Do you miss having an original SoundBlaster card? Now you can build your own! Take a look at the Snark Barker on GitHub.
'The Snark Barker is a 100% compatible clone of the famed SB 1.0 "Killer Card" sound card from 1989. It implements all the features, including the digital sound playback and recording, Ad Lib compatible synthesis, the joystick/MIDI port, and the CMS chips (which are actually Philips SAA1099 synthesizer devices).'
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Build your own SoundBlaster - Presenting the Snark Barker
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(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2022, @05:25PM (3 children)
You should follow @tubetimeus project tweets
He just finished a clone of an Apple II card for the PC
and a POST card for Microchannel
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday May 26 2022, @05:46PM (2 children)
So why hadn't you submitted them? You have given us several links, thank you, but a summary would have been better.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @01:07AM (1 child)
Because it wasn't me, you ignorant piece of shit.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday May 27 2022, @05:13AM
The post in this link and the post I replied to were from the same person.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2022, @05:28PM
http://tubetime.us/index.php/category/projects/ [tubetime.us]
https://github.com/schlae/snark-barker [github.com]
and
https://github.com/schlae/ [github.com] for all the projects
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2022, @06:34PM (1 child)
More retro-hardware stuff? Boomer central? Why do we not have a transparent accounting on which accounts have been banned? Besides Ari, that is. Why is Runsaway still posting? He advocates mass shootings of schoolchildren, for God's sake! Time for SN to stop protecting him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 26 2022, @07:09PM
As with everyone else here, being on SN is his crime, it is also his punishment.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday May 26 2022, @09:55PM (10 children)
Heh, the sound blaster 1.0 was literally a game changer.
I remember going to the local Microcenter and asking for an Adlib music card, because someone I knew had one, but they said "no, you don't want that, we have this new card called the Sound Blaster..."
Got it home and Prince of Persia not only had nice music, but also digital sound effects instead of PC-speaker sound effects (PC speaker sound effects were about the same ear-grating quality as a modern cell phone, yuck).
The Sound Blaster was successful right out of the box because it included 100% compatiblity with existing software written for the Adlib music card and CMS Game Blaster card.
The CMS Game Blaster chips (multi-tone square-wave generators) were the only part of the board that was in "stereo", so they couldn't advertise the later 1.x versions as stereo when they made the CMS chips optional.
Anyway, I've seen a few of these Snark Barkers on eBay before, as well as some of the newer Adlib clones. These are a great way to give new life to a vintage business computer.
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday May 26 2022, @11:11PM (3 children)
anyone remember when the GUS MAX was the hot shit of the day?
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday May 27 2022, @12:32AM
Sure, the Gravis UltraSound boards offered hardware sound mixing - that meant software that played MIDI style music could use sound samples that sounded like real instruments. That put it on similar footing with devices like the Roland MT-32 synthesizer.
As I understand it, technically the chip used in the Adlib was also FM digital synth but with permanent tiny digitally created samples that sounded very artificial. Like an army of kazoos.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday May 27 2022, @12:56PM
Problem with the GUS was that everything was written for the SB so 99% of the time you ended up using it in crappy SB emulation mode. Mind you the few games that had native GUS support rather than something tacked on the side of SB support were pretty nice.
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday May 27 2022, @10:49PM
Yep. Best for demos. I actually got my hands on a GUS, it’s still in a box. It’s big and purple. I need to get it out and plug it into a 5x86 I recently was given. Bit worried all the electrolytic caps are shot after not being used for over 20 years.
I had a SB16, and used that to make music with Fasttracker 2 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastTracker_2) and Impulse Tracker (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_Tracker#/media/File%3AImpulse_Tracker_screenshot.png), as well as general mixing and fudging around with music using Waveditor (or whatever it was called in Win 3.1).
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Thursday May 26 2022, @11:15PM (5 children)
I remember when they came out, and being blown away by the digital sound effects after being used to junky, bleepy PC Speaker and canned-sounding music effects previously. Game changer indeed.
But, I'd hesitate to call them great in modern terms. In addition to the onboard-analog-volume control situation, the sound quality is poor compared to modern PC audio. Wikipedia notes that [wikipedia.org] the original Sound Blaster's digital sound processor...
So not exactly CD quality digital audio. "Better than Adlib and/or CMS because of the digital audio capabilities" doesn't mean objectively a good product as we would think of it today. A random $1 modern USB audio stick from China might well have better digital audio capabilities, for example, and the quality only goes up from there in terms of modern products.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday May 27 2022, @12:44AM (3 children)
Keep in mind that the output filtering on a genuine Sound Blaster (and presumable this clone too) make the 8-bit sound sound a bit better.
That is, if you were to play an 8-bit sample on one of these 8-bit DSPs, and the exact same 8-bit sample on a 16-bit or higher DSP, the 16-bit DSP would let you hear a lot of noise and hiss.
The real kicker was lack of stereo digital sound. Lots of games wanted to take advantage of stereo to sort of give more depth.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday May 27 2022, @02:20AM (1 child)
So it made it sound like 9 bit sound? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday May 27 2022, @10:50PM
That extra bit would make a big bit of difference!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @03:56AM
That's not unusual. An 8-bit or 16-bit game console looks better on a genuine CRT than on an emulator, and poorly mastered music sounds better on crappy sound equipment. That's part of why today's music sounds so bad - it's assumed that everyone will be listening on the worst possible equipment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @07:09AM
> and being blown away
I wasn't, because the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST had been around for 5+ years already. In 1989, PeeCees were "Dad's Computer".
I remember how on the SB's arrival, all the PC-orientated Fido BBS had created (Amiga) MOD directories...
(Score: 2) by MIRV888 on Friday May 27 2022, @12:35AM
I'm something of a packrat.
Definitely took gaming audio to the next level.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @04:17AM (1 child)
Anyone with a proper retro-gaming setup probably has a real one. It's ISA, so you can only use it with old hardware (unless someone makes a retro PC clone with an ISA slot to put it in!) Is there really such a surplus of old motherboards without matching sound cards? The limiting factor on retro setups is mostly the monitors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 27 2022, @05:53AM
Last time I looked, at least one company made an ISA-to-USB adapter.
(Score: 2) by dltaylor on Friday May 27 2022, @07:25PM (1 child)
4 channels 8-bit or 2 channels of 14-bit sound. It took a long time before the SB 16 or equivalent to come out. Opening "Arctic Fox" with "Toccata an Fugue in D Minor" was damned impressive compared to anything the early SBs could do. FWIW, the Amiga had MIDI day one.
Same story with the graphics. It wasn't until SVGA that PCs caught up.
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday May 27 2022, @11:00PM
Have to agree with you there. I think this us the theme for the PC world though, PCs are a modular flexible system of hardware and software. Amigas were dedicated game machines (but could do productivity too), same for the C64/128, etc.
I remember the awe I was in whenever going to my friends places who had A500s connected to amps and big floor standing speakers. Playing Another World with that intro (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G1EGP2EyWe0). Plus others (R-Type, Cannon Fodder, Rick Dangerous, Bionic Commando, etc etc).