Great review of a not so great card. Your conclusion was on point🤣 Microsoft obviously doesn't take it seriously to enter the soundcard business back in the days. Somehow this reminds me on IBMs Mvave attempt.
The LM1877N-9 chip on the card is a 2x2W amplifier so I wouldn't recommend connecting any headphones that you care about if the volume's turned up ;) It was common for PC speakers in the 90s to work both actively and passively so if you had a card like this you wouldn't need to power them separately with the caveat that you could only control the volume from the PC and not the speakers themselves. I've seen cards which have a jumper that lets you switch the 3.5mm output between amplified and line level but that kind of feature might have come along a year or two after this was made.
It's surprising Heroes of Might and Magic 2, and Age of Empires 1, both had MIDI/OPL music... in addition to their CD audio. Unless they were offered in a floppy version (I don't think they did), why would anyone want to hear MIDI music when the CD audio is available? The only exception being, when you played a demo version. But that's pretty exhaustive work (remixing all music) just to have the same tunes sound worse, for a demo version. And this especially applies when the MIDI music is exactly the same (not completely new tracks) as the CD audio, which some games had. I think Settlers 2 was CD only as well and had both MIDI/CD music, almost like they weren't sure if it'd be a CD only release at the time.
I haven't checked those specific games, but early on the CD audio was sometimes just the MIDI audio recorded using a relatively nice GM module, such as an SC-88. In those cases it's not that much extra work and would potentially give superior or at least different audio to people who owned some decent playback device. This would also have left room for a potential floppy release, as you pointed out.
Very nice review and I’m happy to see a lot of interesting games that I didn’t see in other reviews. Thanks.
Great review of a not so great card. Your conclusion was on point🤣 Microsoft obviously doesn't take it seriously to enter the soundcard business back in the days. Somehow this reminds me on IBMs Mvave attempt.
The LM1877N-9 chip on the card is a 2x2W amplifier so I wouldn't recommend connecting any headphones that you care about if the volume's turned up ;) It was common for PC speakers in the 90s to work both actively and passively so if you had a card like this you wouldn't need to power them separately with the caveat that you could only control the volume from the PC and not the speakers themselves.
I've seen cards which have a jumper that lets you switch the 3.5mm output between amplified and line level but that kind of feature might have come along a year or two after this was made.
Let's just say the only thing it has going for it is a genuine Yamaha OPL chip
Microsoft Presents: Expensive and underwhelming almost adlib clone.
It's surprising Heroes of Might and Magic 2, and Age of Empires 1, both had MIDI/OPL music... in addition to their CD audio. Unless they were offered in a floppy version (I don't think they did), why would anyone want to hear MIDI music when the CD audio is available? The only exception being, when you played a demo version. But that's pretty exhaustive work (remixing all music) just to have the same tunes sound worse, for a demo version. And this especially applies when the MIDI music is exactly the same (not completely new tracks) as the CD audio, which some games had. I think Settlers 2 was CD only as well and had both MIDI/CD music, almost like they weren't sure if it'd be a CD only release at the time.
I haven't checked those specific games, but early on the CD audio was sometimes just the MIDI audio recorded using a relatively nice GM module, such as an SC-88. In those cases it's not that much extra work and would potentially give superior or at least different audio to people who owned some decent playback device. This would also have left room for a potential floppy release, as you pointed out.
Good lord, I've never heard Gabriel Knight 1 sound so terrible.
Wow even my IBM MWave is better than this!