Just lost the bidding for a Guillemot Home Studio 64:
http://www.allegro.pl/item417086800_profesjon … studio_pro.html
Please, tell me it wasn't worth the money... 😢
Know what? This is a lesser known sound card, being over-shadowed by the ever-over-hyped-like-it-or-don't-but-have-to-join-it Creative Labs' cards.
If you ask me, it's a very good card. I don't have a personal experience with it, but heard from others it is so.
Sigh....too many potential good cards have been suppressed by the Creative monsters. If only game companies have made efforts to support other proprietary sound technology, we would have been exposed to a wider selection of sound cards.
Next time you see it, don't let it slip away! 😀
Oh, and do let me know if it's being auctioned somewhere. 😁
This card was late to market, overpowered and extremely overpriced for what it offered. The ISA bus hosting didn't help it much either as it dragged down the '50 mips' DSP (lol I guess mv, cpy counts as instructions in that spec) to almost useless levels with wait states aplenty. Don't get me wrong though, Guillemot were a good manufacturer/oemer. There were many great Guillemot/Hercules soundcards but it really wasn't until they migrated to PCI that they became truly useful.
wrote:Sigh....too many potential good cards have been suppressed by the Creative monsters. If only game companies have made efforts to support other proprietary sound technology, we would have been exposed to a wider selection of sound cards.
Yes, it was nice, here: http://web.archive.org/web/19990423052705/www … ound/ss01d.html they mention it would even somehow accelerate DirectSound3D (which other cards based on the Dream SAM9407 coulndn't).
wrote:The ISA bus hosting didn't help it much either as it dragged down the '50 mips' DSP
But there were other cards based on the SAM9407 on ISA (Terratec AudioSystem EWS64 L), so it seems to me, ISA wasn't that bad.
All in all, this is a nice card because of the nice synthesizer (the ROM samples for the Dream DSP sound quite nice, some are even Roland certified), the ESS1686 which is good at DOS compatibility and a WaveBlaster header (the EWS64 had a Crystal CS4236). And the DirectSound3D acceleration would even extend its use for the early Windows games. Guess I have to wait for another offer...
