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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
I spent my allowance on computer books about MS-DOS and various programming languages, assembler, interrupts, how computers worked, etc, etc.
I was obsessed with learning every little program that was in that dos folder, and how to write batch files and properly tune the config.sys. Then windows hit and there were ini files to explore. Plus you could hack a lot of old dos games with binary file editors.
I was just so passionate about everything. I feel sorry that all of this is just handed to my kids now. They’ll never choose to do the deep dive unless something takes over their brain.
If my friend’s dad hadn’t taken me to their old 286 and ran “type command.com” to make a bunch of gibberish appear on the screen I have no idea where I would be today. I was hooked from that moment.
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.
Indeed, I remember looking for executable files in a game’s directory to find something other than the game itself, a “config.eve” or something, and running it to get some kind of text-based menu with unfamiliar conventions.
I have a feeling I had to set the IRQ to 5 on my machine, I also remember something being 220 but maybe I’m imagining that one. I remember doing it so many times it no longer made sense.
I remember seeing a friend (or a friend’s parent) set IRQ to 7 on their computer, that was a real event for me, first time I realized the other values were legitimate options too.
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.
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.
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.
A long time ago I would help babysit my young niece and nephew. One of the things they would enjoy was a Eliza program I typed up from a basic listing. A simple program but they would really get a kick out of it and would ask for it for a long time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember seeing Future Crew's Second Reality in a pc-store showroom where someone had connected the SoundBlaster to amplifier with these big speaker. It was just released and some smart ass had managed to put hands on it from some BBS.
My mind was blown immediately and I got hooked to computer music, computer audio, graphics and multimedia in general. I knew that C64 had a dedicated audio chip, and my COM port (or maybe printer port) had something called COVOX in it, but this SB thing was beyond any previous measure cool. And the C64s were in fact quite pricey and not being sold at all where I lived.
My parents got me a present that was the SoundBlaster as a gift that I managed to get into the elite national school of math and sciences. I started digging scream tracker 3 (by the FC gang), and a school teacher in 10th grade was definitely surprised when I played a demo-tape of self-made recordings. There are many SoundBlaster stories I can tell.
Eventually few years later (in 1996/1997) our group of 2 people released 2 demos, and most of the music was composed by myself, while my mate was spitting thousands of assembly lines, and was also proud to implement a tracker of his own making for the production...
After having played as a DJ at more than 300 events electronic music is to date important part of my life and SB has a very special place in my heart. I can still remember the touch of the product.
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.
> Ethan Brodsky, couldn’t easily find anything about him today. Just another generous internet stranger who played a role in my tech career.
I got curious - the email address in the reply is "ericbrodsky" - I did find an Eric Brodsky on LinkedIn who was at Wisconsin until '95 - so it's possible Ethan is his son, and he used his dad's email address?
Some more digging, and I found this profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ethanbrodsky/ - could be him? Went to Wisconsin a few years later (so was likely in HS when he wrote the SoundBlaster stuff).
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?
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.
I guess people didn't realize that they were secretly in the demoscene ha ha!
I wonder if it was some overly excited intern developer that whipped this up in his/her spare time? Creative Labs didn't seem like the kind of company that would allow time spent to develop stuff like this but I guess thats just speculation, I was in elementary school when this was released.
I remember when my late father came home with a Sound Blaster 16 and installed it because I had been doing alright in school. I then spent a few days not doing my second grade homework but instead trying to figure out how to set up the SET BLASTER requirements for this card and figuring out how to get games to work with it. There was no internet, and I had no idea how I ever learned anything at all back then. The moment when Epic Pinball started playing music was so shocking that it is still imprinted in my head to this day!
Let me recall how I learned back then because it's an interesting contrast. Magazine subscriptions (like Byte). Books from the library. Word of mouth (friends, computer stores). Television - there were a few like Bits and Bytes and The Computer Chronicles. And just hands on. A computer club if you were lucky!
You were very lucky! All I had was trial and error and the occasional help from my dad. I never did learn to code until High School but when it came to troubleshooting and "IT" related stuff? Thats what I ended up becoming good at. That just required trial and error. Coding would have required me to figure out how to install a compiler. Later on we got TechTv but I think we had internet by then. Not really useful as I recall relying on my collection of webrings instead of search.
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.
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".
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
Definitly, during those days buying a PC always meant at least being able to pay a 3 to 5 year credit, and given the rate PCs were changing, when one would be finally done with the credit, it was slowly the time to think about a new one, because buying parts alone would no longer be enough.
Funny enough, "you need $2000 for a good PC" held from mid '90 up to the end of '00. After that you could assemble "good enough" for less and less each year.
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.
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...
Back in the 80s, my brother bought a voice synthesizer chip from Radio Shack and wired it to his Commodore 64. Unfortunately, the voice synthesizer chip would insert an l sound before all vowels so when he had it say, “Hello, Professor Falken, would you like to play a game?” it came out has “Hlello, Prloflesslor Flalklen, wlould ylou like tlo pay la glame?”
I hear that any time I encounter something that reminds me of War Games, most recently yesterday when my daughter asked me to play Tic Tac Toe with her on her kid’s menu while we waited for dinner to be served.
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!
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.
I really like listening to a game’s MIDI soundtrack with different sound cards. Each almost feel like their own musical instrument interpreting the soundscape. All of my nostalgia for Sonic 3 is different than the official YM2612 renditions.
I still remember young, in this regard surprisingly clueless me being soo excited when moving to my first PC (some 486) with a Soundblaster clone, coming from an Amiga 500.
The ad said something about 22 voices, how cool would that be (as the Amiga had 4)!
Now envision my surprise when I heard the sound of these 22 voices in some of the demos mentioned on this page when I was used to the Amiga.
Well, over time with faster CPUs, software mixing, AWE32, GUS or EWS64 etc. the problem solved itself and in the meantime I really like the FM sounds for what they are but man was I disappointed at that time.
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.)
I bought an SoundBlaster16 DSP card on the basic premise it had a DSP on it as I wanted to do some audio processing. Not sure if it actually did have a DSP IC in it as Creative never released any info on how to program it. The disappointment was made up for because the day after my card arrived the supplier sent a second one by mistake then the day following a third one. They never realised their mistake so I was able to sell the spare two so had some spare cash for more useful toys.
You mean the ASP/CSP right? :-) Because scammy Creative called 8052 microcontroller on all of their cards a DSP = Digital Sound Processors (not Digital Signal Processors!).
Card with real DSP was called ASP = Advanced Signal Processor or CSP = Creative Signal Processor. ST18932, a bad one but still a DSP. Enough performance to implement 14.4kbps modem.
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 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.
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.
A non-techie relative started writing a long paragraph about her problem, thinking the good Doctor was going to understand it like a real therapist/human, and got miffed when she couldn't type beyond 255 characters...
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.