looking
| at jumper settings would have been a start. But with some "ESS"
| sound chips not listed anywhere, no jumpers showing the
| settings, etc., it was a complete black box.
|
| Didn't have internet access to go to and research computer
| problems in those days, and I had no technically knowledgeable
| friends... Windows Help system was of no help, and it could be
| a considerable time sink with its terrible search function
| finding tons of irrelevant hits. Game documentation rarely
| provided clues. The way forward at the time would have been to
| buy one of the many non-distinct books on computers available
| on store shelves.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| You warped me right back to 11 years old, and I thank you for
| it.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Absolutely, there were IRQ & DMA defaults that usually worked
| pretty well in my experience, and in my friend group everybody
| had memorized fallback combinations to try. You never knew when
| you'd suddenly need to change that stuff when visiting a
| friend's house.
|
| It's funny you mention using your Yamaha keyboard for MIDI out.
| I did this with the SB Live back in the day, it had a pretty
| cool front I/O panel too. I remember playing Phantasmagoria
| this way and getting creeped out really fast. Probably didn't
| help that the music was coming from my keyboard which was in
| another part of the room.
| jasomill wrote:
| Older ISA Sound Blaster cards indeed have jumpers to configure
| I/O ports, IRQ lines, and DMA addresses for the hardware, and
| traditionally there was no reliable way to auto-detect
| conflicts with other hardware -- such conflicts are a likely
| source of your distorted audio -- so manual reconfiguration was
| frequently required.
|
| Additionally, Sound Blaster-compatible software requires either
| manual or semi-automatic configuration via the BLASTER
| environment variable or application-specific configuration
| mechanisms to determine the hardware configuration.
|
| Creative indeed repurposed a couple infrequently-used pins on
| its implementation of the IBM PC game port[1] to implement a
| MIDI interface; other vendors followed suit.
|
| In addition to computer music applications, external MIDI
| modules -- most notably, the Roland MT-32[2] and Sound Canvas
| SC-55[3] -- were commonly supported by games of the era[4].
|
| Today, all this can be easily emulated in both software[5] and
| first-party emulated hardware[6]. Additionally, Sound Canvas
| was the basis for the General MIDI standard, so it's also
| possible to wire up DOSBox MIDI to other GM-compliant synths
| for similar results (at least in [relatively] newer games with
| General MIDI support; attempting to emulate MT-32 via GM rarely
| works out well).
|
| Source: personal experience, though "back in the day" I used a
| Roland SCC-1, which combined an SC-55-compatible synth and an
| MPU-401-compatible[7] MIDI interface on an ISA card. For most
| games, this configuration also required a separate sound card
| for non-music sound effects, but was otherwise convenient,
| slots permitting, as it required no external hardware.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_port
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_MT-32
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_SC-55
|
| [4]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MT-32-compatible_compu...
|
| [5] https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3ASetting-up-MIDI-in-
| DOSBox%...
|
| [6] https://id.roland.com/products/sound_canvas_for_ios/
|
| [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPU-401
| cricalix wrote:
| And for a dose of (in)sanity, check out LGR's MIDI Mountain.
|
| https://youtu.be/bQn3SyDh2Xo
| mrighele wrote:
| Yes, "good" memories, in a bad way. If you had a "home" PC,
| adding a sound card was not a terrible issue, but once you had
| an "office" pc with with something like two serial ports, a
| printer and, God forbid ! a network card (obviously a ne2000 or
| a 3c509), free IRQs were somewhat of a scarce resource.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Does anyone else remember having to configure I/O, IRQ, DMA
| etc?
|
| I totally do. It wasn't fun but in the end, somehow, we always
| ended up configuring everything correctly!
| tmaly wrote:
| This brought back memories. I remember having to do that to get
| certain games to work.
| jonathanoliver wrote:
| IRQ 5, DMA 1--but I had to adjust my COM mouse to use a
| different IRQ.
|
| Also, I had a highly tuned config.sys and autoexec.bat to get
| as much memory as I possibly could for King's Quest 3.
| verst wrote:
| How did you learn to tune those? It was all trial and error
| for me. I'd love to see a blogpost about this so I can
| finally learn all the things that I should have done but
| didn't back in the day :)
| henrikschroder wrote:
| It wasn't about "tuning", you simply needed to configure
| everything so there weren't any collisions, and this
| depended on whatever _other_ expansion cards and ports you
| had in your PC, because there was a limited amount of IRQ
| channels (2, 5, 7, 10), DMA channels (0, 1, 3), and I /O
| addresses (0x220, 0x240, 0x260, 0x280) that expansion cards
| could use.
|
| The original 8-bit cards could be configured through
| jumpers on the card, and the settings you put into
| autoexec.bat or individual setup programs for your games,
| simply had to match the hardware settings.
|
| Later, plug'n'play meant that your PC's BIOS could auto-
| detect and auto-assign everything to avoid collisions, so
| you didn't have to bother with it.
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| tomduncalf wrote:
| Those screenshots of the DOS applications make me feel nostalgic!
| I came across a screenshot [1] of WaveStudio recently, which was
| a wave editor they bundled for Windows, but I'd totally forgotten
| about the DOS apps that predated it!
|
| [1] http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Creative_WaveStudio
| alasdair_ wrote:
| I made the mistake of buying a SoundBlaster Z1 for my last gaming
| PC build. After two years of constant struggle, I removed it last
| night and just use the onboard sound which sounds identical.
|
| The thing _constantly_ stopped working and I would have to reseat
| it into a different PCI slot and often reinstall the drivers to
| make it work again. It also had obnoxious bright red LEDs with no
| way to turn them off.
|
| It often went weeks without being detected at all after any kind
| of reboot of the system.
|
| I will never buy another.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I got my first PC around 1997. It was a good machine for the
| time: 32 MB with a 200 MHz MMX pentium, it got a S3 graphics card
| with 2MB of video memory and had a modem, cd-rom and a sound
| card. The sound card was an Aztech Labs aAZTR2316. It came with
| drivers for windows and DOS.
|
| I soon discovered that "compatible with soundblaster" was not the
| same thing as "100% compatible with soundblaster". To get my
| sound card working as a soundblaster, I had to load its drivers.
| They worked but were somewhat buggy and required TSR's all the
| time. It some memory and, depending on the game, the game just
| refused to run with such drivers loaded. I never got to run
| battle chess with sound because of that.
|
| Since I had seen some "real computers" running UNIX I soon wanted
| to run linux on my PC. On linux I could play CD with the cd-rom
| but the drivers for my aztr2316 was only merged in 2007. By that
| time I had already bought a more compatible computer. I learned
| to envy my friends who had Creative Labs Soundblaster's and US
| Robotics real modems.
|
| It had some upgrades. Increased the RAM to 64 MB, replaced to
| modem with a NE2000 compatible network card, added CD recorder
| combo, I even got 2 floppy drives and 2 hard disks. The machine
| was almost fully stuffed internally. Nevertheless, It got
| replaced and I never heard a single tone from its sound card on
| linux.
|
| Years later I tried to turn on the computer again so I could test
| the drivers for the sound card. I never completed POST
| complaining about "parity error". I could have tried other memory
| chips, but I just gave up on my first machine. Let her rest.
| AaronBBrown wrote:
| I remember the pure magic of playing Sierra games after adding a
| Sound Blaster. Dr Sbaitso was also a hoot.
| jesuslop wrote:
| What I liked most is that it demonstrated direct memory access,
| so the CPU and the card shared the mastery of the memory bus. You
| told the card to play such memory block with very little IO, and
| the play started while you continued running your code. On end
| you had an interruption handler called.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| Pure nostalgia and this defined my teen years. From hours spent
| messing around with Dr. Sbaitso, to that talking parrot, to being
| elated to finding a doc on how to program the SB on a BBS, the
| sound blaster era was when computers were most exciting. We were
| finally breaking out into major video/sound breakthroughs.
| noipv4 wrote:
| Ahh, the fun configuring ISA cards. That's how I learned about
| DMA, interrupts and addresses. Also learned how COM and LPT ports
| operated. Also learned to configure a dialup modem using AT
| command set.
| blenderdt wrote:
| The experience of the too real 'blood splash' sound in Prinse of
| Persia. I was shocked after buying a sound card.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| 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.
| colordrops wrote:
| I played a game called mean streets that played recorded audio
| through the PC speaker. That definitely wasn't cheating.
|
| https://youtu.be/WJ4rYt8v--4
|
| It used a system called Realsound.
| danieldk wrote:
| I 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.
| wenc wrote:
| I 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.
| pantulis wrote:
| Also 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.
| rasz wrote:
| https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=59154 First dos sound
| blaster game.
|
| >Looking through Mobygames, the total number of retail Dos games
| released from 1989,1990 and 1991 was a massive 1902 games (this
| is excluding educational software, shareware games, PD freeware
| and compilations). The real number is even bigger than this as
| Mobygames' disclaimer says a large number of retail Dos games are
| still missing and not catalogued. It's interesting that all other
| systems, the only computer/console that comes anywhere close from
| 1989-1991 is the C64 with 1421 retail games.
|
| out of those 1900 PC games released between 89-91 only a small
| fraction (<10%) supported Sound Blaster digitized wave output. It
| took over two years for true adoption as the de facto standard.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Like many I got a sound blaster as part of a multimedia kit that
| included a cdrom, SB card, and some games.
|
| Unlike many, I suspect, I also used it as a poor-man's digital
| oscilloscope at work, simply by sampling the microphone input (or
| line input? I don't remember.) it worked well enough (although
| all flat signals reverted to the middle.)
|
| But it was enough to show the value of a digital scope over an
| analogue one, and we made a big of money, and so bought a real
| digital oscilloscope (for what was then, to us, quite a lot of
| loot.)
|
| Those were the days of miracle and wonder.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| You could have Dr. Sbaitso say whatever you typed, by telling him
| to 'say' something. As pre-teens, my sister and I used to laugh
| maniacally with this basic TTS system. Typing in 'winkle tinkle'
| like a dozen times and hearing him say it in his special cadence
| still kind of cracks me up.
|
| I also won the middle school science fair with a program that
| came with the SB Pro, called VEDIT2, if I recall. I set up a tape
| recording of a standard sound and moved a dish-shaped snow sled
| different distances from the microphone while recording the
| standard sound. I used VEDIT2 to measure the peak amplitude and
| then compared with expectations from a parabolic focusing
| reflector. Any middle schooler using the word 'directrix' was
| sure to win in my small town.
|
| And yeah my dad helped with the math.
|
| Good old SBPro though.
|
| EDIT: ah this site has a thing for SB Pro too, and it has vedit2:
| http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Sound_Blaster_Pro_(DOS)
| elvis70 wrote:
| You can still play with Dr. Sbaitso onine:
| https://oneweakness.com/dr-sbaitso-online. Don't say too many
| insults, otherwise you risk an error of parity.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Oh I have gotten quite a good number of parity errors in my
| day. I was just firing it up at archive.org as well to hear
| that winkle tinkle cadence one more time.
|
| https://archive.org/details/msdos_Dr_Sbaitso_1992
| sandermvanvliet wrote:
| For some more nostalgia you can build your own Sound Blaster, or:
| Snark Barker
|
| https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker
| foresto wrote:
| Sound setup was one of those fiddly tasks that we came to expect
| whenever installing a new game.
|
| Did I remember the correct interrupt and port? Did I leave the
| card jumpered with alternate settings last time I played that one
| game that uses hard-coded values? Will this new game respect the
| BLASTER environment variable? Does silence when I launch the game
| mean that I made a mistake, or just that the game has no sound at
| the title screen?
|
| Warcraft II addressed this with a sound setup tool that rewarded
| the effort with a delightful surprise:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slTHHXWNG4Y
| danjc wrote:
| As a teen in the 90's I added sound to the games I wrote using
| SMix. It was a sound mixer that supported Sound Blaster and
| others.
|
| SMix was written by Ethan Brodsky, couldn't easily find anything
| about him today. Just another generous internet stranger who
| played a role in my tech career.
|
| https://archive.org/details/smix130_zip
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| EIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII>> o Programming
| the SoundBlaster 16 DSP o o Written by Ethan
| Brodsky o o (ericbrodsky@psl.wisc.edu)
| o o Version 3.2 o o
| 8/3/95 o
| EIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII1/4
|
| https://archive.org/details/sb16doc_zip
| bluedino wrote:
| My sound card story:
|
| A long time ago we had a bottom of the barrel PC. 386SX 16MHz,
| 1MB RAM, and 41MB HDD. My parents weren't poor but they were
| cheap and this was a bargain $899 PC at the time, with 14" VGA
| monitor and 9 pin printer.
|
| The Pentium had just been released, but I had Surplus Software's
| advertisements (later bought by Egghead). They sold out of date
| hardware and software on clearance. I picked up an 8-bit
| Soundblaster compatible sound card, and a 2400bps modem. The
| parts arrived, I installed them, and my brother and I spent the
| better part of a Saturday morning downloading, or rather waiting
| for the download of Duke Nukem 2
|
| Note: Airborne express dropped the package off at 10:00 am when I
| had placed my order the day before using my moms credit card
| (with her permission). That alone was amazing.
|
| Back to the story...after the download was complete, we ran the
| installer and we so nervous and excited
| CD\DUKE2 DUKE2.EXE
|
| The cheesy opening cut scene and thundering intro music blew us
| away. We had never heard any sound like that from the pathetic PC
| speaker or even our beloved NES.
|
| It was amazing.
| jowdones wrote:
| Not very far from my first PC: 14'' VGA monitor, and a Siemens
| Nixdorf 386SX 16Mhz, 40Mb HDD but fortunately 2Mb of RAM (which
| probably made a huge difference on being able to play some
| games). Something similar to this beast:
| https://www.ebay.com/itm/172038842293?hash=item280e5067b5:g:...
|
| Similarly, the Pentium was just released and a friend of a
| friend of mine had one (wealthy parents). Just once, I got to
| visit the Pentium's guy home tagging along my friend. The guy
| played a small VIDEO-CLIP with sound output in a Soundblaster-
| driven pair of speakers.
|
| I had never heard any game sound but PC speakers or NES
| (Famicom). There was a popular software at the time which I
| don't recall, which was playing MOD files into the PC speaker
| and we would listen in awe how that would sound.
|
| Now imagine being hit simultaneously with full-blown digital
| sound AND VIDEO. Flabbergasted is an understatement. The
| Pentium guy kept saying something about choppy video and crappy
| quality but I couldn't notice a damn thing, seemed the most
| amazing video I ever saw and all I could think (but of course
| couldn't say it out loud) was "shut the fuck up, I can't hear
| the soundtrack".
| monocularvision wrote:
| I am so blown away by how close our stories are. Got this exact
| setup from grandparents for my 13th birthday, which was a HUGE
| surprise. I remember sitting on the sidelines of my younger
| brother's football games while I read the DOS manual.
|
| I ended up buying a Sound Blaster Pro and installing that. We
| were absolutely blown away by the sound coming from that thing,
| specifically Links 386.
|
| Oh, and I ended up working at Egghead Software for a couple
| years in the mid-90's.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| It's a funny quirk of the history of home computing how
| enthusiasts usually dislike the sound blaster for being basically
| the crappiest hardware design you could somewhat get away with
| (ie with the original sound blaster, it was impossible to play
| digital samples without continuously having buffer underruns
| resulting in crackling), while the average gamer who grew up in
| the 90s or even 2000s has very fond memories of those cards. And
| I actually count myself to the latter camp, as like probably most
| people back then, just having digital sound at all was a miracle,
| and with those tiny desk speakers back then, it would've been
| hard to tell the difference anyways.
| bitwize wrote:
| Compared to the Amiga, Atari ST, or Macintosh, the PC had the
| charming rinky-dink-ness that the ZX Spectrum had compared to
| machines like the C64, up until about 1994 or so (later for the
| Mac).
|
| It's kind of sad that no one but Apple wants to make serious
| quality custom equipment for home users anymore. The PC proved
| for everyone that "race to the bottom" is a valid business
| model.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| IIRC if you were into the music part of the demoscene you were
| also treated to lots of critiques of various cards. This was
| part of the reason I went for the PAS-16 rather than the Sound
| Blaster.
|
| The GUS was also absolutely huge in that crowd because of the
| way it handled MIDI via wavetable. I remember reading reviews
| and scrounging up cash to buy a wavetable card, actually an OEM
| AWE 32 in a nondescript cardboard box from the basement of a
| computer store in Utah. The various features for working with
| the wavetable made it a lot of fun to play with.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Crackling ? IIRC one had to use DMA to make sure the buffer was
| properly filled... I don't remember having any "clicks" in the
| MODtracker file I was playing...
| rasz wrote:
| first SB didnt support autoinit
| https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=52806 "DMA Sound
| Blaster 1.x 'seamless' playback investigation".
|
| Of course Creative screwed again with numerous bugs in SB16
| https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=50071
|
| * MPU-401 Hanging Note Bug.
|
| * MPU-401 Stuttering with high sampling rates.
|
| * Single-Cycle DMA Clicking (Non Vibra).
|
| Not to mention poor engineering practices like leaving
| floating opamps resulting in noisy cards.
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(page generated 2022-05-15 23:00 UTC)