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| Phonomenal! |
1989,1991 - The first Sound Blasters
Sound Blaster (1989)
Sound Blaster 1.5 with CMS chips
So they went to the game industry, asked here and asked there. And got the unambiguous result that the card besides playing music should be able to play also samples. The result of this was their Sound Blaster.
Equipped in version 1.0 with a DSP that returned 22 Khz 8 bits Mono and recorded with 13 Khz, CMS chips for compatibility with their own Game Blaster and above all with a Yamaha OPL2 they entered into direct competition for the AdLib. The latter was supposedly possible only thanks to Microsoft, they persuaded Yamaha to bring the OPL2 on the free market, until then, AdLib was exclusive partner and buyer!
Production in Singapore made the card cheaper than the AdLib, which was produced in Canada. Still, CL understood very well to offer support for the programming of their card. AdLib was pushed fast from the market.
SB 2.01 with empty CMS sockets
Under the "bonnet", it looked very chaotic. Seemingly, they were in trouble getting the card fast to the market. This resulted in a difficult programmable DSP (although one product of this house should later top this), and a sound rendering, which often made itself noticeable by crackling. But after all - they had brought the first consumer card on market that allowed playback of digital samples!
By the way, the crackling was created for specific reason: data was sent to the card in blocks via DMA (Direct Memory Access). If one block reached its end, you had to inform the card, that another block will come, and simultaneously, you had to suggest this situation also again to the DMA controller. This led to considerable gaps, in which simply nothing was played, especially on slower systems. Stopping sound data and its further playing led to partly considerable level fluctuations, which we then perceive as crackling.
Another problem, which often was not heeded by developers, and which existed until the Sound Blaster Pro, was an only very coarse alteration option of the playback frequency. Placing 22,05 Khz precisely was not possible at all. Many developers overlooked this, and so music often is returned too slowly. , Example: Epic Pinball - SB Pro compared with Ultrasound.
Further versions of the card little later followed. Version 1.5 was a economy version: the CMS chips for Game Blaster compability were optional, instead there were two empty sockets.
Version 2.0 on the other hand saved another chip, that was also intended for CMS (a standard chip, but programmed by CL). Simultaneously, they optimized the circuit board layout, which now worked with clearly less chips. Most importantly, however, was the DMA autoinit mode that finally enabled the card to play continuously, therefore without interruption and crackling! And finally, with version 2.01, they made sound playback with 44,1 Khz sampling rates possible. For this reason they introduced the "Hispeed Mode". Translated this means, that the DSP was so heavily loaded in this mode (used of above 23 Khz), that it didn't accept any commands from outside anymore, and the rendering could merely be stopped with a Reset of the complete DSP.
All these improvements brought some alterations to the interface of the DSP - one of the reasons, why other companies had so heavy problems really being 100 percent compatible to this card. While angry tongues claim, this is above all a behavior in order to stop competitors, I claim that this is also a result of incompetence on one hand, but also time pressure on the developers side at Creative Labs on the other hand.
Sound Blaster Pro (1991)
A further development of the original Sound Blaster was the SB pro. It differed above all to the SB 2.01 in the ability to return and record stereo. The latter now even at 22,05 Khz!
They left the DSP at 8 bits, however added another OPL2 on it: a second chip of this kind guaranteed stereo music playback (although this was seldom used by games).
Also this card went through several revisions, very likely 3 of them, while every revision brought improvements to the interference factor concerning bus transfers (one could follow his mouse movements, keyboard entries and all other live at the boxes).
Revision 2, with which the two OPL2 were replaced with an OPL3, made the biggest difference. OPL3 was downward compatible with OPL2, played stereo with 20 voices and made the synthesizing possible with after all 4 operators instead of 2 as with the OPL2.
Also with this card, Creative Labs obviously was a little hasty. Maybe some remember the "reverse stereo" option of some games.
According to unconfirmed statements plain and simple the first two revisions of the card swallowed (maybe also all, nobody exactly knows it) the first data byte, therefore the left channel, and then happily started playing on the left side - but with the second byte, hence the right channel!
They recognized this defect and introduced an obscure code snippet in their program examples with the headline "enable stereo playback"...
Samples
| Epic Pinball | | [OGG] [MP3] | | MOD-Playback, here the game interpolates by software | | Descent | | [OGG] [MP3] | | Descent I intro - OPL3 sounds like OPL2 in stereo... |
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