Comment by KellyCriterion
2 days ago
SOUNDBLASTER 2.0 !!!!!!
A 16(!!!) bit ISA slot card, which revolutionized PC-audio-experience.
Are they still on the market or crashed by the ever-more-increasing onboard chips?
And there was Gravis Ultrasound, where you could upload samples into the RAM of the soundboard (that was like superpowermegatech back at these days :-) IIRC, the highest degree of fidelity was fu**ng 16 MB of onboard RAM on the soundboard.
:-D
The Sound Blaster 2.0 wasn't 16-bit. It could do a higher sample rate than 1.0 but it was still doing 8-bit audio in an 8-bit ISA slot. The Sound Blaster 16 was a separate product another year or two later.
They might be thinking of the Sound Blaster Pro or Pro 2 which were 16-bit ISA cards, although really they were basically still 8-bit ISA cards that only used the extra pins on the 16-bit connector to give you a few more choices for IRQ/DMA. My gut feel is that the Pro and Pro 2 were when the SB really hit the mainstream. A lot of people I knew had them at the time, at any rate.
You are right:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster#Second-generatio...
Im getting old :-D
> Are they still on the market or crashed by the ever-more-increasing onboard chips?
I don't think any major vendor has made ISA sound cards in almost 30 years. Discrete PCIe sound cards exist but I don't know who exactly their intended market is. Audio pros?
You can find old 90's ISA cards used on eBay and whatever. The more sought after types (e.g. SB Pro) may not be exactly cheap, though.
Also, for the retro PC market, there are hobbyist cards such as the PicoGUS. [1]
So, yes or no, depending on what you're asking for.
[1] https://picogus.com/
Another former Gravis Ultrasound owner here. If you hadn't jogged my memory, I'd have completely forgotten it.
It dook Duke3D around 2.5 Min to load all the MIDI samples into the soundcard RAM during startup, if you forgot that pain already? :-D
The thing is that Duke3d ran fast/sounded just fine even on a slow Pentium with a basic sound blaster. GUS was very useful in the 486 era, but it sounds like it was actually better to not use it with a faster computer in this case.
I think I completely normalized that. I only remember that Duke said really cool things :-)
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