Ad Ben: Sound Commander (February 13, 2017)

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!



Here's a nickel's worth of free marketing advice: if it's 1991 and you are trying to sell a PC game it does not hurt to make sure it has the word 'Commander' in the name. The degree to which Wing Commander was a success means that an incomplete list from those years includes Air Commander, Flight Commander, Tank Commander, Air Force Commander, Robot Commander and many more. And the tie-ins didn't stop there: there were even a host of hardware peripherals that tried to ride Wing Commander's coattails. For example: today's sound card, the SOUND COMMANDER.

Developed by the Singapore-based MediaSonic, Inc. the Sound Commander premiered at COMDEX in 1991 to no particular acclaim. Like the Sound Runner, featured in our previous installment, the Sound Commander was an 8-bit 'generic' card promoted as a be-all, end-all solution that was actually an attempt to undercut the price of the quickly-establishing Creative Labs Sound Blaster. Unlike the Sound Runner, the Sound Commander at least had a chance: it included FM synthesis, meaning that it could play speech similar to the Sound Blaster (though the first models did not promise full Sound Blaster compatibility.) The Sound Commander actually lasted for several iterations, with the Sound Commander FX and the Sound Commander Gold following in 1992 (though their advertisement had no Wing Commander connection, for reasons we will see in a future installment of this series!)





Aside from the similar name, why does the Sound Commander appear in this space? Eagle-eyed viewers will note that there are two Wing Commander screenshots in the advertisement: a shot from the Hornet cockpit and one of the Tiger's Claw lounge from before Enyo 1. MediaSonic would have requested these stills from Origin (and the other developers represented) and then used them to promote the card. These advertisements (in two versions, with and without reference to Comdex) appeared in three issues of Computer Gaming World running from November 1991 through January 1992. You can find the entire issues in the Computer Gaming World Museum.

Why does it look so dark? That's because in 1991, advertisements were laid out by hand (along with anything else printed: game boxes, hint books, magazine articles) and there was no such thing as a readily compatible screen grabber. Instead, screenshots were captured with traditional film cameras that literally took a picture of the screen. In this case, the Hornet cockpit and the Tiger's Claw lounge are a publicity stills provided by Origin and then set up in the advertisement by MediaSonic or their ad agency. You may well recognize these same screenshot in other advertisements or in magazine reviews. Origin would create slides duplicates from a small selection of film negatives which they would provide to advertisers, reviewers and other interests (Joe Garrity has many of these source slides archived at the Origin Museum.)
Want a Sound Commander of your own? They are not especially sought after, but do regularly appear on eBay (a 'Sound Commander Pro' model is listed as of this writing.) Just remember, it doesn't actually do anything special in Wing Commander I... the only connection is that the game supports Ad Lib sound and the Game Commander is Ad Lib compatible.

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Original update published on February 13, 2017
 
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I think you mean a "DAC" for the speech.

AdLib, SoundBlaster had a Yamaha YM-OPL chip which was used to produce music... via FM synthesis. SoundBlaster basically had the OPL chip wired the same way as the AdLib, giving it full AdLib compatibility simply because it was the same circuit. I'm guessing it was a pretty obvious circuit since lots of stuff had AdLib capability.
SoundBlaster added a simple 8-bit DAC so it could play arbitrary sounds (including digitized speech) thus letting you do sound effects and other things

There are many ways to wire a DAC to a PC, including ways if you want to use DMA so you can pass it memory buffers without involving the CPU to write a new value every sample. Thus making it much harder to get SoundBlaster compatibility.
 
Not exactly Sound Commander related... but in many ways better. Much better!

I remember all of these clone cards coming out. While Ad-Lib and Roland had been around for awhile (The Ad-Lib and Roland MT-32 both came out in '87 but were mainly for musician and studio use), consumer sound cards really exploded around 1989-1990. Wing Commander helped, that's for sure. As a 10 year old I desperately wanted one of these things known as a "sound card". Sierra used to advertise the Ad-Lib and MT-32 in their magazines that came with their games like Space Quest and Kings Quest. I finally got my wish in 1991/1992 when I got a card called the ATI Stereo F/X. It was basically an 8 bit Soundblaster clone, but a very capable one. Interrups and address were configured via software and it came with (in it's day) a comprehensive software suite *and* speakers. AND it came bundled with something that I had never heard of... a full boxed Wing Commander II *with* the Speech Pack. On 5 1/4"!. Having a 286 at the time it was about a year before I could use the speech pack. Wow! I've tried to find information on this card like product shots and such (note- not the VGA combo card, just the stereo FX) but aside from a few shots of the actual card and driver disk on VOGONs, there's no info. I credit this card with both my longstanding love and support for ATI as well as introducing me to Wing Commander!
 
During the early 90s, there were plenty of sound cards, dozens or more of them all vying for marketshare. Most of them died out because they just were too small to get much support and sound blasters became the de-facto standard. So not being able to find specifics on your card isn't all too unusual - there may have been hundreds of different cards in the end that wasn't AdLib or SoundBlaster.

Heck, I had one of the first sound cards they had for laptops - we had a 486 with a SoundBlaster Pro (and CD-ROM drive) and a 286 (which I later outfitted with said SBPro because I got an ... AWE32 for it). Alas, said 486 was in use by my parents, so they took pity on me and got me a 486 laptop. The seller threw in this parallel port sound dongle (not a Disney Sound Source or Covox) - it was called a Port*able Sound Plus, an apparently 16-bit device. It had ... decent sound blaster compatibility - enough that most things actually worked. The only thing that didn't was Doom, and the worst performance was during one of the demos where it took too much CPU.
 
When Wing Commander came out, our family PC was a PS/2 Model 80. It was a blazing fast (for 1990) 386/16 at the time... but getting a sound card was nearly impossible because IBM had come up with this proprietary microchannel architecture to prevent people from selling unlicensed expansion cards. So I started off with PC speaker (maybe that's why all sound is still amazing to me?)
 
Yeah, The PS/2 used Micro Channel Architecture (MCA). It was good - very advanced for the time (while everyone was using 8 or 16 bit ISA, MCA had 32 bits), but as everyone hated, highly proprietary and to develop for MCA required paying $$$ to IBM. Of course, no one made any cards - why pay IBM $$$ for a tiny marketshare computer, when you can make a bog standard ISA card (which is also much cheaper since it interfaces with standard off the shelf logic) which works on every other computer out there.

I'm just starting to acquire some real sound gear - got an SC55mk2 and an SC88Pro on the way, hunting for an MT-32. It's embarrassing how bad a real Soundblaster was for music, yet I still recall going "this sound is awesome!!!" back in the day. Going from Soundblaster "music" to real MIDI gear is like going from PC speaker sound to a Soundblaster.
 
FM cards could actually produce more then descent sound if you composed a score just for them. The best examples I can think of are Taito's RamboIII and the original Golden Axe. Anything beats the PC squeeker though.
 
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