schlang wrote:compared to the PAS, the quality from all SB cards is crap. noises, hisses, interference, cracking, popping, ..........
I think this is debatable and highly dependent on which card you have.
While I agree that Creatives 8 bit and most SB16 cards are quite noisy, other cards such as the Pro 2.0 or AWE64 range are quite good. There are also certain models of SB 16 which are much better. It really depends on the model, as there are differences between cards (what chips they have used).
And again, you have a MT-32 and Sound Canvas, so for most games you can use these of music in combination with an AWE64 for speech.
Bottom line, I see the PAS16 is one of many Sound Blaster clone cards. While games do support it natively, they always also support Sound Blaster and other standards.
The PAS16 isn't compatible to Sound Blaster Pro however, only Sound Blaster MONO, so it's one of the less capable clone cards, especially considering that it doesn't have a wavetable connector...
Sol_HSA wrote:Mau1wurf1977 wrote:Privateer and Strike Commander are very very modern games and likely support both cards.
I had to re-check, but yes, your post was made in 2011. 🤣
Hahah, true my comment could easily be taken out of context 😵
I never understood what would be the reason to buy a PAS/PAS16 over SB. LAPC1 had a different approach, GUS was a demoscene sweetheart, but PAS was "just" an incompatible SB clone. Or was I mistaken?
I think we need to look at the timeline...
Cloudschatze wrote:
Pro AudioSpectrum - Released April, 1991
Sound Blaster Pro - Released August, 1991
Creative played catch-up with Media Vision for a number of years, and basically threw the SBPro out the door to compete with the PAS (which, unsurprisingly, resulted in buggy hardware and a ridiculous number of revisions).
There was a thread here recently, and apparently there are at least 4! revisions of the Sound Blaster Pro 1.0. Now that's quite a feat, considering that card was quickly replaced by the Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 🤣.
According to that article I linked earlier, the PAS was priced at a premium compared to the Sound Blaster Pro. This was likely an important factor. Back in those days, who cared about a "premium experience". All these cards sounded amazing and the average consumer would have likely purchased the cheaper product.
Creative was/is after all a marketing company at hearth, an area most of its competitors didn't do very well.
On wikipedia there is a note about a financial scandal, and that likely sealed the fate of the PAS cards.
And regarding GUS *prepares for abuse from GUS lovers 🤣*, it was fantastic if you were into tracker music, epic pinball games and other games using the GUS in that (tracker) way.
Apart from that it tried to be a jack of all trades (wavetable and Sound Blaster compatible), but master of none (heaps better wavetable options were available and Sound Blaster compatibility was average) and took over a ton of resources.
Still, it was unique enough and left its mark. The current prices for GUS products are a testament of this.