Awesome!

Thanks 😎

Heh. Pre 3D accelerator era. Brings a lot of memories. 😀

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

Heh. Pre 3D accelerator era. Brings a lot of memories. 😀

Don't miss the column on the Matrox Impression and its 3D acceleration capabilities! 😎

hot damn im getting a pentium 90 right now

"Sound Blaster Pro is all you need" ROFL!!! I didn't think so back then

"IF you add more than 16 MB of RAM. you might run into some potential addressing problems." I've had 64mb by the end of 1994 and things were stable 😖

"1 Gigabyte! He would never run out of disk space again!" I remember filled up my 1.2gb in March 1996 hehe

I'm not sure how many DOS games use 16-bit audio or exceed 22 kHz sampling rate but the number is probably rather low. So SBPRO would do the trick and it has basically zero compatibility problems. I used one alongside a Ensoniq Soundscape for years. When the game had native support, the Ensoniq was always much superior however. 16-bit 48kHz and nice signal quality, especially compared to a horrible ISA Creative product.

I went from a 210 MB HDD to a 1.2 GB glorious Quantum Fireball screamer sometime in '95 I think. Nothin quite like sextupling (hehe) your storage, eh.

swaaye wrote:

I'm not sure how many DOS games use 16-bit audio or exceed 22 kHz sampling rate but the number is probably rather low.

Well you wouldn't want to use a SBPro on a huge stereo system. The 8-bit noise is obvious.

Most Miles Sound System games limited the sampling rate to 11khz if a 8-bit sound card driver is chosen. Most of them often contain 22khz audio (Jagged Alliance is a nice example). The Sound Blaster Pro wouldn't sound too hot in those games.

Other notable 16-bit sound games are Shattered Steel, Wing Commander III (Which was out in 1994) and Descent II.

Yeah you are quite right that there certainly are games that use a 16-bit card.

Off the top of my head, I remember the Crusader games benefiting immensely. The MOD music sounds much better. STTNG AFU also sounds a lot better. It actually also ran noticeably faster when I used the Soundscape vs. the SBPro, for whatever reason. The card doesn't use TSRs and has that 68EC000 CPU onboard so maybe it really does have lower CPU usage than other cards.

Oh those were definitely the days when things were improving very noticeably, huh? I mean the SBPro not only has its bit depth and sampling rate limitations, but the thing has a craptastic onboard amp that must just destroy the already poor signal. No line-level output at all. Gotta drive those horrible pack-in "multimedia" unpowered speakers after all, 🤣. So if you went out and bought a decent 16-bit card, you got a big clean up of noise if it had decent analog circuitry and then on top of that you got much better audio reproduction. It was night and day most of the time.

But you can't fault SBPro's compatibility. Creative may be an evil, cheapass company, but they cornered the market. It actually was cool too that it didn't need any drivers at all. Configure those jumpers, jam it in the slot, and set up your game. You didn't even need the BLASTER var.

I've tacked on the Control Devices portion of the UGM special event.

Reading the old article makes me wonder: what if Win95 never existed? What difference it would make to gaming? Will VESA, 3dfx, and WaveTable be 'de facto' standard even until today?

Win95 almost wasn't that great for gaming. If it hadn't been for the guys who came up with DirectX and jammed it down the non-gamer MS execs' throats, it wouldn't have been all that much better than Win 3.x.

It's an interesting angle for sure. I think that without Windows 9x and the DirectX monopoly, we would've seen more and more middleware driver libraries like Miles and HMI.

What we needed more probably was a jump to a NT-like OS sooner rather than later. Late DOS games barely ran in DOS really at all, relying on the extenders to bypass all sorts of retro junk that held everything back. 9x was just another on-top-of-DOS OS, even if it was a ton better than 3.1.

Wavetable synthesis (actually sample-based synth) only lasted until PCs could play back streaming digital audio. I don't think it's much of a secret that the composers behind game soundtracks were not big on MIDI, especially the fact that every card sounds different. They actually had to compose pieces separately for each music tech (i.e. PC speaker, OPL2, OPL3, GMIDI, MT32, etc). MIDI's days were over once PCs could handle dynamic streaming music content like the later IMUSE generation in X-Wing Alliance. (I greatly dislike static CD audio, btw)

swaaye wrote:

Win95 almost wasn't that great for gaming. If it hadn't been for the guys who came up with DirectX and jammed it down the non-gamer MS execs' throats, it wouldn't have been all that much better than Win 3.x.

Nonetheless, eventually games were all tuned for Windows 9x (and later, XP), but take a look at the steep hardware requirements --compared to DOS and consoles. Even the first X-Box uses 733 MHz Pentium III processor.

swaaye wrote:

It's an interesting angle for sure. I think we would've seen more and more middleware driver libraries like Miles and HMI.

...and DOS extenders, of course. Do you think DOS4GW would keep sitting on the throne, or would there be something better?

And since we're talking in the context of "alternate history" where Win9x never came up, don't you think MS will try to make their own DOS extender to gain dominance in gaming market? And would it be successful?

Nonetheless, without Win9x, do you think MS would ever gain dominance in the gaming demography? Would more and more people switched to PC-DOS or DR-DOS while using QEMM and Stacker, instead of using MS-DOS and EMM386? Without Win9x, would Creative Labs be able to keep their throne in the gaming world? And how about 3dfx? Without Win9x and Direct3D, everyone would have to use DOS-based APIs, and since 3dfx was the only accelerator at that time..... (the rest being decelerator. Alright, Rendition Verite was nice, but sucky Mode X ruined everything)

swaaye wrote:

Wavetable synthesis (actually sample-based synth) only lasted until PCs could play back streaming digital audio. I don't really mean CD Audio (yuck), but content like the later IMUSE generation in X-Wing Alliance.

I think it depends on how well DOS extenders can enable games to run demanding tasks like streaming digital audio. Sure, CD Audio was already ubiquitious in late DOS games like Archimedean Dynasty and WarCraft II, but dynamic music is another thing.

Or maybe take a look at the good side: maybe people would eventually complain about the static music provided by Redbook Audio, and people would eventually back to MIDI for that purpose. And considering the phletora of WaveTable upgrades during the end of DOS era, maybe MIDI music and hardware would keep evolving instead of dying off.

By the way, since we're talking about completely different thing here, wouldn't it be appropriate if this thread got splitted?