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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

This is insane, and I love it.

It seems almost entirely pointless: the SB 1.0 has a big place in history but that's due more to market share than technical excellence or uniqueness compared to, say, the C64's SID chip, or even a true contemporary like the Gravis Ultrasound.

And unless I'm mistaken vintage Sound Blaster boards are not exactly in short supply... though I'm not entirely sure about that; it's tough to search for them thanks to the countless scads of products bearing the "Sound Blaster" moniker.

And yet, this is cool. This is a complex piece of work, a very nice piece of engineering by the look of it!

Preservation of computing and gaming history is important, and ensuring we can make more physical copies of things if needed/desired is crucial when it comes to keeping that history alive.

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> the SB 1.0 has a big place in history but that's due more to market share than technical excellence or uniqueness compared to, say, the C64's SID chip, or even a true contemporary like the Gravis Ultrasound.

Cultural value is as important as technical advancement, at least in the long run. I think you could agree with me.

A notable cliche is still VHS. In the 80s, it was a far-from-optimal video system, but recently it has became a symbol of the 80s. Another example is the proliferation of home computers in the 80s, while many were groundbreaking, we also had some that were closer to a market bubble than a technical accomplishment, and were known as "Trash 80s" but now it's still something different.

And thanks for your additional commentary on soundchips.

Cultural value is as important as technical advancement, at least in the long run. I think you could agree with me.

True but, EG, resurrecting the old 360KB 5.25-inch floppies tech used on the '80s era IBM PCs is probably not worth revisiting.

> resurrecting the old 360KB 5.25-inch floppies tech

Sure, practicability is important as well. The primary reason that nobody is resurrecting 5.25-inch floppies, is simply due to its impracticability. I think many people in the retrocomputing community would like to make a retrocomputer with these crunching floppies, but the supply chain has already vanished, it's also extremely difficult (if not impossible) to make a 5.25-inch floppy drive independently, as it involves custom mechanical moving parts. It's better to use the time to, let's say, a homemade video game cartridge.

Many retrocomputing hobbyists make a liberal use of modern peripherals such as CF cards.

it's also extremely difficult (if not impossible) to make a 5.25-inch floppy drive independently, as it involves custom mechanical moving parts

The tolerances are not that high and the physical specifications are available from ECMA; most of the mechanical parts would not be difficult for a machinist, it's the heads which are the most difficult. The intersection of machinists and retrocomputing hobbyists is probably not that large, and 5.25" drives are still not really rare enough to attempt remanufacturing.

The technical excellence of the Gravis Ultrasound makes it less interesting IMO. It did everything right, so it has no individual character. I prefer hardware that cut corners, e.g. the Amiga's Paula chip, with its hard panning and lack of built in anti-aliasing filter. Technically "bad" sound hardware can have a unique and distinctive sound that's still interesting today. The GUS just sounds like a lower specced version of modern hardware.

>And unless I'm mistaken vintage Sound Blaster boards are not exactly in short supply... though I'm not entirely sure about that; it's tough to search for them thanks to the countless scads of products bearing the "Sound Blaster" moniker.

You are mistaken about that, soundblaster ISA cards are going for hundreds of dollars on ebay these days, due to their rarity. A cheaper clone is certainly welcome

Wow! That's really interesting to know.

And baffling, honestly. I'd have thought there were scads of them anywhere you find old computer parts.

But I suppose it's also true that old PCs were discarded and trashed/recycled at very high rates, due to rapid obsolescence thanks to a couple decades of Moore's law and the fact that the were fairly ugly and finicky beasts in the first place... so I suppose it makes sense that even if Creative Labs sold a zillion of these back in the day, only a very small percentage survive.

(I tend to hold onto my electronic stuff for a long time, but even I was generally glad to ditch my outdated PC equipment ASAP back in those days.)

The SID chip is the best audio hardware of the 8-bit era. So much character!

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