Until I upgraded to Linux Mint recently I actually DID use a Soundblaster card (modern one from 2018) to drive my super nice headphones and speakers
Too bad mint weirdly hated it despite recognizing it, but the new speakers have a fine DAC so....
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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I had to play Wolfenstein 3D with the little wafer speaker on the motherboard.
Back in my day, there was a little speaker in the case that connected to the motherboard by a couple of wires.
It sounded terrible and we liked it, because it was better than nothing.
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Dr. Sbaitso says "'sup."
Dr. Sbaitso was the speech systhesis DOS program that was included with most Soundblaster cards. You could tell Dr. Sbaitso about all of your problems.
Still running Creative SoundBlasterX G5
Amazing card, and the series is very much alive
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But you got the connector for a Joystick for free!
Ah, i remember might & magic 3. loved it, because it sent speech through the crappy pc speaker. So cool
I was a rebel and went with the Pro Audio 16
You had to use Voodoo to see the magic 3d graphics
I had one. Besides, I love 80s/90s aesthetics.
The Yamaha YM3812 sound chip was the backbone of computer sound & music generation for almost a decade.
What? They did have onboard sound. The problem is that if you used the motherboard speaker to make anything more decent than a beep, you basically needed to build an entire sound engine from scratch and very few games did so. It also wasn't worthwhile because a shitty two pin speaker could not compare to the speakers of a professional sound system which you needed the soundcard to hook up into, and CPU bandwidth was such a limitation back then than even when games could play WAV they would use MIDI to offload the musical instrument synthesizing for the soundtracks to the sound card. Designing a game that used the onboard sound speaker was basically the realm of assembly hacking geniuses.
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In the grand scheme of things they were relatively inexpensive. You could spend a lot but you didn't need to.
I'm still rocking an Audigy 2 on my main computer for that 1/4" jack on the front bay
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220/5/1
1000 yard stare
Long live the Gravis Ultrasound Max!
Wait. When did onboard sound get good enough that you don't need a soundcard? My computer is "only" 12ish years, and it has a soundcard. The reason used to be that internal ones sounded like shit.
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I still use an external Creative sound card so I can switch my speakers over USB between my work laptop and personal desktop!
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I still use my external soundblaster to connect to my 5.1 amp. I have HDMI to my TV and then toslink to my amp, but it was inconvenient having to have the TV on for listening music.