I bet I have the original SB16 CD lying somewhere, provided it hasn't got dropped to garbage, that is. I will check later, when I arrive home. I don't remember to have seen the demo you mentioned, but the Talking Parrot rings a bell in my head.

With regard to the parrot, this page indicates the following:

"Mindmaker, Inc. has been known as a leading developer of intelligent personal assistants, natural language processing and other artificial intelligence technology. Not many gamers had heard of them until the debut of the Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! cards. Bundled along with the Live! and Live! Value soundcards was an interesting program called Prody Parrot. The animated computer parrot interacted with the user and has some voice recognition capabilities. The same technology used to help Prody understand your commands is used for the Game Commander."

I bet I have the original SB16 CD lying somewhere, provided it hasn't got dropped to garbage, that is. I will check later, when I arrive home. I don't remember to have seen the demo you mentioned, but the Talking Parrot rings a bell in my head.

that probably wouldn't help, as to the best of my knowledge, the demo came with the original 8 bit Sound Blaster card. I remember way back when my father had upgraded the family computer with a Sound Blaster card, 2X CD-ROM drive and Gravis Gamepad, remember being amazed at the Sound Blaster demo. Thanks for trying though, I imagine this demo will be hard to find, maybe not even a separte EXE but part of the setup utility, it was so long ago I forget.

I know I got those demos with my SB 2.0, but I think the floppies might still be at my parents' place on the other end of the state 🙁

MasterRyu wrote:

that probably wouldn't help, as to the best of my knowledge, the demo came with the original 8 bit Sound Blaster card. I remember way back when my father had upgraded the family computer with a Sound Blaster card, 2X CD-ROM drive and Gravis Gamepad, remember being amazed at the Sound Blaster demo. Thanks for trying though, I imagine this demo will be hard to find, maybe not even a separte EXE but part of the setup utility, it was so long ago I forget.

Either way, I looked for the CD and couldn't find it... Sorry.

Well. Today's your Lucky Day!

I still happen to have that soundblaster demo. That I kept since having the Soundblaster Pro Card in my parent's old 386 (which by the way still runs beautifully.)

I'm not sure if it runs correctly in DOSBox 0.63 but in the current CVS it runs beautifully. Although, it seems shorter than I remember... 🤣 must be the cycles I dunno.

Run the mmdemo.bat for it to load correctly 😉.

Note: the only non-original file is the SBFMDRV.COM which i got from this site for i somehow forgot to copy it over. *shrugs*

And on that same site some various SB things 😀.

Oh and btw here's an interesting weblog entry by a person who wrote some of the midi files that came with the SB stuff.

Greets
~Paladinate~

Also as a bonus I was able to find a place that had zipped up the Talking Parrot and Dr. Sbaitso Demos.

Unfortunately they don't seem to work properly under DOSBox.
Anybody got any ideas?

NOTE: DR. SBAITSO will run under the DOS Command Prompt in Windows XP (I just tried it with my SB Audigy Card) 😜

thanks man, I really appreciate this. Maybe I can wrangle the programs to work somehow, who knows, at least I will have them for future use. I remember playing around with Dr. Sbaitso back in the day.

--EDIT--
The demo and Dr. Sbaitso work fine under DOSBox 0.63 - all you have to do is change the sound card type to SBPRO2 in the configuration file (at least for the demo, as it is the SB Pro 2 specific demo, I don't know if that is required for Sbaitso, though I would think it should work fine with SB1 setting as it came with original Sound Blaster)...however, the Parrot program exhibits odd behavior, as running it only produces a group of parallel horizontal lines connected to numbers, and it also freezes DOSBox in the process.

Well it sorta works under the current DOSBox CVS (Dr. SBAITSO) but it crashes DOSBox as soon as I type in my name. Not sure why.

that is odd...works fine on 0.63 here, with Pro and SB16 setting (I'm sure it works fine with sound set as SB too) I do know that if you don't run SBTALK.BAT to initialize the voice driver before SBAITSO2.EXE you won't get any sound (I'm sure you did), but I was able to type my name and it worked correctly (tho there was some minor volume fluctuation, don't ask me why), conversation went on, did not crash. I am running at 9000 cycles, I don't know if that has any bearing, tho the SB Pro demo and Sbaitso2 worked fine under my previous 15000 cycle setting.

Could be a bug in the CVS since it works fine in DOSBox 0.63 (as I just tested with).

The problem is having EMS=False causing DOSBox to either hang or crash.

does this apply to 0.63 as well or is it cvs specific ?

Sorry for digging up this old thread, but attached are a few more old CLI goodies that shipped with the SB/SBPro/SB16 😀

* Blaster Master v6.2
* Sound Blaster 16 MMPlay (MMDemo)
* Sound Blaster Pro (CMS) Intelligent Organ v1.04
* Tetra Compositor Non-Interactive Demo
* Creative Labs VOC Edit 2 (VEdit) v2.15

The "Sound Blaster 16 MMPlay (MMDemo)" is the demo that shipped with the Sound Blaster 16 cards, although I think that the older one (posted above) is neater; but... I like the tune in this one better 😀

One thing: I had to add the old SB1 CT-VOICE.DRV, as I couldn't seem to get the demo to run under DOSBox with the SB16 version of the driver.

As a heads-up to anyone watching this thread, progress has at last been made on the Talking Parrot program by an awesome Dosboxer by the name of ripsaw8080. Go here for further info:

Re: "Talking Parrot" program - help?

BTW, for anyone interested:

The ZIP of the Creative Talking Parrot attached previously in this thread is missing a few files. The ZIP attached to this message contains them, and are the CGA text mode (ANSI graphics) files for the program that *also* shipped with it.

Unzip to your hard drive where you have the CTP installed, and start the program like this:

PARROT.EXE /T

😀

rfnagel wrote:

Sorry for digging up this old thread, but attached are a few more old CLI goodies that shipped with the SB/SBPro/SB16 😀

---snip---

* Tetra Compositor Non-Interactive Demo

Again, sorry for digging up this old thread <grin>.

I swear, I'm damned near POSITIVE that I've ran the ancient Tetra Compositor non-interactive demo under DOSBOX, but I can't for the life of me currently get it running (DOSBox v0.74).

The program locks up DOSBox hard as a rock (requiring an "end-task" in the Windows Task Manager to shut it down), and I've tried every combination of DOSBox sound card types, CPU types, cycles, and such that I could think of... still no dice 🙁

Does anyone have any idea what needs to be in the "DOSBox.conf" file to get this thing to run? Like I said, I'm almost SURE that I've had this running under DOSBox several times in the past.

The Tetra Compositor demo has an issue with DMA wrapping that causes an error exit in DOSBox 0.74. There is no error exit if you use older versions of DOSBox or SVN, but then you'll get gaps in the sound from the wrapping. Loadfix seems to prevent the issue (e.g. the command "loadfix tdemo") in any version, and SVN has the ems=emm386 setting that also appears to be effective.

ripsaw8080 wrote:

The Tetra Compositor demo has an issue with DMA wrapping that causes an error exit in DOSBox 0.74. There is no error exit if you use older versions of DOSBox or SVN, but then you'll get gaps in the sound from the wrapping. Loadfix seems to prevent the issue (e.g. the command "loadfix tdemo") in any version, and SVN has the ems=emm386 setting that also appears to be effective.

Many thanks for the info and fix, ripsaw8080! 😀

Yeah, now that I think about it, it was under the older versions of DOSBox that I ran the TC demo under... but "loadifx" works fine under the current version 😀

Thanks again! 😀