So I have a hankering to put together a system with a Media Vision PAS 8-bit and Thunderboard as I already have both cards.
According to Moby Games there was support from titles from 1990 all the way to 1998 with a few compilations being released even later that are listed as supporting the PAS.
https://www.mobygames.com/attribute/sheet/att … et,0/p,2/so,1a/
Is this at all correct?
Define 'correct'. If you mean 'are all the 630 MobyGames records correctly depict PAS support', then I don't know.
What I do know though, is that Audio Interfrace Library and its heir Miles Sound System both support 8-bit PAS, and while AIL appeared circa 1991, the DOS version of MSS was maintaned until 2010 (DOS was only dropped in version 8.0 of MSS), so there's no doubt that a wide range of DOS games throughout all the DOS epoch would support PAS.
On the other hand, PAS support is nowhere as omnipresent as SB is. HMI SOS, which is I think second most popular middleware sound library, doesn't support 8-bit PAS (only the 16-bit one), and overall lots of games don't know nothing but SB support.
Hardware comparisons and game system requirements: https://technical.city
Does seem to be a rather big list doesn't it.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of those games are relying on SB compatibility rather then outright support.
chinny22 wrote on 2020-04-21, 10:43:I wouldn't be surprised if some of those games are relying on SB compatibility rather then outright support.
8-bit PAS has no SB compatibility. Hence the Thunderboard in the configuration mentioned by OP.
Later 16-bit versions of PAS incorporated a Thunderboard chip, so that they supported SB.
Hardware comparisons and game system requirements: https://technical.city
Yeah.. I was wondering about it being through AIL or MSS for a lot of those.
Guess I will just have to test this out myself which means the system configuration will probably change from the initial system I put together.
Several Microprose titles support the PAS natively. Top of my head, F-15 Strike Eagle, Fleet Defender, Rex Nebular, Return of the Phantom or Dragonsphere.
The original PAS got pretty decent support considering how rare it was. I have been collecting PC parts for almost 25 years, and I have never seen one in real life.
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Anonymous Coward wrote on 2020-04-22, 02:46:The original PAS got pretty decent support considering how rare it was. I have been collecting PC parts for almost 25 years, and I have never seen one in real life.
Same here. Saw a GameBlaster and a Rainbow Arts AdLib clone once, but no original PAS.
Gratefuly, I "grew up" with a PAS16, so I never faced the trouble (configuration etc) of real Sound Blasters that were current then.
For a while, things seemed so simple (the PAS16 just worked). As if FM (OPL3) and the PAS16 DAC was just an ordinary, common standard.
At the time, I had little known that the Sound Blaster was not an outdated standard yet.
Oh well, I wished MediaVision lasted a bit longer. Maybe then we wouldn't have seen funny things like CQM and the Vibra series. 😉
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