VOGONS


Gameblaster Origin

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First post, by AppleSauce

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So I was watching RMCs this week in retro episode 116 and they brought up the Retrograde retro pc mag which you can get for free.

https://custompc.raspberrypi.com/books/retrograde

I did some reading and came across some interesting stuff.

It seems the author managed to get an interview with Sim Wong Hoo and tried to ask him some interesting questions.
In the interview Sim mentioned the CubicCT PC , which was apparently a clone PC Creative Technologies made.

He says that it was cancelled after creative realized making pc clones would be too daunting for the small company ,
however even though they gave up on the market , he mentions taking the audio portion and making a sound card from it.

The attachment gamb.png is no longer available

This would presumably be the Gameblaster / Creative Music System , and I always wondered why on earth creative made a card with
PSG chips when everything was clearly heading towards Yamaha FM , so maybe this was why , if it was indeed a mothballed project and creative being the
opportunist faced company it was , then that would check out , unless I'm reading this all wrong.

Can anyone confirm that the CubicCT PC shares the same Phillips SA1099 chips in it?

Reply 1 of 1, by Cloudschatze

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AppleSauce wrote on 2023-03-18, 19:18:

Can anyone confirm that the CubicCT PC shares the same Phillips SA1099 chips in it?

The Singaporean release of the Creative Music System makes several specific references to the "Audio I/O Card" of the Cubic CT, and even includes a version of the CMS driver routine (AD-CMS.COM -> CMSDRV.COM) specifically for use with that.

Here is one of the more-interesting CMS manual excerpts, verbatim:

"Cubic CT Audio I/O card

- there are 4 connectors on the Audio I/O card
- the top most earphone socket is for plugging the a microphone, you will not need this for playing muisc.
- the next lower socket is for connecting to a stereo head phone. You can also connect it to those walkman external speakers.
- the lowest two connectors are for connecting to speakers directly, you can also connect them to the "line-inputs" of your Hi-Fi sets."