Sounding Off About Obscure Sound Cards (July 26, 2014)

[ChrisReid]

LOAF was catching up on some early '90s issues of CGW this morning and came across several sound card advertisements that exemplify the times. It's been many years since people have had to spend much thought on the particular sound card for their new PC, but back in 1992, the market was on fire. Over just a couple short years, the industry converted from simple beeps & boops to dynamic music and digitized speech. Wing Commander 1&2 were at the forefront of this revolution and so were often highlighted in various ads such as these. To underscore the fact that this was largely a new thing for people, all of the hardware mentioned here came with free speakers. And when we got a pair of cheap 3-inch speakers, we actually used them!

Everyone's familiar with the Sound Blasters and AdLibs of the day, but the boards pictured below were not quite as popular. Despite branding itself as the "new affordable P.C. sound standard," the Sound Commander failed to make a lasting mark on the industry. The Sound Runner was out there "conquering the final frontier of truly realistic ear-blasting sound" and claimed to be the most compatible PC sound card with support for over 100 games! Finally, the Sound Galaxy NX was billed as "the only PC sound card you will ever need." It was the only sound card that supported four different competing standards: the Sound Blaster, AdLib, Disney Sound Source and Covox Speech Thing! Apparently it did not support the Sound Commander standard.







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Original update published on July 26, 2014

 

[Dondragmer]

Does anyone remember the days when just capturing a screenshot from your DOS game involved messing around with a TSR? Those took additional memory of course, so you'd probably have to modify the CONFIG.SYS on your boot disk to squeeze a few additional kilobytes so your game would continue to run. Then you'd find that it accessed the keyboard hardware so directly that you couldn't activate the screenshot TSR anyway.

So, if you were given the task of advertising the Sound Galaxy NX, capturing a few screenshots was a big job. It might be simpler to use 8 pictures from an existing screenshot library illustrating games with sound card support. You need to fill 9 spaces, so you duplicate one of the screenshots. Then you hope that the competing Sound Commander doesn't use screenshots from the same library.

Some of them I can understand - you want people to identify the games you support, so using the title screens of "Leisure Suit Larry 1" and "F-15 Strike Eagle II" could have been believable on their own. The other 6 pictures seem a little too coincidental, though...

Remember kids, don't plagiarise, or 22 years later someone might expose your crimes in a sarcastic forum post. That would be dreadful.

 

[Mace]

First soundcard I bought was a Sound Galaxy NX Pro. It was hfl 599, about € 280,-. It was 100% compatible with the Sounblaster pro II(that was hfl 899,- ), everything worked with it, and due to a noise filter digital playback sounded better! I ran my first CD-rom drive through it(Mitsumi Single speed) I kept it around sitting beside my first Gravis Ultrasound to play FM-synthesis games, until I purchased an ultrasound extreme. The covox speech thing/Disney sound source was supported, and worked fine, but most, if not all games I could choose soundblaster(pro), so why bother?

The only "non-soundblaster" card from its generation, suitable for games, and within the pricerange that matched the quality was the Pro Audio Spectrum, but that card had compatibility issues since it was not a "true" soundblaster hardware compatible card.

 

[ChrisReid]

So, if you were given the task of advertising the Sound Galaxy NX, capturing a few screenshots was a big job. It might be simpler to use 8 pictures from an existing screenshot library illustrating games with sound card support. You need to fill 9 spaces, so you duplicate one of the screenshots. Then you hope that the competing Sound Commander doesn't use screenshots from the same library.

Ha, I especially like the reused 3rd & 9th screenshot.

First soundcard I bought was a Sound Galaxy NX Pro.

Why would they make a Sound Galaxy NX Pro?! The Sound Galaxy NX was already the only sound card you will ever need!

I remember around the year 2000 seeing a 30 gigabyte hard drive with the label "the only hard drive you will ever need!" 30 gigs was unfillably enormous at the time, but even then I remember laughing to myself about how such a thing would be obsolete within a few years. My last few cell phones have had more storage space than that.

My first card was a Sound Blaster Pro for WC2. My elementary school self was pretty happy figuring out how to get it installed.

 

[bsmith1702]

I've always been amazed at the Roland MT-32. Yes, it was the best way to listen to games at the time, but they retailed for $550 in 1990! Who actually bought one of these things?

 

[Worf]

Some of them I can understand - you want people to identify the games you support, so using the title screens of "Leisure Suit Larry 1" and "F-15 Strike Eagle II" could have been believable on their own. The other 6 pictures seem a little too coincidental, though...

Remember kids, don't plagiarise, or 22 years later someone might expose your crimes in a sarcastic forum post. That would be dreadful.

To avoid going through the process of capturing, a lot of companies had press kits with screenshots. Marketing would just use those press kits (which often have high-res "camera ready" artwork for publishing)

It wouldn't surprise me that the coincidental screenshots (or almost all of them) came from the publisher of the games - the hardware manufacturer tests the game, the publisher gives their OK and the screenshot is in. Saves effort.

I'm fairly certain if you look closely, those screenshots will be identical to ones that are even on the box itself.

It took a while but I had real soundblaster cards in my PC - the 486 we bought in 1994 or so had a soundblaster pro I upgraded to an AWE32, while a 286 we had used an ancient soundblaster card that we picked up second hand cheap.

Of course, I ended up with a laptop, so there were no real sound cards for those that worked well. The one that came closest was one that came with a Windows Sound System card which had a pseudo soundblaster mode that was like 75% compatible.

Hell, I had a IBM machine with its strange DSP-based sound card that was also a modem and telephone (plus answering machine and all the other stuff). Apparently it wasn't poewrful enough - if you put it in soundblaster pro mode, it took so much DSP that none of the phone stuff worked.

 

[Dondragmer]

I've always been amazed at the Roland MT-32. Yes, it was the best way to listen to games at the time, but they retailed for $550 in 1990! Who actually bought one of these things?

It was designed for professional musicians, and those who could afford one bought it. The fact that computer games started supporting it, and a few wealthy gamers purchased one, was a happy side effect for Roland.

To avoid going through the process of capturing, a lot of companies had press kits with screenshots. Marketing would just use those press kits (which often have high-res "camera ready" artwork for publishing)

It wouldn't surprise me that the coincidental screenshots (or almost all of them) came from the publisher of the games - the hardware manufacturer tests the game, the publisher gives their OK and the screenshot is in. Saves effort.

I'm fairly certain if you look closely, those screenshots will be identical to ones that are even on the box itself.

Thanks for that explanation. I know game boxes often included screenshots from pre-release versions that could not be reproduced in the final game (The WC2 box had a turret with two joysticks and a WC1-style explosion, and I think the side of the box had a planet scene that never appeared.) I'm also sure I remember at least one magazine "review" that contained the same unattainable screenshots. So, did the magazine write the associated glowing review and 96% score, or were those provided in the press kit as well?

Australian Personal Computer (which in the early 1990s was a business-oriented magazine with a short games section) was pretty good about capturing their own screenshots, but would often take them in CGA mode, even for games with VGA or MCGA support. Presumably their screen capture tools coped better with lower color depth.

 

[Mace]

Why would they make a Sound Galaxy NX Pro?! The Sound Galaxy NX was already the only sound card you will ever need!

If you hooked up a good MIDI module to the joystick port, it actually would have been. However, need and want are two different things, and used to buy a new soundcard every other year or so in the 90's. And the serious awnser would be "stereo".
There also was a Sound Galaxy NX 16(48 Khz digital stereo playback), and a sound galaxy NOVA(isolated circuits so no background noises, fully soundblaster16 compatible).

As for the hard drive, I still giggle when people store ALL their personal data, that they desperatly need on a single, non-redundant device and it fails.

they retailed for $550 in 1990! Who actually bought one of these things?

Me from 20 years back refuses to accept this. The only place you could get them in my hometown was the place where I purchased my plectrums and guitarstrings, and it retailed at hfl. 2500,- (say 1200 USD). But this was before the internet, and prices varied from town to town. But public transport was free for college students then, so I took a lot of road-trips with my friends across the country for motherboards, diskdrives, dimms back in the day. The roland was not a common device, and so expensive that it would sit on the shelf forever, so no computer store had it.

After the Sound Galaxy I switched to Gravis cards, that could emulate the roland sound, the standard was supported in a lot DOS of games during 1993/1996, the games that really supported the card(and detected the memory banks and filled them accordingly) were DOOM and the CD version of TIE fighter, they actually took full advantage of the card, and DOOM used the positional audio features, playing with a headphone gave you an edge. Wing commander 3 used the standard set of wavetable samples that came with the card. Using Mega-em to emulate the MT32 really enhanced the WC1/2 experience....

 

[Worf]

Thanks for that explanation. I know game boxes often included screenshots from pre-release versions that could not be reproduced in the final game (The WC2 box had a turret with two joysticks and a WC1-style explosion, and I think the side of the box had a planet scene that never appeared.) I'm also sure I remember at least one magazine "review" that contained the same unattainable screenshots. So, did the magazine write the associated glowing review and 96% score, or were those provided in the press kit as well?

Australian Personal Computer (which in the early 1990s was a business-oriented magazine with a short games section) was pretty good about capturing their own screenshots, but would often take them in CGA mode, even for games with VGA or MCGA support. Presumably their screen capture tools coped better with lower color depth.

Depends on the magazine. Some magazines were designed to sell ads, so the "content" in them was really just generated from the press kit and perhaps a few minutes of demo play. The better ones would actually review something - either the full version itself, a demo, or a prerelease version that they were provided. Of course, they captured some screenshots, but the rest were probably just taken from the press kit because it helps fill the article up. The unreachable shots were probably just taken because the authors of those reviews pretty much don't have a lot of time to review it - they get a whole box of games, and a month they need to submit 10 reviews or something to the editor, so they almost never complete it. At least, not without copious cheat codes, easy mode, etc.

WRT APC, I'm guessing their capture equipment may consist of little more than a monitor and a film camera with a bunch of electronics that sync the camera to the monitor so the shutter is open for one frame of video. Or maybe they went more advanced and had a real digitizing card that captured the output of the CGA card into a frame buffer (I think CGA at the time still used digital-ish signalling, but I could be wrong). TSR-based capture utilities usually could be counted on having issues and being unreliable.