First post, by Cloudschatze
- Rank
- Oldbie
Behold, the obscure product of a mid-1991 tryst between Creative Technology and Tandy Corporation:
Mostly based on the Sound Blaster Pro chipset and design, the Creative-produced "Tandy Multimedia Audio Adapter" was factory-installed in a handful of MPC-variant Tandy systems, and could also be found as part of a multimedia upgrade package that included either an internal or external CD-ROM unit, and Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions.
Physical differences between this card and the regular Sound Blaster Pro offering include the use of two mini-DIN joystick ports (compatible with Tandy 1000 joysticks, but requiring the use of adapter cables), and a mini-DIN MIDI port, to which a Y-cable with full-sized MIDI input/output ports would be attached. These particular mini-DIN ports can also be found on Tandy's 1000 RLX-B system, as well as the original Sensation!, respectively.
The CD-ROM interface is of the Mitsumi variety, and (interesting for the time) provides for both 16-bit AND DMA-assisted transfers. As pertains to internal installations, the uniquely-designed (Mitsumi) CDR-1000 drive was intended to pair with this interface, and is indeed what is included in the upgrade kit that I purchased.
Concerning some of the other differences, and of particular interest, are the fact that:
- The card uses a bus-interface chip not found on any other Creative card (that I'm aware of) - the CT1346.
- The output amplifier can be bypassed/disabled by jumper, resulting in a line-level output signal. This is a feature not common to Creative cards until the SB16.
- And last, but certainly not least, a high-DMA channel is also allocated for audio, permitting native playback of 16-bit, 44.1kHz (mono) files in Windows. Presumably, this could be accomplished in DOS as well, assuming the programming routines can either be determined, or are found to be compatible with those documented for the SB16.
