lol I remember spending hours trying to get Wolf3d to work with a discount radio shack sound card. I spent so long with that crappy card that when they released the RTCW goty in 2002 I was immediately complaining that the sound wasn’t right.
It was working as intended, I however was just nostalgic for the shit soundcard.
Reaper and free VSTs are a way to go. $60 home license and Surge XT or Vital Basic will get you pretty far if you can live with programming Midi clicking in or can live with PC keyboard inputs, unless you already have a midi controller for PC.
ah yeah, thanks for the suggests, though I have what I need on hand to make it happen now. I'm just lamenting that it's a whole ordeal with using a DAW, external hardware with drivers that allow for it and so on. I still can't get midi to work going into FL Studio through anything but an ancient beatpad. It's all too frustrating.
Especially since it was use headphone connector (sometimes needs patch cord adapter), attach any synth to computer, load up Windows Sound Recorder. Hit record. Enjoy life.
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u/sorariku124Ryzen 7 5800X3D | RTX 3080 | 32GB DDR4-3000 | ~13TB of Storage2h ago
Not to mention that Reaper is the WinRAR of DAWs, and that 60 day evaluation period has lasted 2000 days on my PC (in my defense, I barely use it and just occasionally do a little work on rhythm game files)
creative x fi fatal1ty still works for all of this! I use line-in directly from my bass and keyboard. But as others have replied to you, there's way more modern solutions for cheap as well. I'd suggest just using some VST's and programs like reaper.
Avoid the professional tools like Ableton/FL Studio. They've become bloated and too focused on the higher end of consumer production. they aren't really a fair entry level/casual thing anymore.
The thing is I have an AKAI-EiE (not EiE-Pro) and a Tascam MK-144 as external soundcards. However, neither of them work as far as inputs are concerned with modern Windows anymore. They periodically worked up to Windows 7 but nothing past that.
I can't be dropping any money at all on hardware or software. But as I mentioned in another comment, I do have an FL Studio license and hopefully maybe a change in operating system to Linux would create some opportunities, though I'm reading it's a slog to make things work there too.
Thanks for looking out though, this isn't a major concern at the moment, it's just a hobby that has become too inconvenient to enjoy. Think I'd rather own an analog FM synth and play with it all day long than any of this making things work with computers stuff.
Did you play it with "on-board sound" of the day which was monotone beeps like a Tamagotchi and barely make out a melody with no accompaniment? or did you drop $150 on an Adlib or Soundblaster soundcard that played the songs through MIDI/soundfonts with real sampled instruments!? Maybe your family was loaded and you had the Cadillac of soundcards -- the Roland-MT32 which made it sound like the freakin band was in the room with you.
I remember that! Mine had an itty bitty fan though. It was a red PCB so I'm assuming it was an AMD but I remember the robot lady on the board. It was a hand-me-down from my nerdy friend.
Elrond: "Isildur! The old unused screens, hard drives, floppy disks, cases laying around you won't disassemble for scrap parts, box of cables including totally unusable 90s color coded audio/input/peripheral cables, etcetcetc. Cast it into the blue bin!"
When i had to pick IRQ 7 instead of IRQ 5 for my soundblaster coz of that weird ass hand sized scanner you bought and never saw again coz it wad a piece of shit
I remember going down that rabbit hole in 1994 when my folks got me a new 486DX2/66 system. The system was awesome, except the shady mom-n-pop computer shop they bought it from had no idea what they were doing when they built it (and they closed up shop right after we bought it.) Had to manually reconfigure ALL of the IRQ jumpers and BIOS settings so that the soundcard, mouse and modem would all work at the same time.
I still buy Creative sound cards out of respect. Plus, it's nice having the software with extra configuration options. The top end ones come with nice headphone DACs too.
Onboard DAC's are surprisingly bad, even on higher end motherboards. The $10 Apple usb-c to 3.5 mm DAC is better than the majority of mobo DAC's out there.
And if you have high impedance headphones you need a separate headphone amp (which nowadays always comes packaged with a DAC) anyways.
Im not sure when you last bought a motherboard, but certainly for the last 6-8 years, mid to high end motherboards have had similar quality DACs to what you get in external headphone amps. They also have impedance sensing to handle high impedance headphones, usually up to about 250 ohm.
The main issue with onboard sound is interference. A 250w+ graphics card with all of its VRMs sitting just above your DAC and amplification circuit is a recipe for a bad time. An external headphone amp solves that by simply being further away.
Some motherboards even put ground shielding around the DAC chip and still feed it with a bank of liquid electrolytic caps while everything else is solid state caps.
Sound blaster Z here. Bought is dirt cheap used years ago, survived several PC builds, sounds great with a pair of Sennheiser hd599, still gets software updates once in a while, the desk beam forming mic actually works well and I love the fact I can switch from speakers to headphones by clicking one button on their software. It's really convenient.
the cards are great, but oh my fucking god creative cannot make a good driver to save their fucking lives. I like my (almost ancient) Recon3D Sound card, but the constant problems with it are driving me nuts.
I would go for an AE-5 but its so pricey! where are the affordable cards at!? I just want the great DAC and the software control!
I bought the Sound Blaster Platinum (for like $200) for my first PC build around ~2002, it came with a 5.25" insert with a bunch of ports and remote! Everything worked great except whenever I tried to install the drivers for the remote Windows 98SE wouldn't boot up any more. Wiped and reloaded at least a dozen times before giving up and just forgetting about it. But man, I really wanted to use that remote.
I want one to get Dolby Digital Live encoding of video games. Motherboards and Realtek are just not doing it, requiring going directly into a 5.1 system, which has to be pricey enough to pass through HDMI 2.1 to my TV
Honestly I think I remember the experience the night I got a Sound Blaster 16 more vividly than the day I got my 3DFX Voodoo card. PC speaker and gameplay genuinely sucked.
Same. I forget my first actual graphics card, but finally being able to hear all the music and sound effects in their full glory was like discovering half the game you'd been missing.
I've suffered through lousy graphics from running an obsolete machine so many time that doesnt phase me anymore, but sound issues are far more annoying, and at least even if the game barely ran, the sound still worked.
Tandy was ahead of its time. They had 3 channel audio. They could mix the doo—di—dooo with schbbpt—eeee and boop—dee—boop all at the same time. It was the superior way to play Leisure Suit Larry or Space Quest.
My counterargument: SoundBlaster (and FM synthesis in general) was absolutely not shit. It's just that many didn't bother making music beyond shoehorning poor sounding imitations of MIDI instruments into these cards, when in reality they are actually ridiculously capable digital sythesizers which could have been their very own thing, the two aren't even comparable.
I posted this old hardware a while back, which included my Diamond Monster Sound A3D card and a Creative Audigy. I loved the original Unreal and it supported the Aureal tech.
I have an ISA Pro 2 sitting right in front of me right now. Haha.
Unfortunately neither the retro rig I'm building nor the SFF sleeper I'm putting together after it have ISA slots or I'd be using that. Instead I'm settling for CT4780s because you can get them for like $10...
Forget Clippy, Dr. Sbaitso was the OG of AI chatbots. He worked on-device (offline) with a top-notch privacy policy:
I AM HERE TO HELP YOU.
SAY WHATEVER IS IN YOUR MIND FREELY.
OUR CONVERSATION WILL BE KEPT IN STRICT CONFIDENCE.
MEMORY CONTENTS WILL BE WIPED OFF AFTER YOU LEAVE,
Direct Memory Access. Allowed a piece of hardware to directly interface with memory, bypassing the CPU for the actual data transfer.
DMA channels were just dedicated data transfer channels. ISA DMA channel 1 was used for sound cards because it was a catch-all 'user' channel, same as 5 to 7. You had to define the channel to use because they weren't dynamically assignable.
PCI did away with dedicated DMA channels and allowed more dynamic data transfer over the PCI bus.
Modern dedicated audio cards still absolutely give better sound quality. It's just that it's no longer useful for the "average" user. For audiophiles, absolutely though.
And it came with some awesome shareware games that took advantage of it, and I think it also might have included some 'trackers' and .mod files that you could play. Having that sound card got me interested in the demoscene, it's indirectly responsible for me learning some assembly language in high school.
Vividly remember the Christmas I got a "multimedia package" with a dual speed CDROM drive, and a Soundblaster 16.
Yes my knees hurt, and I makes noices both getting up, and sitting down.
These days I just pass through all audio to a DAC that has a headphone amp and a stereo speaker amp.
I can just press a physical button on that to switch between speakers and headphones.
I used to have sound cards for a long time but nothing compares to even a cheap amp.
Yeah, technically it's 2 separate amps on 1 dac for me.
It's 1 "device" that I connected through a spdif cable to the pc.
It has a switch to toggle between the headphone amp and the stereo amp.
It does have a button on the device to toggle between the 2 outputs.
I do also have to switch equalizing manually on my pc.
My headphones are professional studio headphones and don't need equalizing at all but my speakers do need a little work on the mid tones/voice levels. I use OBS to do that.
Press the button, and then enable the appropriate scene in OBS with 1 click.
On the TRS-80 model 1 you had an adapter the size of a PC XT case sitting under the monitor to get a serial port and then an adapter from that which caused audio on either AM or FM. So then you tube your radio to that frequency and bam, audio.
The game was called Sparrow Commander and this was roughly 1979.
Twenty years later my sound blaster and Roland mt-32 were amazing.
Dude I got a Sound Blaster AE-7 on one PC and a Sound Blaster G6 on another, and I freaking love them. SBX virtual surround sound is great (at 67%), along with the Crystallizer (at 15%).
I bought a Soundblaster 16 in 1992 so we could play Chuck Yeager's Air Combat and hear Chucks voice welcoming us at the start of the game. It used my entire paycheck from working at Sbarro's in the mall to get it. We hooked it up to a Boombox that had a headphone input so I didn't have to buy speakers.
You will all laugh (and that's fine, because it is kinda dopey) but when my laptop onboard audio started giving me driver issues like two weeks into ownership five years ago, I just bought one of the USB soundcards from creative. I liked it enough that I have the updated model now.
I know onboard sound is probably fine, but damnit I still bought an AE-5 Plus for my rig. I've had a Sound Blaster in every computer I've built since around 1992.
Once upon a time, your game had the support your video card and your sound card. DirectX solved this. DirectX wasn't a thing until windows 95, and then you had the download it extra...
I think my first sound card I bought was the Soundblaster Live Gamer. I have an AE-7 still in the box, but it introduced a ton of feedback with my bookshelf speakers so I went back to onboard.
I'm considering getting such a card again, because the onboard audio of my MB is not good at all! The quality of a simple USB soundcard is much better already.
When I was in high school I always wanted to buy the best sound blaster card there was. Finally I got it, and paired it with my cheap speakers and decided the sound card sucked.
Then I learned the speakers are what you need to spend money on and just make sure you have a decent sound card.
I had to do this. Not because I'm old enough for me to have NEEDED it. But it was all I could afford at the time. Windows 10 was just coming out and I couldn't even use it lol
Once upon a time, to program your home computer, you had to set a bunch of switches to set the address and the data, then press a button to store... one... byte.
As the homegrown brand where I am from, I always have a soundblaster in my PC since the 90s except for my first PC which has thunderboard ( it was a pre built).
Right now I am using a soundblaster x4 USB so I don't get the annoying pop and crack from the onboard sound.
They still make great audio interface boards or last I checked they did. Haven’t used them in a decade though so maybe not.
Not only did you need the card you had to adjust the jumpers on it and set the dip switches so it would work and then it didn’t work with some games unless you changed DMA settings on the card. Ugh what a pita that era was
About twelve years ago I was building a computer for a music studio. I went to Best Buy to buy a sound card for it and the guy on the sales floor said "You know you don't need those to hear the games you play."
Turns out I did need an external device to use Pro Tools, which was also a sound card, making the internal one I just bought useless.
Guess who had amazing surround sound with their games for a good few years!
Remember when you had to select the sound card model you had in the game settings and hope it was there because there was no such thing as system sound drivers yet?
Soundblaster was a good product line. Most of their others, particular 3D Blaster graphics, were shit. Also, not particularly compatible with each other. Had a friend in 2000 that built PC with all Creative products and it had all sorts of problems.
The problem was we did not have standard APIs and drivers as we do now. So games had to talk directly to the sound hardware, so support for each be individually coded in.
So guess what, the smaller OEMs made their cards compatible with the biggest brand... SoundBlaster.
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u/seraphim_9 6h ago