[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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-05-15 23:00 UTC)