IRQ 5, I/O 220, DMA 01 🤘🏻

I was poor, so mine was typically running the "or SoundBlaster compatible" card.

https://lemmy.world/comment/10562073

Not the same thing, but I still have my old Voodoo 2 3D-accelerator card (not the same thing as a video card back then).

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.

Grandpa said nothing wrong.

It was all fun and games until your thrustmaster and your soundblaster and your modem hit an IRQ conflict.

Plug-and-play was a godsend for gamers.

Wait, he didn’t even get to the part where you had to configure it!!

"The planet Arrakis, known as Dune"

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 :)

At the same time, the Commodore Amiga had built-in stereo 44.1kHz 16-bit sound...

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6

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

Miss that era and wish that there were more options for PCI “premium” sound cards. All of the fancy DACs and audio interfaces are seemingly USB.

Fuck Creative. Letigious patent troll is the whole reason why 3D audio in games was stuck in the dark ages technologically for the longest time.

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)

And then three things happened at once

1. Creative de-facto monopolized the industry often by unethical means (suing Aureal into bankruptcy, etc.), not letting much room for competitors, which in turn lead to diminishing quality on the part of Creative.
2. Microsoft didn't put hardware acceleration support into XAudio, which superseeded DirectSound.
3. Game publishers realized the vast majority of gamers didn't care about sound quality, so they could spent those resources on making the games look a little bit more realistic.

Ah, the days of needing a 3D GPU and a 2D GPU...

At least it was a real name. Nowadays it seems like every new company's name is just a random jumble of letters solely because that .com was available.

Not only that but they also had the serial input for joysticks.

So if you played some Wing Commander with a game pad or stick you probably had this card.

The motherboard had nothing but the case usually had a speaker just to make a "beep" sound. I had to play Wolfenstein with that shit because my dad didn't have a sound blaster until he also got a CD-ROM drive to play Doom since he could only find a copy on CD and not floppy disk.

And even now, a SoundBlaster32 is better than the in-built audio stuff motherboards do have. Though it's not worth getting one just for games.

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.

what was really cool were the few games that would give realistic* music and speech from the internal motherboard speaker. No daughterboards or external speakers required. This was 386 era, I think.

* realistic as much as could be from that tiny internal speaker and 8 bits of data.

I miss my SoundBlaster Live! card. Excellent sound quality. Last used with the last computer I built, in the late-mid-2000s. That was the second computer I had that had on-board audio, and I just didn't bother with on-board audio because I just straight up assumed it was going to be shit. Unfortunately it stopped working at some point, along with the GPU (I suspect a static electricity fuck-up on my part, or something) which didn't matter all that much because I was mostly using the system as a server at that point.

(I'm going to build a new NAS server from ground up later this year, and I'm contemplating getting an external DAC for it for use with musicpd. Wonder if there's still SoundBlaster branded DACs, or are they gone? ...Oh they're still around!? Good.)