Remembering Creative's Wing Commander Legacy (January 7, 2023)

Bandit LOAF

Long Live the Confederation!
Some sad news, RIP. "Sim Wong Hoo, the founder, chairman and CEO of Creative Technology, died on Jan 4." Creative's technology is massively important to the history of the PC... and their output in the 1990s was incredible! Wing Commander and Creative had a long and fruitful relationship and I thought it might be good to have a discussion about it.



The 1989 DOS port of Chris Roberts' Times of Lore was the first Origin game to include Sound Blaster support. The two companies' first official partnership was a small one: in 1990, Creative began including a Wing Commander I promo shot on the original Sound Blaster packaging.





But in 1991, Wing Commander spoke! WC2's Summer CES captured the world's attention by using a newly-released Sound Blaster Pro to present a cutscene where the evil Kilrathi actually spoke (hastily voiced by game developers recording themselves)!




That September, the game included a fully voiced intro for Sound Blaster users and an optional 'speech pack'. It wasn't the first time a PC spoke but it quickly became THE way for enthusiasts to show off their hardware. Sound Blaster Pro's flew off the shelves that Christmas.





Creative would later credit WC2 as part of the reason for their product becoming an industry standard overnight. Origin would go on to release five speech accessory packs for Sound Blaster users, stopping only with the advent of original CD-ROM development.





But Creative picked up the ball in 1993, including Wing Commander games on two different OEM CD releases included in a dozen odd configurations of 'multimedia kits', all-in-one releases that upgraded a PC with a sound card, CD-ROM, speakers, microphone and more.





These kits made multimedia affordable and introduced a LOT of people to both interactive entertainment and, thanks to the game compilations, several of Origin's worlds. Wing Commander 2 once held a record for most OEM copies of a CD-ROM in circulation!





In 1997, Creative went even further by helping to fund the development of a DVD release of Wing Commander IV for their early Encore DVD kits (which required a special MPEG card!). It's because of this work that WC4's lavish videos are available in high quality today! For my part, I spent a summer in high school at a sleepaway camp for the blind for to afford the kit, the biggest purchase in my whole life to date. It was technically a volunteer job but you had a stipend for meals and entertainment… so I just didn't eat or have any fun!





Creative went on to commission a DVD release of Wing Commander Prophecy from the same developer, Daylight. The release was finished but sadly never published. Luckily, copies leaked many years later and so the Creative Labs/Origin relationship left us with one final gift!





Oh yeah! A minor one but for the sake of folks configuring old machines: LiveWare 2 for the Sound Blaster Live PCI card included a custom profile for Wing Commander Prophecy!




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Original update published on January 7, 2023
 
But Creative picked up the ball in 1993, including Wing Commander games on two different OEM CD releases included in a dozen odd configurations of 'multimedia kits', all-in-one releases that upgraded a PC with a sound card, CD-ROM, speakers, microphone and more.





These kits made multimedia affordable and introduced a LOT of people to both interactive entertainment and, thanks to the game compilations, several of Origin's worlds. Wing Commander 2 once held a record for most OEM copies of a CD-ROM in circulation!


I think it was precisely this particular kit that my Dad got for his 386 PC all those years ago. All of those titles on the box look familiar to me, and the software compilation for those two CDs look very familiar to me too. My version of the left one had gold lettering on a dark blue background, but the software titles on it were the same.

If it wasn't for this Creative kit, it's possible I may never have discovered the joy of WC2 and all the other WC titles I came to know thereafter.
 
Wow. I remember the first PC I had was an 8088 clone back in the 80s, which was replaced with a 286 system in 1990 or so. Somehow around 92 or so I managed to convince my parents to invest in something a bit newer and we had a fully built out 486. My dad decided to splurge and add in not just a sound card (an authentic SB Pro), but splurge and get it with a CD-ROM (sure, 1x at the time), which was from a Creative kit. He also got a 14.4kbps modem along with it.

Somewhere along the line someone was selling a used original Sound Blaster which I installed in to the 286 so it at least wouldn't be a dog to use.

Thing is, that 486 is still with me, and the install discs and CDs that came with it are somewhere as well. A little later I bought an AWE32 which upgraded the 486 until I got a Pentium PC for myself (then I grabbed that card back, and the original SB Pro went back into the 486)..

Sadly, in a fit of cleaning house, the 286 and Pentium PC got recycled. Though, I did reclaim back the AWe32. The 486 was still in use by my parents so it never even got close to being trashed.
 
But Creative picked up the ball in 1993, including Wing Commander games on two different OEM CD releases included in a dozen odd configurations of 'multimedia kits', all-in-one releases that upgraded a PC with a sound card, CD-ROM, speakers, microphone and more.


I think it was precisely this particular kit that my Dad got for his 386 PC all those years ago. All of those titles on the box look familiar to me, and the software compilation for those two CDs look very familiar to me too. My version of the left one had gold lettering on a dark blue background, but the software titles on it were the same.

I have a yellow CD with the exact same titles as the blue one above. Also, some intellectual property lawyer took the time to add ™️ and ® to all the titles.

Creative Labs Compilation CD yellow.jpg


Some DOS games required that you have an environment variable called "BLASTER" defined in order to know the which DMA and Interrupt to use. Other games made you select them during setup, and some seemed to work them out on their own.

In memory of Sim Wong Hoo and his influence on my life, here is the BLASTER environment variable from my parents' 486-33, after they upgraded it to add a Sound Blaster 1.5. I last needed to know this in 1996 when they got a Pentium-133. However, my determination to get any game to run, even if it meant creating a boot disk for that particular game with its own CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, meant I remember these values to this day.

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T3
 
I remember the same: Port 220, IRQ 5 (not 7), DMA1. I don't remember the T, though.
Yes, the most common variation was that some games defaulted to Interrupt Request 7, I assume because some cards shipped with the jumpers set that way. If configured wrong, a game would normally play its first sound effect, then freeze. If I understand Interrupts correctly, the card would send a signal when it finished playing a sound, so if the game was waiting for the wrong Interrupt, it was never going to arrive.

The "T" is for "Type," an integer representation of the version number. No sensible installer ever asked for your "T" number. If they needed to know, they asked if you had a Roland / Ad Lib / Sound Blaster / Sound Blaster Pro / Sound Blaster 16 / Gravis UltraSound.

According to this page:
T1 is an original SoundBlaster, T2 is an SoundBlaster 1.5, T3 is an SoundBlaster 2, T4 is an SB Pro, T5 is an SB Pro with an FM Synthesis chip, and T6 is an SoundBlaster 16 or later.
I'm very sure that the software provided with the card told me to use "T3," so I must have been wrong all these years about having a Sound Blaster 1.5, we must have had a Sound Blaster 2.
 
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