• Etterra@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 months ago

    Oh yeah, I forgot about Soundblaster. They have that stupid card a Transformer name and none of us ever questioned it.

  • datelmd5sum@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

  • renrenPDX@lemmy.world
    1·
    11 months ago

    My best friend gave me his sound blaster after upgrading to the Pro. Later I upgraded to a Gravis Ultrasound. Offloading sound processing to the sound card (1MB) improved gaming performance significantly.