The light being blocked is from what's called a "copper pour", usually used for a ground plane. Among other features, it will provide more sheilding. In the case of the the MS card, it seems to be split into an analogue and digital ground; right and left respectively. This further isolates any interference. I'm actually surprised that the SB card doesn't use larger ground planes (it uses some, the larger opaque patches), but there's probably a reason for why the engineers made it that way, maybe their own way of isolating analogue and digital ground? Or maybe it's just that SB is a 2 layer board and the MS is 4. It doesn't actually cost more to have a PCB made with larger copper planes (since copper is not added but removed in PCB manufature), all else being equal so that wouldn't be an indicator of quality. But 4 layers would be more expensive (to what degree 30 years ago I don't know) and provide better isolation/interfernce reduction, so maybe that's why it has that quieter noise floor. Actually I'm pretty sure now the SB card is 2 layer and the MS 4. Smaller copper pours could be from a hesitancy to use large copper planes since back in the day (like 70s-early 80s) large copper areas on big boards (bigger PCB being "floppier" due to proportionally being thinner) could cause them to warp.
" In the case of the the MS card, it seems to be split into an analogue and digital ground; right and left respectively. This further isolates any interference. " Nah - most of the times that is the opposite of what you want cause it significantly increases coupling and interference.
@@ABaumstumpf I looked up the Analog Devices AD1848 datasheet, on page 26 they recommend a split digital and analogue ground plane "for the best isolation".
Not necessarily fully related to the video but a thought I had when you were talking about the Excel multimedia gimmicks.... it's very similar to today where a lot of very strange industries are playing with AI. While I do think it can be cringe for to use AI when it's really not necessary, as much as it is for spreadsheet software to utilize sound cards, it's really just part of the learning process when new technology comes out, we find out what works, and we find out what doesn't.
I agree, most tech has an awkward experimental stage. Another example is VR headsets, which existed for quite a long time but have really only recently been implemented in a way that works well.
WSS does look like a 4 layer card. The digital section is laid out normally with internal pour and surface routing. The analogue section is laid out inverted, with the outer layers being ground pours for shielding and internal routing. Notice how most of the signal path traces are not visible on either of the surfaces, instead most components are connected straight to vias, many underneath the components instead of to the side, and nowhere else. Gives the whole card quite an eery look. This looks to be by far not the only design trait, it actually is a really nice card. Actually arguably this inverted shielded layout probably doesn't do much, but it doesn't hurt either. The ground pour near signals does help, and just avoiding silly signal loops and tight component placement and routing helps a lot, and component selection helps a lot as well. Many soundcards with that AD WSS codec are quite clean! And yes Creative is just thrown together on 2 layers everything cutting right across not a care in the world.
Thank you for the insight! Good to know I wasn't talking completely out of my butt. It is a nicely built card, it was just released a little too late. By that time Creative had a deathgrip on the market.
3:21 Has a legit ground plane: lower noise floor. Also that line from top to bottom infers the two ground planes are isolated, further avoiding noise entering.
Funny I completely forgot just how bad sound cards used to be until the late 90's. Routing the audio from a cd rom drive to the sound card was a thing.
We didn't get digital audio from CD-ROM drives until we got WDM drivers, and those weren't super popular until the Windows 2000/XP era. I ran out of 4-pin CD-audio cables when I built my Pentium 4 2.0 GHz/GeForce 2/Sound Blaster Live system, and then realized that if I want to use VXD drivers to get better EAX effects I need to grab another cable for Redbook audio.
@@c6jones720 Eh, that was relatively easy once you figured out what settings would work with your build. The biggest problem for me was forgetting that IRQ 7 was shared between the printer port and the sound card. It normally wasn't a problem, until a sound-making screen saver started up during a long print job!
@dycedargselderbrother5353 it took well over a decade, the first AC'97 in the Pentium 3/Celerons were quite CPU binding and lacked surround sound, good midi synthesis and EAX, the Audigy 2 sold quite well, after about 2005 I think onboard was good enough for most.
Your production values and editing have really gone way up in the past 18 months. I feel this is one of your best videos, if not the very best. DOS sound card coverage outside of gaming is not common on RUclips, so I'm really glad you're covering it.
I remember working with this card... The included speech recognition system was excellent+ when used properly, (possibly the best available at the time), but it definitely was not a general-purpose sound card.
While Microsoft's WSS card didn't succeed well, I remember many cards and chipsets through the 1990s were both SB Pro and WSS compatible and worked quite well. I had one with a Crystal chipset that included a CD-ROM interface back in the day, for example.
Yes, some of the Aztech cards for instance were WSS capable and the SB support was much better. Some cards even used a Crystal chip as sort of a bridge for the AD chip to interface with SB supported things.
It just highlights how much of a mess the PC platform was in the early 90s. Rapid technological advancements, but with no coordination or standardization, meaning that sometimes things that became industry standards were just crap. It looks that WSS was technically a better product than SB in most ways, but with SB already established as the de facto standard, and no concept of a universal audio driver architecture, it was doomed to failure. Thankfully Windows gaming with its abstraction layers that actually made sense, DirectX and stuff, fixed this and now it's not nearly as bad as it was in those times.
It is actually very similar to a format wars that happened with formats like VHS and BetaMax or D-VHS and DVD. It's not always the best overall format that wins, it's the one that is most established or convenient. It is definitely good things are more standardized these days, but this awkward period of computing is really interesting to me in retrospect. I just like how everyone was throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what would stick.
When I was a kid I saw Windows Sound System in the setup menu and wondered but all the adults said was they'd be shite without further explanation. Now I see what they meant.
I used to have a cheapo Reveal sound card. Sometimes, it just muted without any errors. Finally got it - had to open its proprietary setup TSR program and reselect the right device setting, one option was Windows Sound System, don't remember the other. Nor which was the right, but it just sometimes flipped into wrong on its own. Gotten that, was of satisfactory quality and very reliable.
Gen Tux able, he only plays games, back then nobody bought it for games !!!!!!! SB Pro only or SB 16, rest of the sound cards came with te system, daddy never used it ????
The sound card I want to know if it ever existed at all or was vaporware is the Media Vision ProZonic. I saw an advertisement for it in computer magazines in the 90's, with claims to support pretty much every sound standard there was. Pro Audio Spectrum 16 of course, Sound Blaster pro/16 etc. Covox Sound Master 2 and more. IIRC about the only one not supported was Gravis UltraSound. Was it ever sold or did it just make it to prototype or engineering sample state? Was it just about to go into production when Media Vision went under then was axed by the new owners? I wonder if in any of the scans of old computer magazines in the web archive there is preserved any article or advertisement for the ProZonic? The revived Media Vision tried telling me there was no such thing as a "Jazz 16" sound card, despite the fact I was holding it in my hand, looking at a magazine article on it, and printed right on the card was the then current company name and address, AND the name of the card JAZZ 16. Now why would the revived Media Vision that clearly and obviously did make that card tell me while taking to someone there on a phone call, that no such item existed? No wonder the second go of the company also went out of business. Another bit of computer parts history you could dive into is the company that was one of the largest manufacturers of PC video cards that insisted it never made any. Trident Microsystems made "reference designs" which they licensed to other companies to base their video cards on. Trident also helped out by producing "reference kits" of a PCB and parts for other companies to assemble for their testing and development. Those PCBs had Trident's name, FCC ID numbers and other information. The thing with those kits was Trident never limited how many anyone could purchase. The vast majority of Trident video cards were simply reference kits other companies assembled and shoved into a shoddy box with a cheaply printed manual and the driver install might have got a slight rebranding. Only once did I ever encounter a Trident based video card that would not work with Trident's reference drivers. It was pretty useless because the company that took the rare rout of not simply soldering together Trident kit-cards also went the extra mile to customize its BIOS to only accept their customized drivers - then they proceeded to NOT release a driver for Windows 98. So Trident never made a single video card while manufacturing many thousands of them. Imagine if Ford made all the parts for their cars then sold them as kits to anyone to assemble, than flat out refused to provide any support or repairs "Because Ford doesn't make cars."
no.. this card was not ment for games.. or even DOS really... but it worked great in linux and windows NT ... and it has a 48khz sampling rate.. not 44khz.. soundblaster is limited to a weird max sample rate of '45.4khz'... ...the RCA jacks were perfect for stereo systems as well.... listening to music from CD was done by 'rip and play' routines... comparing this card to a soundblaster is apples to oranges... and comparing the emulation layer to the native 48khz 16bit sample rate it can do is unfair.. use something like impulse tracker 2, adlib tracker 2, or mpxplay and try again... this card sounds much better than you are giving it credit for...
If you're referring to the Wikipedia page for this card it does say it has a 48khz sampling rate. I think it is a typo though. The PC Mag Nov 24, 1992(page 37) article referenced on that very page specifies it plays and records at 16bit 44khz stereo. This is also consistent with an InfoWorld article published on Sep 21, 1992(Page 137). As for CDs you can play them using the 3.5mm line in, which wasn't really an uncommon solution at the time and I demonstrated that on the Screamer 2 demo. You're right the card was more for Windows use and NOT for games. However, in 1992 DOS was still something you needed to support in my opinion and the competition were doing it for around the same price. In 1992, Windows was really optional and many people were just doing everything in DOS. Even when Windows 95 came out there were many games and programs that needed sound in DOS. For testing I always try to show the strengths and weaknesses of a card and give them a fair chance. The FM on this is on par with a SB16/Pro since it is literally the same chip, and for games that support the WSS standard I think it is superior, which is why Descent 2 and Tyrian sound awesome here. However, the Sound Blaster emulation for digital sound is one of the worst I've tested, and literally micro stutters in many games if it even works at all. One Must Fall 2097 and Dune 2 were best case scenarios in terms of that. I do get what you're saying though... Sound Blaster is TECHNICALLY inferior to WSS, but I feel the lack of support in most programs kind of makes it one sided in Creative's favor. The later WSS cards like the ones made by Aztech are much better all around cards for this reason. I do think RAD Tracker is a good idea for future videos though. Thanks for watching. EDIT: So I looked at the datasheet for the AD1848JP that is used for this card, and it does say it supports 48khz..... so maybe you're right and I'm more confused as ever. lol
@@DOSStorm yes its indeed 48khz... i used to own one of these cards, used it for a very, very, very long time in an ever-evolving linux machine... i played CDs by 'ripping' them realtime to the soundcard.... sounded much better than the analog cable or doing the same with the DAC of the SB16..... while the card was made in 1992 it was so advanced it lived well beyond its initial creation to windows XP and is still supported in linux if you happen to have an ISA bus... ...my coveted SB AWE32 however is in a P3 that boots 98SE....
I think you missed the overall application of a soundcard like this within windows: multimedia, as generic as that sounds. It was starting to get pretty big in this era and programs like Authorware from the brand new Macromedia were breaking onto the market. It especially found use in things like computer-based training and education/academia that could be used by relative non programmers for simple workflows. There were other applications, namely Powerpoint and Asymmetrix Compel where a soundcard in a business setting would have been especially useful. Windows-based video recorders like the Intel Smart Video Recorder were only a year away from this and all stuff our research center at a major state university did in the days of Windows 3.1. Practically nobody was thinking about putting this stuff on the web until much later.
Wow, what a nostalgic trip this video was for me. I had almost forgot about Screamer 2 (I played it A LOT) and my trusty AWE64 soundcard that I used until ISA ports wasn´t a thing anymore. Had to change sound card at that point...
I remember getting to play with one of these in 1993. I was blown away with the voice recognition at the time. I think you could load programs or select menu options? Bit of a gimmick though. I had a sound blaster v2 at home at the time.
The weirdest thing about WSS is the whole "version 2.0" thing where they completely pivoted from WSS being "a piece of hardware" to it being "a standard for multimedia support on PCs". Lacking the context of what Microsoft was actually doing with WSS at that time, it still doesn't make a ton of sense to me. It seems kind of like they were trying to make fletch happen with all the software just supporting WSS, and all the rest of the hardware vendors were supposed to fall in line and build to that standard. LOL. Good luck with that. EDIT: OTOH, this is kinda what Windows' hardware abstraction, and later DirectX, were all about too: Create a reference API and let the hardware vendors write drivers that conform to that, so software vendors don't have to support individual devices. And of course, that worked when Windows became THE platform to code for on PC. But in the DOS/Win3x days? naaahhhh....
Another commenter mentioned this. What is weird is all the news articles in 92' mention a playback sample rate of 44khz. However, the AD1848JP datasheet says the chip supports 48khz so you're probably right.
I remember those cards. They were for sale at Software Etc. in the Puente Hills Mall and the funny thing about it was that the salespeople didn't really know what it did (they read the box and claimed that it was an Adlib clone). It literally left the shelves after a month.
8:31 Hey DOS Storm! What's this word processor called? Neat vid, btw. I've never really given WSS much consideration. Back in those days I was using ESS cards. So this was a nice journey outside the familiar. Thanks.
@@DOSStormThanks much. Tried it and it's not quite what im looking for. There's a similar graphical DOS word processor for kids that I used in 1994, but for the life of me I can't remember what it's called, or enough of the interface to even describe it. I just have a fraction of a memory of it and it's been driving me crazy for years. Hopefully I find it one day.
The FM synth is a real OPL3 so it will mostly sound like an SB16 for music. The digital sound is where it has problems and it doesn't work most of the time even on really popular games like Doom or Duke3d.
Yeah chips like the cheap and ubiquitous opti929 just look at the datasheet... it just piggy backs off one of these, but adding midi routing, game port, sound blaster emulation and optical drive address logic. WSS is quite fortunate for those since it only needs a couple flow control pins, 8-bit data bus and 2-bit address bus, so the cost of the package doesn't explode with the number of IO lines, which get expensive. Of course until AC97 came about which had even fewer pins and became an even more obvious choice.
6:03 I think you’ve missed the value proposition of the proofread function. It’s for checking transcribed columns of numbers: You listen to the numbers you entered while you read them from the source. There was no other practical way for a single person to check transcriptions of numbers in excel for accuracy at that time. Arguably the WSS method would result in fewer errors than a second person reading aloud. In other words, that WSS card had up to the value of whatever it costs to pay a person to read numbers from a screen. If that task is a full-time job then it’s $299 once to save $18k per year. Those cards would have paid for themselves in weeks when actually doing what they were designed to do. I have no idea if they actually worked for that task, but I remember that era, and it was and is clear to me that that is what they were designed for.
Cool video! Even though it clearly has bugs when playing games, the sounds that actually sounds correct sounds cleaner. I get that bandwidth on the ISA bus for sampled/wave audio was a premium in the DOS gaming era, but it's actually terrible that most DOS games sounds like a 5-10 year older Amiga game where they had to squeeze in all of the game on a single 880k disk and thus couldn't afford high quality sampled audio. P.S. New to the channel, haven't checked out your other content. If you ever want to dive deep into sound quality, you could use for example an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card in a computer running for example XP, and connect it analogue to the cards you test, and play back various test files (say 1kHz sine wave at the best quality the card can do (in particular test both with files sampled at 44.1kHz and 48kHz) and record it in 24/96 or 24/88.2 on the M-audio card, and use some software to measure distortion. You could also try it the other way around, i.e. play back a sine wave using the M-Audio card and record it with the card you are testing, and do the same analysis. Also you could do this with frequency sweeps, square waves, pulses (FFT analysis) and whatnot. Might take a lot of time but you could probably script a lot of it to automate it. I.E. just have the various test sounds as a play list and record all audio in one go, and then feed all results into some script who does all analysis. A tricky thing at least for the better sound cards is that you really would want either something that insulates the ground for the audio signal, or insulates power for one of the systems (i.e. a 1:1 mains full transformer powering either the system you are testing or the system using the M-audio card). The work-around for this would be to use audio cables that simply have thick enough ground shields, and also use short power cords and plug everything into the same power strip, to minimize ground loop hum. You might want to apply a notch filter for mains frequency and it's harmonies if it appears in the measured sound (and use test tones that isn't a harmony of the mains frequency, i.e. not 1kHz if you live in an area where the mains frequency is 50Hz). Or to make tests at bit easier for everyone to grasp, you could just use some free music and play it as is, and with various levels of digital attenuation on the audio file before playback, to put emphasis on noise and certain types of distortion. Although all of this would had been irrelevant in 1992, it would had been very relevant five years later as a used card for someones pentium system to listen to MP3 files.
In-depth review and comparison, thank you! There were efforts by different companies to create a "standard" back then so the idea wasn't too far-fetched. AdLib and a few others tried to push the "Gold Standard" to which only two other companies ultimately adhered (Toptek and another one I can't remember) while Microsoft tried to de-complexify the market with the WSS standard as well.
You're welcome, glad you liked the video! It was very much the wild west back then and Creative Labs was actually an aggressive cut throat company trying to push all competition away or sue them for infringement. Once Windows support was more important(and sound devices were more commonplace) they lost their foothold a bit.
A Windows Sound System card in a IBM PS/1 Consultant is the most “Janice from Accounting wearing a beige pants suite with shoulder pads” thing I’ve ever heard.
Mystic Towers: it's doing audio in a way that assumes a set sample rate and it doesn't work well if the assumption is wrong. It's not a very good implementation of Sound Blaster support.
I remember seeing these very cheap at Computer fairs in the UK. I think computer parts used to get dumped on the UK market if they could not be sold in the US. Usually a couple of years after they had been first sold. Or it was they had found a container full that had been lost. I was building/upgrading PC's in the mid 90's for students. The PC's had generally been used corporately so needed a cheap soundcard and sometimes a cheap "better" video card.
Yeah I think by 1995 prices on sound cards plummeted because of all the competition. It was also becoming more of a commodity item on PCs. Its crazy to think in 1992, people were buying sound cards near the same prices that we are paying now for mid to high end GPUs.
During sound blaster emulation you have clicks and pops because the io port and irq are handled in protected mode using v86 IO permission bit map - if game was written for real mode a lot of extra work for driver but if game made to working in DPMI less work less stutter. Just a guess.
The truly important question, though, is if you place a voice memo on a file with this program, will that voice memo function when the file's opened on a modern version of Excel?
It's definitely an odd one, if only the Sound Blaster compatibility was less broken. Seeing a Microsoft logo on any type of PCB add on card still weirds me out a bit. Is there a patch for MMX I'm missing?
@DOSStorm There an individual who redid the MIDI for an SC-55 and it sounds amazing. Not only on it but also the MU2000EX and other soundfonts. ruclips.net/video/LwfeO4uVAUI/видео.htmlsi=WvRlJlHHiZipwIi1
@@Vanessaira-Retro That looks and sounds amazing, thanks for sharing! I didn't realize how sort of whacky the DOS version of the game is until I played the SNES version years later. The DOS version is the one I grew up on, since I never had a SNES.
@DOSStorm I started with the SNES version, so when I heard the DOS version as well as the DOS version of Street Fighter 2. I cringed a bit. If you want the files just let me know.
This sound card predates Windows 95 and is not "plug and play" because that was not a thing that existed yet when it came out. If you know what the ISA bus settings (e.g. I/O address window and IRQ #) are, you can set up the card with most DOS-based games, including Doom. You may have to change some jumper settings, because, again, that was a thing you had to do sometimes back in 1992. Bottom line, you have to know what you're doing to get it to work. There is a reason why PC gaming didn't really become a mainstream thing until Windows 95 and Plug and Play happened.
PC gaming wasn't so widespread because the cost was astronomical. A Sega Genesis asking price was $180 while a PC sound card alone was $200+. But if someone's got a PC, it sure as hell was gamed on.
I did I set the resources manually and even reserved them in the BIOS. I even tried Set Blaster variables in the autoexec to help with detection. This card just has some issues with sample rates and general compatibility compared to other WSS capable cards that came later. Some of the later cards have a crystal chip that interfaces with SB through the AD chip to make it work better. Duke Nukem 2 for instance will only play certain sounds. In the intro it will play the voice line "I'm Back" but all the gun sounds are muted or cut off. The same thing happens in Duke 3D where all the sounds play too fast, get cut off or stutter. In Doom you only get FM, and I can't find anyone on RUclips or Vogons who has successfully made it work. Even in the documentation for this card, it warns you not to use FM and digitized sound at the same time in SB mode because it has stuttering issues. It really is a shame since it has potential to be amazing with the great build quality and OPL3 chip it has. The bad SB implementation and TSR needed kinda make it hard to recommend for games.
if you see a PCB that slight can shine through and it is not just a really simple analog power-supply: That is a really bad sign. electricity takes the path of least resistance and for a PCB that means when there is a positive track on the top then the return-current will flow in the ground-plane directly beneath that. And with signal-traces, specially when analog and digital is involved, it is paramount to allow the currents to flow like that. have any discontinuities (like splitting the ground plane or worse - no ground-plane) introduces a lot of cross-coupling and noise. Splitting the plane can be required but those are rare situations where you can actually electrically separate the 2 side fully and with the WSS this does not seem to be the case as they have some crosslinks and a connection in the corner. Basically that is as bad as you can make it.
Given how old it was and that time was basically the wild west of sound cards (or anything, really) I think it's not half bad! Always nice to hear (haha!) or see something different.
Imagine how irritating it would be if your co-worker had his spreadsheets being read out constantly... Seems like it was a product in search of a consumer base that really didn't exist.
I used to work with a guy who sent all his text messages out with voice dictation. It was definitely annoying. This was very much an experimental product and maybe it had some niche use, but it hardly seems like something anyone normal wanted.
I've written a driver for that thing 2 years ago, in Borland Pascal, for my SoundLib II, and effectively for the use in my Tetris II (see my video "Reviving an old DOS game"). So count my game to that list of indie games... Documentation was really hard to come by, I haven't found an official one (there's a book by Microsoft about that card, but it doesn't seem to be programming doc), so I dug up old Win 3.1 driver example code as well as some other sound libraries of that time. While the AD chip used was also used by other cards, that claim WSS compatibility, in one or the other revision, I do have several of those other cards, and they DO NOT behave the same - several minor differences and glitches that build up to a general compatibility disaster. Why am I saying this? I think these are the reasons why so few games supported this standard. It's just hard to come by and finicky. The SB cards also had their little flaws (SB Pro on SB 16? Yes, but it's Mono!), but in general they were compatible with their predecessors and didn't require additional tinkering.
It did a great job, complaining about its performance in anything other than windows is like complaining about the cold when you're wearing just a t-shirt.
Dude that looks like an IBM PS/1 G44. Is that right? I had one mine was at 20 MHZ. But it was the only one with the 5.25 bay below the 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives. Let me know please !!!!!!!
Close. It is a PS/1 Consultant 2155A-86C with a 25mhz 486SX and a CD-ROM. It does have a 5.25"/3.5" floppy combo drive but it needs some repair, which is why I have a 3.5" Sony drive in the other bay right now.
Oh man, that PS1. My first PC was a PS1 consultant, that came with a 25mhz 486sx, 4mb RAM, and a 170mb HDD. Later upgraded with a cd rom, soundblaster, and encylopedia upgrade kit lol. Then added 16mb RAM and a 2.xTB HDD, so I could play (at low fps) wolfenstein and doom. I want to say it came with a 2400 baud modem that we bumped up to 9600, then finally a 56k. I spent a good chunk of my childhood (when the free hours they included and open phone line were available) on Prodigy, CompuServe and Promenade.
Pretty much the same specs as this machine! Although this one came with an SB16 and CD-ROM(according to the sticker). I got this machine when I worked at Goodwill years ago with the original monitor for under $10. It would have had the original box but a co-worker of mine broke the box down. They were about to cut the cables off the monitor and chuck the PC in the recycle bin but I intervened. lol
@@DOSStorm That's awesome, such a cool find and story. I built my first PC (PII 400) with a (don't laugh, I didn't know what I was doing at 16) Diamond Stealth II G460 intel I740 graphics card. It chugged on everything I played until I found the AGP aperture setting in bios, then actually worked really well. I remember playing interstate '82 on it and it ran it great. So of course I GAVE AWAY my ps1. Wish I still had it! The front flip down door has the spec on it on the bottom right if I remember right.
@@DOSStorm Tks, gonna check for abadonware to play this night. I am in a retro speed run from stuff I used when I was a KID :) Also doing some track mod music too
Seems like businesses would have been better off just buying Sound Blaster cards… I think the rare ASP upgrade enabled some text to speech functionality. Maybe if Creative had marketed that to businesses, then maybe more software would have been developed to take advantage of the ASP for business use.
100%. I would say Creative's implementation of text-to-speech was quite a bit better than what Microsoft did here. The software doesn't actually require a WSS card to work either, and the same WSS driver/software package actually contains special drivers for Sound Blaster cards. There is no real advantage of using an SB16 or something with a WSS driver though, you're much better off using Creative's driver which has MIDI support. I just question whether anyone needed TTS for any business related activity in 1992. It seems like it was a fleeting gimmick especially considering how poor the dictionary is.
I think that card was for a very brief moment on my shopping list until my know it all friend told me to never ever purchase anything sound related that not bears a Creative Labs brand. 😂 Wise words at that time maybe not so much later. (I think that I never considered any Midi expansion, a PAS 16 or a GUS because of that mindset)
@@brodriguez11000 I had only Creative cards back then, a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 on my 386, a Sound Blaster AWE32 on my Pentium 60 thru Pentium Pro, a Sound Blaster Live on my PII and Slot-A Athlon, the first non Creative card I got was also my last, as a non retro enthusiast, an Hercules Game Theater Xp that I had for a very long time, then I got a USB DAC headphone Amp that I still use (8+ years)
As a gear loonie in the nineties , it is surprising that I never got a hold of one of these. I suppose it was due to the store I frequented, never had them on the shelf. I seemed to have tried just about every other one. And settled on Soundblaster 64 gold and a Roland LAPCI card.😁 Play On
Thinking back to 1992 (I can) I don't see this as such a silly idea. Audio and graphics standards were a mess back then. Dont even go into himem.sys and such...
ZONE RAIDERS!! Man I had a demo of that game as a kid, spent years trying to find it again whet I was older, and more years trying to get it running...I think I did get it running alright in DOSBox at some point, at least the first level, but this may be the first time I've seen it anywhere else...and running damn well too! ...I gotta see if I can get that running on my media/steam PC. That would be epic as hell to play on this projector with a Steam controller...
Yeah I played the demo from a shareware disc a ton as a kid before I got the full version. These days you can buy a pre-configured re-release for modern systems on Zoom Platform for like $3. www.zoom-platform.com/product/zone-raiders
It looks "solid" because there's a pretty decent ground plane on tbe pcb. 'Tis the mark of good design and probably the main reason for the superior noise floor.
So it as a sound card for Excel that Excels at very little. A board made by the numbers. And all just fitting the lowest needs for efficiency? ... oh no I am here ALL WEEK!
Did anyone who makes the HAL analogy actually finish the 2001: A space odyssey movie? They know HAL is a murderer right? I'm not saying that isn't technically impressive and all, it's just a bit like naming your voice assistant Cortana. Oh, wait....
Are you saying that the voice reader feature used pre-recorded speech and not synthesised text to speech when reading text aloud? That's not very good at all. The performance of the WSS card in Mystic Towers was particularly troublesome. Since I've not played One Must Fall, I don't really know what it should sound like. To me the WSS card sounded just fine when you played Tyrian 2000.
Yeah, it's prerecorded speech. The best you get for unknown words is the option for it to read out individual letters. Tyrian and Descent support WSS natively so they work perfectly without the need for SB emulation. Mystic Towers and OMF are using the emulation which is why they sound off.
That's literally what Microsoft does: make a reference product to try to break a bad market leader (Soundblaster in DOS), build the driver in the OS, encourage third parties to implement it. We had the sound blaster but we hated it, it was terrible to resolve the IRQ conflicts when you had another device, like a printer or modem. WSS hardware used a higher IRQ with rare conflicts. It was 16 bit instead of 8 bit, had ad lib fm sounds, it was great. The first no frills audio card. Dos games isn't everything. These were the days of multimedia and windows
I wouldnt refer to soundcard released after the Soundblaster as 'early'. The early era was defined by PC sound being utterly unbearable (Yea, including The MT-32, because just playing premade instruments still is is ridiculosly bad!). So ther early soundcard era was exactly until the Soundblaster would enable PCs to finally reproduce arbitrary sounds, which they lacked before (no matter the still disgustingly bad sound quality). ;)
"Not all cards were 100 percent Soundblaster compatible.." *Pro Audio Spectrum 16 enters the chat* The entire chat: "GET TF OUT OF HERE AND STOP LYING!"
@@DOSStorm It was an amazing card when it came out. I bought one right off but quickly found out how that 100 percent compatibility was more like 92.46 percent. Once games started to support it though it was a beast!
@@DOSStorm It was REALLY strange that Creative didn't make the 16 completely compatible with the SB Pro. I remember being VERY annoyed with that but overall yeah the SB16 was waaaaayyyy more user friendly!
@@DOSStorm the only SB I didn't have was the SB1.0. I used to get the new one every time one came out but went straight from the CMS to the SB2.0. I just loved being annoyed and editing my Autoexec and Config.sys with new hardware contantly back then! lol
The DOS version MMX is kind of an abomination. Maybe it's an acquired taste? It was the first way I played through the game so it kind of sounds "right" to me even though I know it's not.
![12 Best F-Droid Open-Source Apps You’ll NEVER Find on the Play Store! [2025]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/KSPoLLAXc9w/mqdefault.jpg)
What a missed opportunity to add FMV to Excel for the true 90s solution looking for a problem.
Yes, the world needed a live action clippy adaptation inside of Excel.
at some point you could embed shockwave flash objects in excel sheets
@@lasskinn474shockwave my beloved🥲
The light being blocked is from what's called a "copper pour", usually used for a ground plane. Among other features, it will provide more sheilding. In the case of the the MS card, it seems to be split into an analogue and digital ground; right and left respectively. This further isolates any interference.
I'm actually surprised that the SB card doesn't use larger ground planes (it uses some, the larger opaque patches), but there's probably a reason for why the engineers made it that way, maybe their own way of isolating analogue and digital ground? Or maybe it's just that SB is a 2 layer board and the MS is 4.
It doesn't actually cost more to have a PCB made with larger copper planes (since copper is not added but removed in PCB manufature), all else being equal so that wouldn't be an indicator of quality. But 4 layers would be more expensive (to what degree 30 years ago I don't know) and provide better isolation/interfernce reduction, so maybe that's why it has that quieter noise floor.
Actually I'm pretty sure now the SB card is 2 layer and the MS 4. Smaller copper pours could be from a hesitancy to use large copper planes since back in the day (like 70s-early 80s) large copper areas on big boards (bigger PCB being "floppier" due to proportionally being thinner) could cause them to warp.
" In the case of the the MS card, it seems to be split into an analogue and digital ground; right and left respectively. This further isolates any interference. "
Nah - most of the times that is the opposite of what you want cause it significantly increases coupling and interference.
@@ABaumstumpf I looked up the Analog Devices AD1848 datasheet, on page 26 they recommend a split digital and analogue ground plane "for the best isolation".
@@ABaumstumpf In the Analog Devices AD1848 datasheet, on page 26 they recommend a split digital and analogue ground plane "for the best isolation".
Not necessarily fully related to the video but a thought I had when you were talking about the Excel multimedia gimmicks.... it's very similar to today where a lot of very strange industries are playing with AI. While I do think it can be cringe for to use AI when it's really not necessary, as much as it is for spreadsheet software to utilize sound cards, it's really just part of the learning process when new technology comes out, we find out what works, and we find out what doesn't.
I agree, most tech has an awkward experimental stage. Another example is VR headsets, which existed for quite a long time but have really only recently been implemented in a way that works well.
WSS does look like a 4 layer card.
The digital section is laid out normally with internal pour and surface routing.
The analogue section is laid out inverted, with the outer layers being ground pours for shielding and internal routing. Notice how most of the signal path traces are not visible on either of the surfaces, instead most components are connected straight to vias, many underneath the components instead of to the side, and nowhere else. Gives the whole card quite an eery look.
This looks to be by far not the only design trait, it actually is a really nice card. Actually arguably this inverted shielded layout probably doesn't do much, but it doesn't hurt either. The ground pour near signals does help, and just avoiding silly signal loops and tight component placement and routing helps a lot, and component selection helps a lot as well. Many soundcards with that AD WSS codec are quite clean!
And yes Creative is just thrown together on 2 layers everything cutting right across not a care in the world.
Thank you for the insight! Good to know I wasn't talking completely out of my butt. It is a nicely built card, it was just released a little too late. By that time Creative had a deathgrip on the market.
3:17, yes, proper ground planes matter when it comes to anything analog.
Digital circuits are the enemy of analog audio, they require separation of grounds this is where you see though areas on the pcb
Oh hey, a familiar face :)
@@fragglet the world is small, at least on the Internet. 😁
And OP275 op-amps that's a luxury!
For everything. You want a nice, big, solid groundplane. And no - separating it from the digital side is very of the biggest source of noise.
3:21 Has a legit ground plane: lower noise floor. Also that line from top to bottom infers the two ground planes are isolated, further avoiding noise entering.
Funny I completely forgot just how bad sound cards used to be until the late 90's. Routing the audio from a cd rom drive to the sound card was a thing.
We didn't get digital audio from CD-ROM drives until we got WDM drivers, and those weren't super popular until the Windows 2000/XP era. I ran out of 4-pin CD-audio cables when I built my Pentium 4 2.0 GHz/GeForce 2/Sound Blaster Live system, and then realized that if I want to use VXD drivers to get better EAX effects I need to grab another cable for Redbook audio.
@@physbryan ands all those dos games where you had to st up interrupt numbers...
@@c6jones720 Eh, that was relatively easy once you figured out what settings would work with your build. The biggest problem for me was forgetting that IRQ 7 was shared between the printer port and the sound card. It normally wasn't a problem, until a sound-making screen saver started up during a long print job!
And then onboard audio basically replaced sound cards a few years after they became good.
@dycedargselderbrother5353 it took well over a decade, the first AC'97 in the Pentium 3/Celerons were quite CPU binding and lacked surround sound, good midi synthesis and EAX, the Audigy 2 sold quite well, after about 2005 I think onboard was good enough for most.
For when the farty beeps emanating from the PC speaker aren't enough embarrassment when you hit the wrong keys in an office full of co-workers.
Yes, but unlike the farty PC speaker, you could at least turn down the speakers attached to your sound card.
I can do this on my modern PC too...
Your production values and editing have really gone way up in the past 18 months. I feel this is one of your best videos, if not the very best. DOS sound card coverage outside of gaming is not common on RUclips, so I'm really glad you're covering it.
Thank you! I put a lot of effort into these videos, and comments like this mean a lot. :)
Just subscribed, youtube recommended your video and glad it did. Keep these great videos coming!
I'm definitely going to keep making them. Thanks for watching!
I remember working with this card... The included speech recognition system was excellent+ when used properly, (possibly the best available at the time), but it definitely was not a general-purpose sound card.
While Microsoft's WSS card didn't succeed well, I remember many cards and chipsets through the 1990s were both SB Pro and WSS compatible and worked quite well. I had one with a Crystal chipset that included a CD-ROM interface back in the day, for example.
Yes, some of the Aztech cards for instance were WSS capable and the SB support was much better. Some cards even used a Crystal chip as sort of a bridge for the AD chip to interface with SB supported things.
It just highlights how much of a mess the PC platform was in the early 90s. Rapid technological advancements, but with no coordination or standardization, meaning that sometimes things that became industry standards were just crap. It looks that WSS was technically a better product than SB in most ways, but with SB already established as the de facto standard, and no concept of a universal audio driver architecture, it was doomed to failure.
Thankfully Windows gaming with its abstraction layers that actually made sense, DirectX and stuff, fixed this and now it's not nearly as bad as it was in those times.
It is actually very similar to a format wars that happened with formats like VHS and BetaMax or D-VHS and DVD. It's not always the best overall format that wins, it's the one that is most established or convenient. It is definitely good things are more standardized these days, but this awkward period of computing is really interesting to me in retrospect. I just like how everyone was throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what would stick.
They weren’t just selling HW. They were selling the SW package too. Without it you could play WAV files on the beeper
When I was a kid I saw Windows Sound System in the setup menu and wondered but all the adults said was they'd be shite without further explanation. Now I see what they meant.
I used to have a cheapo Reveal sound card. Sometimes, it just muted without any errors. Finally got it - had to open its proprietary setup TSR program and reselect the right device setting, one option was Windows Sound System, don't remember the other. Nor which was the right, but it just sometimes flipped into wrong on its own. Gotten that, was of satisfactory quality and very reliable.
Gen Tux able,
he only plays games, back then nobody bought it for games !!!!!!!
SB Pro only or SB 16, rest of the sound cards came with te system, daddy never used it ????
@ yeah I never bought anything myself before the Athlon 64 came out I got it from recycling. Shame on me for being not as old as you hoped. :)
The sound card I want to know if it ever existed at all or was vaporware is the Media Vision ProZonic. I saw an advertisement for it in computer magazines in the 90's, with claims to support pretty much every sound standard there was. Pro Audio Spectrum 16 of course, Sound Blaster pro/16 etc. Covox Sound Master 2 and more. IIRC about the only one not supported was Gravis UltraSound.
Was it ever sold or did it just make it to prototype or engineering sample state? Was it just about to go into production when Media Vision went under then was axed by the new owners? I wonder if in any of the scans of old computer magazines in the web archive there is preserved any article or advertisement for the ProZonic?
The revived Media Vision tried telling me there was no such thing as a "Jazz 16" sound card, despite the fact I was holding it in my hand, looking at a magazine article on it, and printed right on the card was the then current company name and address, AND the name of the card JAZZ 16. Now why would the revived Media Vision that clearly and obviously did make that card tell me while taking to someone there on a phone call, that no such item existed? No wonder the second go of the company also went out of business.
Another bit of computer parts history you could dive into is the company that was one of the largest manufacturers of PC video cards that insisted it never made any. Trident Microsystems made "reference designs" which they licensed to other companies to base their video cards on. Trident also helped out by producing "reference kits" of a PCB and parts for other companies to assemble for their testing and development. Those PCBs had Trident's name, FCC ID numbers and other information. The thing with those kits was Trident never limited how many anyone could purchase.
The vast majority of Trident video cards were simply reference kits other companies assembled and shoved into a shoddy box with a cheaply printed manual and the driver install might have got a slight rebranding. Only once did I ever encounter a Trident based video card that would not work with Trident's reference drivers. It was pretty useless because the company that took the rare rout of not simply soldering together Trident kit-cards also went the extra mile to customize its BIOS to only accept their customized drivers - then they proceeded to NOT release a driver for Windows 98.
So Trident never made a single video card while manufacturing many thousands of them. Imagine if Ford made all the parts for their cars then sold them as kits to anyone to assemble, than flat out refused to provide any support or repairs "Because Ford doesn't make cars."
Was it actually advertised as the "ProZonic"? I know the "ProSonic" exists, I wonder if they just changed the branding before it was released?
@DOSStorm I just remember seeing an ad or announcement for a card that supported pretty much every PC audio standard other than GUS.
no.. this card was not ment for games.. or even DOS really... but it worked great in linux and windows NT ... and it has a 48khz sampling rate.. not 44khz.. soundblaster is limited to a weird max sample rate of '45.4khz'... ...the RCA jacks were perfect for stereo systems as well.... listening to music from CD was done by 'rip and play' routines...
comparing this card to a soundblaster is apples to oranges... and comparing the emulation layer to the native 48khz 16bit sample rate it can do is unfair.. use something like impulse tracker 2, adlib tracker 2, or mpxplay and try again... this card sounds much better than you are giving it credit for...
If you're referring to the Wikipedia page for this card it does say it has a 48khz sampling rate. I think it is a typo though. The PC Mag Nov 24, 1992(page 37) article referenced on that very page specifies it plays and records at 16bit 44khz stereo. This is also consistent with an InfoWorld article published on Sep 21, 1992(Page 137).
As for CDs you can play them using the 3.5mm line in, which wasn't really an uncommon solution at the time and I demonstrated that on the Screamer 2 demo. You're right the card was more for Windows use and NOT for games. However, in 1992 DOS was still something you needed to support in my opinion and the competition were doing it for around the same price. In 1992, Windows was really optional and many people were just doing everything in DOS. Even when Windows 95 came out there were many games and programs that needed sound in DOS.
For testing I always try to show the strengths and weaknesses of a card and give them a fair chance. The FM on this is on par with a SB16/Pro since it is literally the same chip, and for games that support the WSS standard I think it is superior, which is why Descent 2 and Tyrian sound awesome here. However, the Sound Blaster emulation for digital sound is one of the worst I've tested, and literally micro stutters in many games if it even works at all. One Must Fall 2097 and Dune 2 were best case scenarios in terms of that. I do get what you're saying though... Sound Blaster is TECHNICALLY inferior to WSS, but I feel the lack of support in most programs kind of makes it one sided in Creative's favor. The later WSS cards like the ones made by Aztech are much better all around cards for this reason.
I do think RAD Tracker is a good idea for future videos though. Thanks for watching.
EDIT: So I looked at the datasheet for the AD1848JP that is used for this card, and it does say it supports 48khz..... so maybe you're right and I'm more confused as ever. lol
@@DOSStorm yes its indeed 48khz... i used to own one of these cards, used it for a very, very, very long time in an ever-evolving linux machine... i played CDs by 'ripping' them realtime to the soundcard.... sounded much better than the analog cable or doing the same with the DAC of the SB16..... while the card was made in 1992 it was so advanced it lived well beyond its initial creation to windows XP and is still supported in linux if you happen to have an ISA bus... ...my coveted SB AWE32 however is in a P3 that boots 98SE....
How interesting!! LGR now has some serious competition for old stuff reviews! I just subscribed so keep them good videos coming ❤
who need these nerdy people ? Computer museum ?
High praise, thank you. More videos are on the way!
Is there a way I can get beeps and boops in modern excel like in this video?
I think you missed the overall application of a soundcard like this within windows: multimedia, as generic as that sounds. It was starting to get pretty big in this era and programs like Authorware from the brand new Macromedia were breaking onto the market. It especially found use in things like computer-based training and education/academia that could be used by relative non programmers for simple workflows. There were other applications, namely Powerpoint and Asymmetrix Compel where a soundcard in a business setting would have been especially useful. Windows-based video recorders like the Intel Smart Video Recorder were only a year away from this and all stuff our research center at a major state university did in the days of Windows 3.1. Practically nobody was thinking about putting this stuff on the web until much later.
Ahh, for the office manager who wants to make sure that absolutely nobody plays video games on their watch.
Wow, what a nostalgic trip this video was for me. I had almost forgot about Screamer 2 (I played it A LOT) and my trusty AWE64 soundcard that I used until ISA ports wasn´t a thing anymore. Had to change sound card at that point...
HammerFall! A man of culture.
I have been known to enjoy some Power Metal from time to time. :)
I remember getting to play with one of these in 1993. I was blown away with the voice recognition at the time. I think you could load programs or select menu options? Bit of a gimmick though. I had a sound blaster v2 at home at the time.
The weirdest thing about WSS is the whole "version 2.0" thing where they completely pivoted from WSS being "a piece of hardware" to it being "a standard for multimedia support on PCs". Lacking the context of what Microsoft was actually doing with WSS at that time, it still doesn't make a ton of sense to me. It seems kind of like they were trying to make fletch happen with all the software just supporting WSS, and all the rest of the hardware vendors were supposed to fall in line and build to that standard. LOL. Good luck with that.
EDIT: OTOH, this is kinda what Windows' hardware abstraction, and later DirectX, were all about too: Create a reference API and let the hardware vendors write drivers that conform to that, so software vendors don't have to support individual devices. And of course, that worked when Windows became THE platform to code for on PC. But in the DOS/Win3x days? naaahhhh....
Thank you for keeping DOS alive!
WSS supports up to 48KHz, 16Bit. And later games support them. Games can be patched to support wss, too
Another commenter mentioned this. What is weird is all the news articles in 92' mention a playback sample rate of 44khz. However, the AD1848JP datasheet says the chip supports 48khz so you're probably right.
@@DOSStorm Turrican 2 for DOS > Test it out ^^
I remember those cards. They were for sale at Software Etc. in the Puente Hills Mall and the funny thing about it was that the salespeople didn't really know what it did (they read the box and claimed that it was an Adlib clone). It literally left the shelves after a month.
8:31 Hey DOS Storm! What's this word processor called?
Neat vid, btw. I've never really given WSS much consideration. Back in those days I was using ESS cards. So this was a nice journey outside the familiar. Thanks.
It's the DOS version of "The Children's Writing & Publishing Center" made by The Learning Company.
@@DOSStormThanks much.
Tried it and it's not quite what im looking for. There's a similar graphical DOS word processor for kids that I used in 1994, but for the life of me I can't remember what it's called, or enough of the interface to even describe it. I just have a fraction of a memory of it and it's been driving me crazy for years. Hopefully I find it one day.
the sb emulation sounds better than expected, but it did allow for a whole breed of sbpro and wss compatible clones later
The FM synth is a real OPL3 so it will mostly sound like an SB16 for music. The digital sound is where it has problems and it doesn't work most of the time even on really popular games like Doom or Duke3d.
Yeah chips like the cheap and ubiquitous opti929 just look at the datasheet... it just piggy backs off one of these, but adding midi routing, game port, sound blaster emulation and optical drive address logic. WSS is quite fortunate for those since it only needs a couple flow control pins, 8-bit data bus and 2-bit address bus, so the cost of the package doesn't explode with the number of IO lines, which get expensive. Of course until AC97 came about which had even fewer pins and became an even more obvious choice.
3:05 - Not moronic at all! Notice separate ground-planes for 'analog' ground and 'digital' ground and that they are 'starred' at the edge connector!
6:03
I think you’ve missed the value proposition of the proofread function. It’s for checking transcribed columns of numbers: You listen to the numbers you entered while you read them from the source.
There was no other practical way for a single person to check transcriptions of numbers in excel for accuracy at that time. Arguably the WSS method would result in fewer errors than a second person reading aloud. In other words, that WSS card had up to the value of whatever it costs to pay a person to read numbers from a screen. If that task is a full-time job then it’s $299 once to save $18k per year. Those cards would have paid for themselves in weeks when actually doing what they were designed to do.
I have no idea if they actually worked for that task, but I remember that era, and it was and is clear to me that that is what they were designed for.
Cool video!
Even though it clearly has bugs when playing games, the sounds that actually sounds correct sounds cleaner.
I get that bandwidth on the ISA bus for sampled/wave audio was a premium in the DOS gaming era, but it's actually terrible that most DOS games sounds like a 5-10 year older Amiga game where they had to squeeze in all of the game on a single 880k disk and thus couldn't afford high quality sampled audio.
P.S. New to the channel, haven't checked out your other content. If you ever want to dive deep into sound quality, you could use for example an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card in a computer running for example XP, and connect it analogue to the cards you test, and play back various test files (say 1kHz sine wave at the best quality the card can do (in particular test both with files sampled at 44.1kHz and 48kHz) and record it in 24/96 or 24/88.2 on the M-audio card, and use some software to measure distortion. You could also try it the other way around, i.e. play back a sine wave using the M-Audio card and record it with the card you are testing, and do the same analysis. Also you could do this with frequency sweeps, square waves, pulses (FFT analysis) and whatnot. Might take a lot of time but you could probably script a lot of it to automate it. I.E. just have the various test sounds as a play list and record all audio in one go, and then feed all results into some script who does all analysis. A tricky thing at least for the better sound cards is that you really would want either something that insulates the ground for the audio signal, or insulates power for one of the systems (i.e. a 1:1 mains full transformer powering either the system you are testing or the system using the M-audio card). The work-around for this would be to use audio cables that simply have thick enough ground shields, and also use short power cords and plug everything into the same power strip, to minimize ground loop hum. You might want to apply a notch filter for mains frequency and it's harmonies if it appears in the measured sound (and use test tones that isn't a harmony of the mains frequency, i.e. not 1kHz if you live in an area where the mains frequency is 50Hz).
Or to make tests at bit easier for everyone to grasp, you could just use some free music and play it as is, and with various levels of digital attenuation on the audio file before playback, to put emphasis on noise and certain types of distortion.
Although all of this would had been irrelevant in 1992, it would had been very relevant five years later as a used card for someones pentium system to listen to MP3 files.
In-depth review and comparison, thank you! There were efforts by different companies to create a "standard" back then so the idea wasn't too far-fetched. AdLib and a few others tried to push the "Gold Standard" to which only two other companies ultimately adhered (Toptek and another one I can't remember) while Microsoft tried to de-complexify the market with the WSS standard as well.
You're welcome, glad you liked the video! It was very much the wild west back then and Creative Labs was actually an aggressive cut throat company trying to push all competition away or sue them for infringement. Once Windows support was more important(and sound devices were more commonplace) they lost their foothold a bit.
A Windows Sound System card in a IBM PS/1 Consultant is the most “Janice from Accounting wearing a beige pants suite with shoulder pads” thing I’ve ever heard.
Somehow One Must Fall at the slower playback rate doesn't sound half bad?
I agree. If that song wasn't etched into my memory I might not have even noticed.
the music is just so banging it works with anything in any speed
Mystic Towers: it's doing audio in a way that assumes a set sample rate and it doesn't work well if the assumption is wrong. It's not a very good implementation of Sound Blaster support.
What's the game at 4:50?
SkyRoads
I remember seeing these very cheap at Computer fairs in the UK. I think computer parts used to get dumped on the UK market if they could not be sold in the US. Usually a couple of years after they had been first sold. Or it was they had found a container full that had been lost. I was building/upgrading PC's in the mid 90's for students. The PC's had generally been used corporately so needed a cheap soundcard and sometimes a cheap "better" video card.
Yeah I think by 1995 prices on sound cards plummeted because of all the competition. It was also becoming more of a commodity item on PCs. Its crazy to think in 1992, people were buying sound cards near the same prices that we are paying now for mid to high end GPUs.
During sound blaster emulation you have clicks and pops because the io port and irq are handled in protected mode using v86 IO permission bit map - if game was written for real mode a lot of extra work for driver but if game made to working in DPMI less work less stutter. Just a guess.
The truly important question, though, is if you place a voice memo on a file with this program, will that voice memo function when the file's opened on a modern version of Excel?
I like the way you think, I might just have to try that!
Can someone tell me the name of the game at 4:49? I completely forgot about this game until that popped up. I used to play it a lot as a kid though.
Skyroads.
One of the few soundcards I have yet to use. Neat video!
DOS Storm, do you want a redone MIDI patch for Mega Man X?
It's definitely an odd one, if only the Sound Blaster compatibility was less broken. Seeing a Microsoft logo on any type of PCB add on card still weirds me out a bit. Is there a patch for MMX I'm missing?
@DOSStorm There an individual who redid the MIDI for an SC-55 and it sounds amazing. Not only on it but also the MU2000EX and other soundfonts.
ruclips.net/video/LwfeO4uVAUI/видео.htmlsi=WvRlJlHHiZipwIi1
@@Vanessaira-Retro That looks and sounds amazing, thanks for sharing! I didn't realize how sort of whacky the DOS version of the game is until I played the SNES version years later. The DOS version is the one I grew up on, since I never had a SNES.
@DOSStorm I started with the SNES version, so when I heard the DOS version as well as the DOS version of Street Fighter 2. I cringed a bit. If you want the files just let me know.
@@Vanessaira-Retro Yes! If you could pass those along to my email, Twitter or just Archive.org that would be great. Thank you.
This sound card predates Windows 95 and is not "plug and play" because that was not a thing that existed yet when it came out. If you know what the ISA bus settings (e.g. I/O address window and IRQ #) are, you can set up the card with most DOS-based games, including Doom. You may have to change some jumper settings, because, again, that was a thing you had to do sometimes back in 1992. Bottom line, you have to know what you're doing to get it to work. There is a reason why PC gaming didn't really become a mainstream thing until Windows 95 and Plug and Play happened.
PC gaming wasn't so widespread because the cost was astronomical. A Sega Genesis asking price was $180 while a PC sound card alone was $200+.
But if someone's got a PC, it sure as hell was gamed on.
@@mykolapliashechnykov8701 There is some truth to that, but it's entirely off-topic here.
I did I set the resources manually and even reserved them in the BIOS. I even tried Set Blaster variables in the autoexec to help with detection. This card just has some issues with sample rates and general compatibility compared to other WSS capable cards that came later. Some of the later cards have a crystal chip that interfaces with SB through the AD chip to make it work better.
Duke Nukem 2 for instance will only play certain sounds. In the intro it will play the voice line "I'm Back" but all the gun sounds are muted or cut off. The same thing happens in Duke 3D where all the sounds play too fast, get cut off or stutter. In Doom you only get FM, and I can't find anyone on RUclips or Vogons who has successfully made it work.
Even in the documentation for this card, it warns you not to use FM and digitized sound at the same time in SB mode because it has stuttering issues. It really is a shame since it has potential to be amazing with the great build quality and OPL3 chip it has. The bad SB implementation and TSR needed kinda make it hard to recommend for games.
Wow Zone Raiders, didn't think anyone else played that one!
if you see a PCB that slight can shine through and it is not just a really simple analog power-supply: That is a really bad sign.
electricity takes the path of least resistance and for a PCB that means when there is a positive track on the top then the return-current will flow in the ground-plane directly beneath that. And with signal-traces, specially when analog and digital is involved, it is paramount to allow the currents to flow like that. have any discontinuities (like splitting the ground plane or worse - no ground-plane) introduces a lot of cross-coupling and noise.
Splitting the plane can be required but those are rare situations where you can actually electrically separate the 2 side fully and with the WSS this does not seem to be the case as they have some crosslinks and a connection in the corner. Basically that is as bad as you can make it.
Given how old it was and that time was basically the wild west of sound cards (or anything, really) I think it's not half bad! Always nice to hear (haha!) or see something different.
2:56 - уже заблокировали звук из за лицензии.
You had me there for a second, I was checking my channel for restrictions. 😆
Putin loves it !
all your base are belong to us
так там просто тихий шум, демонстрация того как она шумит
I'm pretty sure not being able to see through it just means that the board has a ground plane
Love the grim clouds on the Screamer UK track.
Imagine how irritating it would be if your co-worker had his spreadsheets being read out constantly... Seems like it was a product in search of a consumer base that really didn't exist.
I used to work with a guy who sent all his text messages out with voice dictation. It was definitely annoying. This was very much an experimental product and maybe it had some niche use, but it hardly seems like something anyone normal wanted.
I sometimes used the Windows Sound System to play some older games as I had a sound card back in the day that had WSS compatibility.
james
what is it you need ?
WDM driver you need ?
I've written a driver for that thing 2 years ago, in Borland Pascal, for my SoundLib II, and effectively for the use in my Tetris II (see my video "Reviving an old DOS game"). So count my game to that list of indie games...
Documentation was really hard to come by, I haven't found an official one (there's a book by Microsoft about that card, but it doesn't seem to be programming doc), so I dug up old Win 3.1 driver example code as well as some other sound libraries of that time. While the AD chip used was also used by other cards, that claim WSS compatibility, in one or the other revision, I do have several of those other cards, and they DO NOT behave the same - several minor differences and glitches that build up to a general compatibility disaster.
Why am I saying this? I think these are the reasons why so few games supported this standard. It's just hard to come by and finicky. The SB cards also had their little flaws (SB Pro on SB 16? Yes, but it's Mono!), but in general they were compatible with their predecessors and didn't require additional tinkering.
4:48 Jesus, I havent thought about Skyroads in years!! I spent so many hours on that game as a kid
For the most part, it sounded pretty good.
It did a great job, complaining about its performance in anything other than windows is like complaining about the cold when you're wearing just a t-shirt.
Neat! I learned something new.
Dude that looks like an IBM PS/1 G44. Is that right? I had one mine was at 20 MHZ. But it was the only one with the 5.25 bay below the 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives. Let me know please !!!!!!!
Close. It is a PS/1 Consultant 2155A-86C with a 25mhz 486SX and a CD-ROM. It does have a 5.25"/3.5" floppy combo drive but it needs some repair, which is why I have a 3.5" Sony drive in the other bay right now.
Oh man, that PS1. My first PC was a PS1 consultant, that came with a 25mhz 486sx, 4mb RAM, and a 170mb HDD. Later upgraded with a cd rom, soundblaster, and encylopedia upgrade kit lol. Then added 16mb RAM and a 2.xTB HDD, so I could play (at low fps) wolfenstein and doom. I want to say it came with a 2400 baud modem that we bumped up to 9600, then finally a 56k. I spent a good chunk of my childhood (when the free hours they included and open phone line were available) on Prodigy, CompuServe and Promenade.
Pretty much the same specs as this machine! Although this one came with an SB16 and CD-ROM(according to the sticker). I got this machine when I worked at Goodwill years ago with the original monitor for under $10.
It would have had the original box but a co-worker of mine broke the box down. They were about to cut the cables off the monitor and chuck the PC in the recycle bin but I intervened. lol
@@DOSStorm That's awesome, such a cool find and story. I built my first PC (PII 400) with a (don't laugh, I didn't know what I was doing at 16) Diamond Stealth II G460 intel I740 graphics card. It chugged on everything I played until I found the AGP aperture setting in bios, then actually worked really well. I remember playing interstate '82 on it and it ran it great. So of course I GAVE AWAY my ps1. Wish I still had it! The front flip down door has the spec on it on the bottom right if I remember right.
Whats the game at 4:20 ? I remeber playing this game at this time (had a creative kit) but forgot the name
Mystic Towers, it's actually a game published by Apogee.
@@DOSStorm Tks, gonna check for abadonware to play this night. I am in a retro speed run from stuff I used when I was a KID :) Also doing some track mod music too
I need to ask my father about this card because we have this microphone!
The Plastic stick in a Holder ?
That microphone came with lots of different PC products in the 90s. It could have come with just about anything.
@@DOSStorm Interresting...
I can say that it is better than many cheap microphones.
I really kind of dig the sharty FM synth Sega Genesis sounds from '93, but honestly that's what it is.
How are you going to miss mentioning that is Bonnie from Knight Rider in that commercial.
Forgive my ignorance but I didn't know who it was. lol
@DOSStorm 😂
Seems like businesses would have been better off just buying Sound Blaster cards…
I think the rare ASP upgrade enabled some text to speech functionality. Maybe if Creative had marketed that to businesses, then maybe more software would have been developed to take advantage of the ASP for business use.
100%. I would say Creative's implementation of text-to-speech was quite a bit better than what Microsoft did here. The software doesn't actually require a WSS card to work either, and the same WSS driver/software package actually contains special drivers for Sound Blaster cards. There is no real advantage of using an SB16 or something with a WSS driver though, you're much better off using Creative's driver which has MIDI support. I just question whether anyone needed TTS for any business related activity in 1992. It seems like it was a fleeting gimmick especially considering how poor the dictionary is.
@@DOSStormThey were selling a package of both software and hardware. It needed some hardware to run it.
I think that card was for a very brief moment on my shopping list until my know it all friend told me to never ever purchase anything sound related that not bears a Creative Labs brand. 😂 Wise words at that time maybe not so much later. (I think that I never considered any Midi expansion, a PAS 16 or a GUS because of that mindset)
Mine was Guillemont Maxi sound 64.
@@brodriguez11000 I had only Creative cards back then, a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 on my 386, a Sound Blaster AWE32 on my Pentium 60 thru Pentium Pro, a Sound Blaster Live on my PII and Slot-A Athlon, the first non Creative card I got was also my last, as a non retro enthusiast, an Hercules Game Theater Xp that I had for a very long time, then I got a USB DAC headphone Amp that I still use (8+ years)
"That's NOT what Descent sounded like, at all!" - Me, owner of mostly cheap ESS sound cards in the 90's.
As a gear loonie in the nineties , it is surprising that I never got a hold of one of these. I suppose it was due to the store I frequented, never had them on the shelf. I seemed to have tried just about every other one. And settled on Soundblaster 64 gold and a Roland LAPCI card.😁 Play On
The AWE64 Gold is a great card, I regret selling mine years ago.
Excel used to contain a flight game wonder if that has sound with this
Thinking back to 1992 (I can) I don't see this as such a silly idea. Audio and graphics standards were a mess back then. Dont even go into himem.sys and such...
The lack of SB compat is prolly due to the spirit of AARD code 🤔
4:49 what is that game from my childhood!!?
I just found out that my Canon business scanner comes with a midi file that you can play while it's scanning... and it's not a great composition 😂
This give me "sound blaster at home" vibes
More like the Sound Blaster we have at work. lol
ZONE RAIDERS!! Man I had a demo of that game as a kid, spent years trying to find it again whet I was older, and more years trying to get it running...I think I did get it running alright in DOSBox at some point, at least the first level, but this may be the first time I've seen it anywhere else...and running damn well too!
...I gotta see if I can get that running on my media/steam PC. That would be epic as hell to play on this projector with a Steam controller...
Yeah I played the demo from a shareware disc a ton as a kid before I got the full version. These days you can buy a pre-configured re-release for modern systems on Zoom Platform for like $3. www.zoom-platform.com/product/zone-raiders
@@DOSStorm oh nice, thanks!
What is that light thing you have on your desk?
It's a plasma lamp. If you want to find one like it, Google "swirly Lumisource Plasma Lamp"
@@DOSStorm Thanks
7:13 we do need to buy more cheese
that Megaman X suddenly remind me to C64 SID Chip.
It looks "solid" because there's a pretty decent ground plane on tbe pcb. 'Tis the mark of good design and probably the main reason for the superior noise floor.
7:31 Bonnie Barstow doing some Excel.
7:13 hahahah you just earned a subscriber!
I see that Hammerfall shirt! Good tastes
So it as a sound card for Excel that Excels at very little.
A board made by the numbers.
And all just fitting the lowest needs for efficiency?
... oh no I am here ALL WEEK!
Did anyone who makes the HAL analogy actually finish the 2001: A space odyssey movie? They know HAL is a murderer right? I'm not saying that isn't technically impressive and all, it's just a bit like naming your voice assistant Cortana. Oh, wait....
Are you saying that the voice reader feature used pre-recorded speech and not synthesised text to speech when reading text aloud? That's not very good at all. The performance of the WSS card in Mystic Towers was particularly troublesome. Since I've not played One Must Fall, I don't really know what it should sound like. To me the WSS card sounded just fine when you played Tyrian 2000.
Yeah, it's prerecorded speech. The best you get for unknown words is the option for it to read out individual letters. Tyrian and Descent support WSS natively so they work perfectly without the need for SB emulation. Mystic Towers and OMF are using the emulation which is why they sound off.
I still got this card lying on my i486 system and the only thing good is the Yamaha YMF262
Why ? Excel ? Sound card ? Why would spreadsheet need hardware audio acceleration ? 😅
They were probably hoping it was the next big thing. It wasn't. 😂
That's literally what Microsoft does: make a reference product to try to break a bad market leader (Soundblaster in DOS), build the driver in the OS, encourage third parties to implement it. We had the sound blaster but we hated it, it was terrible to resolve the IRQ conflicts when you had another device, like a printer or modem. WSS hardware used a higher IRQ with rare conflicts. It was 16 bit instead of 8 bit, had ad lib fm sounds, it was great. The first no frills audio card. Dos games isn't everything. These were the days of multimedia and windows
WHY?
Hammerfall, we will prevail
The fact that you REM'd out an LH command to get low memory back in DOS tells me that you might not have any idea what you're doing. 😅
I don't sometimes. I figured out that didn't work later and I just made a backup of the autoexec and config.sys instead. lol
Odd, I don't remember this/these card/s at all. You unlearn something every decade apparently.
I wouldnt refer to soundcard released after the Soundblaster as 'early'. The early era was defined by PC sound being utterly unbearable (Yea, including The MT-32, because just playing premade instruments still is is ridiculosly bad!). So ther early soundcard era was exactly until the Soundblaster would enable PCs to finally reproduce arbitrary sounds, which they lacked before (no matter the still disgustingly bad sound quality). ;)
"Not all cards were 100 percent Soundblaster compatible.."
*Pro Audio Spectrum 16 enters the chat*
The entire chat: "GET TF OUT OF HERE AND STOP LYING!"
I have mixed feelings about the PAS16. It isn't a bad card but is far more fussy than the SB16 when it comes to drivers.
@@DOSStorm It was an amazing card when it came out. I bought one right off but quickly found out how that 100 percent compatibility was more like 92.46 percent. Once games started to support it though it was a beast!
@@DOSStorm It was REALLY strange that Creative didn't make the 16 completely compatible with the SB Pro. I remember being VERY annoyed with that but overall yeah the SB16 was waaaaayyyy more user friendly!
@@DOSStorm the only SB I didn't have was the SB1.0. I used to get the new one every time one came out but went straight from the CMS to the SB2.0. I just loved being annoyed and editing my Autoexec and Config.sys with new hardware contantly back then! lol
Storm Eagle...hear what they did to my boy.
The DOS version MMX is kind of an abomination. Maybe it's an acquired taste? It was the first way I played through the game so it kind of sounds "right" to me even though I know it's not.
Good ol Microsoft. Failing to understand the need and their customers. Some things never change!
Tbh, in games of its period its not terrible.
The FM synth is actually the same as an SB16, the problem lies with the compatibility of digital SB support for sound effects.
"You need to buy more cheeese" 😂
Its a ground plain
Excel-lent!
Yes...**Proud Dad nod of approval**
RAI ICHIKAWA
OMF is the GOAT.
This Sound card i never see beforce