Dunno what to say... HOLY COW! 😀

Looks like you could sell those for some real money.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Looks like you could sell those for some real money.

Or just blackmail him into handing you the music card "or else ull tell creative he hasn't returned the killer card yet so creative's goons will hunt him down for the rest of his life" 😜

Wow, incredible get! You got the whole history of Creative Labs in one fell swoop. Looks like YOU are the one that should be buying a Lottery ticket this week! 😀

I have the worst luck with lottery tickets. I match ZERO numbers significantly more often than I match even one. Statistically, matching zero is LESS likely than matching one.

Somehow, I doubt Creative has any interest at all in it. (Especially since the person I got it from offered it to them before he offered it to me!)

I wonder whether the Killer Card actually still works. Those manuals should be scanned, they may shed some insight on the function of the big CT-1302 chip.

Great Hierophant wrote:

I wonder whether the Killer Card actually still works. Those manuals should be scanned, they may shed some insight on the function of the big CT-1302 chip.

I was thinking the same thing, but it looks somewhat oxidized on the bottom side. It's still looking awesome though! It looks almost transparent or something

Edit:I usually never do any gambling related stuff but for christmas I thought...ah what the heck, why not!
So I bought ONE ticket for €15 or so and won €5. So I thought "might aswell try again" and won nothing. Then tried again and won €75 and the last time I won nothing.
So atleast I didn't make a loss of it 😁

And after reading Freak's lottery story...NOW I understand why I never came across such an awesome looking prototype...or any prototype for that matter!

Maybe I should just start buying lottery tickets again...

Tetrium wrote:

It looks almost transparent or something

Old style bakelite (sic?) PC board.

Heh, check out all of those IC sockets <grin> 😀

Yeah, I'll have to give this guy a thorough cleaning before trying it out; I'll also check out to see if any of the capacitors can be easily replaced.

Yeah, all the socketed chips are great. If I find any of them are dead, most are probably readily replaceable from Radio Shack. (Well, what Radio Shack USED to be, anyway, I'd probably have to go online now.)

On the gambling front: I went to Las Vegas a few times in college. On one trip, a friend of mine won $5000, on a $100 budget. The casino comped him a room, and he even "won" at a change machine! (Put in a $5 bill, got $5.25 back.) He put some of it back the next day, but by the end of the trip, including the cost of gas, meals, etc, he was still ahead by over $3000.

I, on the other hand, never even got back to "break even" once I started. Yeah, I'd have short winning streaks here and there; but once the first dollar went in the machine, I never again hit the amount I had started with. Even worse, I *LOST* on a change machine. (Different casino, so I know it wasn't just the machine being flaky.) Put in $5.00, got $4.75 back. Yup, the one machine in Vegas with a GUARANTEED break-even payout, I lost on.

Only once in my entire life have I won at gambling. Driving through Nevada with a friend, we stopped at a truck stop for gas and lunch. While he was in the restroom, I put a $1.00 bill in a machine, pulled the handle, and just started walking away, knowing I was going to lose. *DINGDINGDINGDING* I had won $20. Paid for the gas and lunch. (Yeah, it was a few years ago.)

(Yes, I've had the occasional $5 or $10 winning lottery ticket, but I've put so much in, I'm at a loss at this point. Lottery tickets I consider in total, not on each ticket.)

So I finally got a machine with ISA slots out of storage. No hard drive. 🙁 I did load SBTEST2 onto a boot floppy to get diagnostic data, though.

The Killer Card has DSP version 1.03.

I'm including scans of the cards (ignore the bright green bit at the end, I used a USB-PS/2 adapter to keep the cards level,) and CMS box. Warning: These scans were done at 300 dpi, so the PNGs are big. (JPGs resampled to 100dpi, compressed.)

(Edit: Web host gone, lost pics.)

Plus the following story from the person I got them from:

Both of the sound cards were samples sent to HeadStart Computers circa 1988. HeadStart made low-end PC clones with bundled softw […]
Show full quote

Both of the sound cards were samples sent to HeadStart Computers circa 1988. HeadStart made low-end PC clones with bundled software, which was very unusual at the time. They jumped on the "Multimedia PC" bandwagon -- a Microsoft project -- and got all sorts of interesting gear, including then-exotic internal CD-ROM drives.

The "Killer Card" came with a couple of demo disks and xeroxed instructions. (The demos were very similar to the demos in the boxed Creative Organ card.) There had been computer sound cards before it, and in fact the "Killer Card" emulated the most popular, but it included a analog-digital circuit for recording voices and music, and a DAC for playing it back. This was a really dramatic innovation for a low-end PC; I remember upsetting co-workers while playing with it by playing a fire truck siren.

Well. HeadStart never released a machine with a sound card by the time it went under, but the "Killer Card" went on to become the Sound Blaster, which set the standard for PC audio. I saved the card, and lots of other odd stuff, from the "toss out" pile that accumulated as we cleaned out the office.

If it helps make connections: HeadStart was co-founded by Harry Fox, who was behind the SpectraVideo computers. These were really odd home machines that used a cp/m-like disk operating system created by Microsoft. I got a couple from Fox's warehouse manager; solid and functional compared to Atari and Commodore PCs, but the promised software line from Microsoft never materialized. I donated them to another basement computer museum in the mid-nineties.

CTT 1320
I wonder whether this means threre was no public ct 1310 at all? (or no ct 1310 at all)

And it works! Still don't have a hard drive, but I found a .MOD player and some smallish .MODs to throw on my boot floppy. This prototype "Killer Card" works perfectly!

Anonymous Freak wrote:

And it works! Still don't have a hard drive, but I found a .MOD player and some smallish .MODs to throw on my boot floppy. This prototype "Killer Card" works perfectly!

That's unreal! Man, that card sure must be worth something, especially to us geekazoids! 😀 I've always loved old PC hardware, my friends think I'm nutz.

If course, I guess that stems from back when I used to work for Milgo down in Miami... huge mainframes, drum drives, and (what the heck was it?) 14-inch floppies. Oh, and the "Zeta" series of 1200 baud modems that the government use to purchase at US$8,000 a pop <grin>!

@Anonymous Freak

Any chance you can create image files of the CM/S disks and post here?

I own both a CT1300A and CT1300B bu have no software 😜

@Amigaz

Any chance you can finally check DSP version of your CT-1320A and post here? (we are already waiting a year for it...)

...EPIC!

robertmo wrote:

@Amigaz

Any chance you can finally check DSP version of your CT-1320A and post here? (we are already waiting a year for it...)

If I'm shown a little kindness and not being called a dumbass or was it dummy head I can do it 😉

yeah, i know you can do it as that is what you are telling me like every week for a year now. But would be very kind of you to finally do it instead of telling that you can do it...

Unfortunately, I don't have a 5.25" drive handy to image the disks from. I'll see if I can get to it this weekend.