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Comment by hypercube33 | Hacker News Reader

In the first waves of multimedia PCs - the CPU was tasked with doing sound, networking, hard drive control, etc. - pretty much all of the cost savings came from having minimal hardware for the auxiliary components and doing it all in drivers.

A common "Trick" was to buy cards that had essentially their own processors to handle this stuff - SoundBlasters, 3Com nics, IDE drive controllers that had their own processor (hell, even up to their own OS) since that freed the CPU up for doing actual work - gaming. Even an external or other

CPUs were a bottle neck but most people didnt tax the single core machines doing most daily work (office work, browsing the web) so it was fine, but once you load up a game that needs sound, 3d, networking, disk access all at once it would start stealing clock cycles trying to do all of that in one place.

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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

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

I think I completely normalized that. I only remember that Duke said really cool things :-)

"Come, get some"

:-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.

> 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/

> had essentially their own processors to handle this stuff

Most of the benefit came from the sound card doing DMA from a memory buffer instead of using a high-frequency interrupt to have the CPU give it sound samples one or two bytes at a time (fetched from the very same memory buffer(s)).

More sophisticated cards could also do mixing of several sounds in "hardware" (usually by having their own little CPU do the work) instead of having the main CPU doing the mixing. Some of them could even play the constituent sounds at different speeds (Gravis Ultra Sound and Midi cards but the Midi cards usually had fixed sound samples). This mattered for more sophisticated game audio for a few years until x86 performance improvements made it irrelevant. DMA is still crucial.

I vividly remember playing around on a friend's 486 that had a scsi controller for the hard drives, that was the best 486 I ever used! It's been all win modems and liquid glass window borders since then!

what’s old is new: check out dpus

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