Remember when soundcards were BIGGER than graphics cards?

[mr_me]

1 hour ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

Adlib did not have digital audio until the Adlib Gold which came out after the original Sound Blaster (there were several Sound Blaster models between the original Adlib and the gold)... while the Adlib was revolutionary for music, the Sound Blaster was just as revolutionary for digital audio.

 

And even so the Adlib gold only had 12 bit audio, while the Sound Blaster 16 which was out at the same time was 16 bit.

While games did have digitised speech with no sound card using the pc speaker; the digital audio support along with a built in game port was why I chose a Soundblaster over the cheaper Adlib card in 1990.  The digital audio support in those sound blasters were low quality and couldn't be used for anything serious.  Still that's about when Soundblaster took over the market after Adlib was the standard for a few years.

[zzip]

On 4/21/2020 at 11:01 PM, remz said:

I also had a Gravis Ultrasound Max, which was big, although I think it was not quite as long.

But wow, wasn't that card a beauty..

 

I had a Gravis Ultrasound Ace, which was about half that length, but it also had the distinctive red circuit board.  Definately stood out! 

[spacecadet]

Expansion slots are still a thing... don't know why people are talking like they aren't. In fact add-on cards are a bigger business now than they ever were in the past.

 

Only the types of cards people buy has changed. They don't buy as many sound cards, but they buy a lot more graphics cards, network cards, USB cards, and other things that didn't really used to exist.

 

When I got my Apple II, assuming you got a IIe and not a IIc like I had, you'd get the 80 column card, floppy disk controller, serial card and maybe a parallel card. For most people, that was it, and it was a pretty standard configuration; you couldn't even do much with the system without most of those things. There were sound cards for the Apple II also, but not many people actually had them. That was the one thing I missed, though, about my IIc. That and eventually not being able to upgrade the RAM beyond 128k (later IIc's could do that, but not early ones like mine).

 

The original IBM PC came with either the CGA or MDA graphics card, and plus you'd want the serial card and I think you still needed a parallel card if you wanted to print. So it was kind of similar to the Apple II in that pretty much everyone got the same cards and I doubt most people even touched the system after that. These days, if people buy a desktop, they pretty much buy it specifically so they can expand it.

 

When I got a PC, part of the reason was so I could use expansion cards, including sound cards. Though I only later realized my PC (a Packard Bell Legend 2000) was crap when it came to expansion, so I ended up rebuilding it myself. To this day I've still got a PC full of cards, even as modern as it is. Right now I have a GeForce RTX2060, a USB card (I needed more ports than what my case and motherboard gave me), and a wifi/bluetooth card. I think all that stuff's pretty common, plus a lot of other, more niche stuff. (I mean different people have different niche stuff, but a lot of people might have one card of some kind that's not that popular by itself.)

Edited April 28, 2020 by spacecadet

[DragonGrafx-16]

A lot of modern prebuilts lack any real expansion slots... and in fact pretty much all of the budget options lack any expansion slots other than a single PCIe for a GPU and that's it! You have to spend upwards of $1500 for a prebuilt that actually has any slots. And most of the really high end internal soundcards (like what you would use for audio recording) are still PCI only. When I got my new PC last year I had to get a USB audio interface because my motherboard lacked any PCI slots. 

[Omega-TI]

My first audio card was a "Thunderboard".  It was Soundblaster/Adlib compatible, but it did not need any drivers or even any calls in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.  I used it in both the 286, the 386/SX16.  When I upgraded again I got a real Soundblaster because by that point I needed more than what the Thunderboard offered. 

[zzip]

12 hours ago, spacecadet said:

Expansion slots are still a thing... don't know why people are talking like they aren't. In fact add-on cards are a bigger business now than they ever were in the past.

 

Only the types of cards people buy has changed. They don't buy as many sound cards, but they buy a lot more graphics cards, network cards, USB cards, and other things that didn't really used to exist.

I think people are talking internal slots.    I remember PC mobos came with something like 7 slots,  might be some combination of ISA + faster VLB or PCI,  back then you'd need at minimum I/O card for your disk/CD, a network card, a sound card, a videocard.   Internal modems were common too-  most of those slots got filled by something.

 

Nowadays most of that stuff is built-in to the MOBO,  ISA slots are long gone, PCI slots are mostly gone,  most have some combination of a few PCIexpress cards for video, and a couple of other things.   Yes you could still buy a sound card if you want something fancy, yes you can still add extra network interfaces if you need them, yes you can double or triple up on the GPU, but I don't think most people do these things?

[zzip]

1 hour ago, INVISIBLE said:

My first audio card was a "Thunderboard".  It was Soundblaster/Adlib compatible, but it did not need any drivers or even any calls in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.  I used it in both the 286, the 386/SX16.  When I upgraded again I got a real Soundblaster because by that point I needed more than what the Thunderboard offered. 

I thought soundblasters at minimum set some variables in autoexec.bat like SOUND=,   MIDI=  to help software locate it?

[Omega-TI]

28 minutes ago, zzip said:

I thought soundblasters at minimum set some variables in autoexec.bat like SOUND=,   MIDI=  to help software locate it?

Yeah, but even back then I didn't like having to fuss with extraneous crap.  To me that was one of the cool things about that board, however they did it, all the programs I used detected it.  The main one being Castle Wolfenstein.  

 

What I don't miss about that era is the manual setting of IRQs with limited COM port settings.  Oh jeez, when you are running four com ports, two printer ports, have a joystick adapter, mouse, sound card and realize you have conflicts disallowing allowing use of the TNC, modem and mouse at the same time...  Arghhhhh!  Modern computers that auto detect and use the USB port has made life so much easier.

 

[boxpressed]

50 minutes ago, zzip said:

I thought soundblasters at minimum set some variables in autoexec.bat like SOUND=,   MIDI=  to help software locate it?

Adlib cards (and clones) don't need to set any variables in AUTOEXEC. The game just knows where to look for the hardware. Not sure why--maybe because there wasn't a choice of ports, IRQ, DMA, etc. Just this week I installed my first Adlib clone and fired up Wolfenstein 3D, and the game detected the card.

[Omega-TI]

I've ALWAYS loved Castle Wolfenstein 3D.  I have it on my super fast super duper new computer (from Steam).

[christo930]

You have obviously never seen an original IBM CGA card, have you?  It is enormous.  Same with the disk controller board. Full length cards. Well over a foot.

 

I don't think I have ever seen a sound card that big.  Even the earliest cards were pretty small and were only 8 bit.  Even high quality Turtle sound cards weren't much bigger than a standard 16 bit card.  I know there was a VLB (awe 32? maybe) that was as long as a Vesa Local Bus card. But I'm pretty sure that is the largest sound card I've ever seen and it's still no comparison to the CGA card.  I think there was some Hercules cards that big too.

[jhd]

Did anyone else have a joystick/gamepad interface card that was not part of a sound card or multi-function card?

 

My Dell 486 had a very small case with only three expansion slots -- one of which was taken-up by an internal modem (later removed). 

 

I subsequently purchased an original AdLib sound card at a flea market, and I got to experience sounds beyond the PC speaker for the very first time! It was just a basic sound card; there were no ports other than audio out. (Frankly, I do not remember if I had to update the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to make it work.)

 

I also found a joystick interface card on clearance at a local Radio Shack store. It almost worked -- there was so much jitter that games were very hard to play. I never determined if this was a software issue or a hardware issue, and I upgraded to newer hardware a year or so later.  

 

 

[Keatah]

Yes. I have one of those gameport-only cards. I used it for a very short time till I could afford a SoundBlaster. IIRC they were pretty sensitive to bus timing, what with them being just a handful of common chips. Nothing custom like in SB and other cards.

 

[DragonGrafx-16]

I use a Gamecard 3 joystick card in my DOS PC... it works really great without any jitter (other than jitter caused by bad controllers). I never use the game port on my Sound Blaster though... it seemed it had issues and I never knew why so I disabled it.

[nadir]

On my first computer we dropped in an original Adlib.  Since the computer (XT clone) had integrated Plantronics graphics I guess you could say the sound card was bigger.  ?  On my second computer, the SoundBlaster 16 ASP w/WaveBlaster was definitely bigger than the ATI Ultra Pro Mach 32 EISA video card.