Just curious, but is creative labs going the way Commodore has -- as in making a comeback?

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Re: Creative Labs
By: Warp 4 to All on Fri Sep 05 2025 12:08 pm

Just curious, but is creative labs going the way Commodore has -- as in making a comeback?

I don't know, but I've been seeing some of their ads on Facebook saying they're planning to release something, and it looks like it might have old-school vibes. But they've been vague about it.

I always thought the Sound Blaster cards were pretty cool in adding significant sound capability when IBM-compatible PCs at the time could only produce simple beeps & such. And the MIDI capabilities too.. A couple of my favorite Sound Blaster cards were the Sound Blatser 16 and the AWE32.

Nightfox

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Re: Creative Labs
By: Nightfox to Warp 4 on Fri Sep 05 2025 17:18:09

Just curious, but is creative labs going the way Commodore has -- as in
making a comeback?

I don't know, but I've been seeing some of their ads on Facebook saying couple of my favorite Sound Blaster cards were the Sound Blatser 16 and

I still have a system rocking the Sound Blaster 16, complete with the demo talking parrot.

Oh those were the days showing off that the computer could talk to everyone
who couldn't have cared less :D

Though, my main system is running a Sound Blazter Z there is sadly no talking parrot under Linux.


73,
de ZL4KJ

...The older you get, the more important is is not to act your age.

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Re: Creative Labs
By: ZL4KJ to Nightfox on Tue Sep 09 2025 01:47 am

I still have a system rocking the Sound Blaster 16, complete with the demo
talking parrot.

Oh those were the days showing off that the computer could talk to everyone who couldn't have cared less :D

Though, my main system is running a Sound Blazter Z there is sadly no talking parrot under Linux.

Yeah, I miss those cool programs they used to include. Those were the days when things like sound cards like that were novel, so they included those demo programs to let you play with the sound card and show it off. :)

Nightfox

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Re: Creative Labs
By: Nightfox to ZL4KJ on Mon Sep 08 2025 09:10:07

Yeah, I miss those cool programs they used to include. Those were the days when things like sound cards like that were novel, so they included

My first sound card was an AdLib along with getting Space Quest III for my birthday in '89. I can still hear the opening music :)

I kind of regret not keeping a hold of the AdLib when I originally upgraded to the Sound Blaster, It would have made a good addition to vintage collection.

Though the AdLib was a far cry from the 5.1 Surround sound I have setup with the Sound Blaster Z.
73,
de ZL4KJ

...I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.

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Re: Creative Labs
By: ZL4KJ to Nightfox on Tue Sep 09 2025 08:28 am

I kind of regret not keeping a hold of the AdLib when I originally upgraded to he Sound Blaster, It would have made a good addition to vintage collection.
Though the AdLib was a far cry from the 5.1 Surround sound I have setup with th Sound Blaster Z.

That would have been cool to keep.

A few years ago, I heard about a company called RetroWave that was making USB devices that had an OPL3 chip on them, for a genuine Adlib-compatible device. It appears as a serial device, and there's a version of DOSBox where you can configure it to route AdLib audio requests to a serial device, so you could use one of these USB devices to get genuine AdLib audio from a DOS game. The device has its own analog speaker/headphone output:

https://tinyurl.com/4wh2chmh

I'm not sure if they're still making that anymore, but it looks like there is a RetroWave OPL3 Express currently available, which may be a newer version:

https://shop.sudomaker.com/products/retrowave-opl3-express

Nightfox

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Re: Creative Labs
By: Nightfox to ZL4KJ on Mon Sep 08 2025 14:48:45

ZL>> I kind of regret not keeping a hold of the AdLib when I originally

That would have been cool to keep.

If only I could go back in time and tell myself a few things. haha, Not that
I would have listened to myself.

A few years ago, I heard about a company called RetroWave that was making USB devices that had an OPL3 chip on them, for a genuine Adlib-compatible https://shop.sudomaker.com/products/retrowave-opl3-express

That is cool. I remember having high hopes for AdLib, I was a little dissapointed they couldn't compete with Creative, I reluctantly got my SB16 in late '92, though I admit I never looked back once I had it installed :)

I'd like to think someone, somewhere is still using the AdLib board I swapped it out for though.
73,
de ZL4KJ

...My other computer is a 486.

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Re: Creative Labs
By: ZL4KJ to Nightfox on Tue Sep 09 2025 11:29 am

That is cool. I remember having high hopes for AdLib, I was a little dissapoint d they couldn't compete with Creative, I reluctantly got my SB16 in late '92, t ough I admit I never looked back once I had it installed :)

I never had an actual Adlib board; I started out with Sound Blaster cards, and I thought they provided great sound & good capabilities. Once they started making the Sound Blaster 16 (which I think was the first that provided 16-bit audio), I think that made their sound on par with CD audio quality, which allowed for totally realistic sound (though I thought the 8-bit Sound Blaster 2.0 I had was pretty good too).

At one point, I had a 386sx-16, and I remember having one or two WAV files (with simple sound effects) that it struggled to play - the audio would come out choppy. I guess that system at the time was a bit too slow for some audio, although I thought the Sound Blaster 16 did audio processing in hardware on the card. Maybe it was an issue sending the audio data to the card..

Nightfox

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Re: Creative Labs
By: Nightfox to ZL4KJ on Tue Sep 09 2025 10:22:53

I never had an actual Adlib board; I started out with Sound Blaster cards,

My first SB was the 16, got it with an upgrade to a 486 dx2-66 with Windows 3.11 early '94

about the same time dad and I ran Lantastic through the house.

I remember having some teething problems on the 486 with sketchy sound if the system was doing too much or messing with IRQ conflicts.

To think the crap I have open on a desktop now and can have uninterrupted sound playing in surround.

73,
de ZL4KJ

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Re: Creative Labs
By: ZL4KJ to Nightfox on Wed Sep 10 2025 01:56 pm

My first SB was the 16, got it with an upgrade to a 486 dx2-66 with Windows 3.11 early '94

about the same time dad and I ran Lantastic through the house.

I remember having some teething problems on the 486 with sketchy sound if the system was doing too much or messing with IRQ conflicts.

To think the crap I have open on a desktop now and can have uninterrupted sound playing in surround.

Yeah, it's amazing what computers can do these days. And it's common for computers these days to have multiple cores & threads, making it very easy to have lots of tasks running at the same time.

Nightfox

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Re: Creative Labs
By: Nightfox to ZL4KJ on Mon Sep 08 2025 09:10 am

ZL>> Though, my main system is running a Sound Blazter Z there is sadly no

talking parrot under Linux.

Yeah, I miss those cool programs they used to include. Those were the days when things like sound cards like that were novel, so they included those demo programs to let you play with the sound card and show it off. :)

I remember mine came with a text-to-speech program where you could even enter note values and lengths to make it sing. Very fun, but also really annoying to everyone else who happens to be in the room :D

...Things too stupid to be spoken are sung.
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Nightfox wrote to ZL4KJ <=-

Yeah, it's amazing what computers can do these days. And it's common
for computers these days to have multiple cores & threads, making it
very easy to have lots of tasks running at the same time.

The change in computing in 2006-2009 was amazing - at work, we started
bringing in hyperthreaded pentium and dual core systems, and having one
more core was like night and way when system processing, like indexing
or virus scans ran during the day.

SSDs were rarities, but Hybrid SATA drives came around - SATA drives
with a 4-16 GB NAND cache slapped on the side. It'd boot up like a SATA
drive, but feel much faster once your apps got cached.

I just signed a lease for my company for all-new laptops. The "basic"
model has 8 cores and 12 threads!



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ZL4KJ wrote to Nightfox <=-

I still have a system rocking the Sound Blaster 16, complete with the
demo talking parrot.

I've told this story before, about working in a software company back in
the '90s. Our QA lab manager needed to be pranked, so we took his
install disks and our sound guy inserted stutters into the test files.

The lab manager would get everything configured, run setup, get
everything configured, then play the tests, and they'd come out

"perperperperforming irq-q-q-q-q-q testtttttt"

(mind you, this was long before plug and play...)

We heard the obscenity volume increase, until finally one of the guilty
party offered to try with "his" install disk. It worked perfectly. :)





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ZL4KJ wrote to Nightfox <=-

My first sound card was an AdLib along with getting Space Quest III for
my birthday in '89. I can still hear the opening music :)

I heard a comparison of some of the music from DOS games with a
Soundblaster, AdLib, and some other card. I didn't realize what I was
missing out on, with a knockoff sound card a few steps above the PC
speaker.



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Re: Re: Creative Labs
By: poindexter FORTRAN to ZL4KJ on Sun Sep 21 2025 04:36 pm

I heard a comparison of some of the music from DOS games with a Soundblaster, AdLib, and some other card. I didn't realize what I was missing out on, with a knockoff sound card a few steps above the PC speaker.

Several years ago, I found a Roland MT-32 emulator that runs in software; I imagine it's similar to a software MIDI synthesizer (it may be exactly that) with a Roland MT-32 sound font or something.. I'm pretty sure there's a way to configure DOSBox to use it so you can get Roland MT-32 sound for DOS games that support it.

Nightfox

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On 22 Sep 2025, Nightfox said the following...

Re: Re: Creative Labs
By: poindexter FORTRAN to ZL4KJ on Sun Sep 21 2025 04:36 pm

I heard a comparison of some of the music from DOS games with a Soundblaster, AdLib, and some other card. I didn't realize what I was missing out on, with a knockoff sound card a few steps above the PC speaker.

Several years ago, I found a Roland MT-32 emulator that runs in
software; I imagine it's similar to a software MIDI synthesizer (it may
be exactly that) with a Roland MT-32 sound font or something.. I'm
pretty sure there's a way to configure DOSBox to use it so you can get Roland MT-32 sound for DOS games that support it.

you can set yourself up pretty nice with VirtualMIDISynth and the Arachno SoundFont .. that's what i'd do i think. there are some sample videos on youtube

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Re: Re: Creative Labs
By: poindexter FORTRAN to ZL4KJ on Sun Sep 21 2025 04:36 pm

Soundblaster, AdLib, and some other card. I didn't realize what I was missing out on, with a knockoff sound card a few steps above the PC
speaker.

I didn't have a sound card for the longest time, but I did just run a cable from the PC speaker out on the motherboard into a boombox's AUX in. Not very many things would support sending real audio to it, but when they did it actually didn't sound half bad :).

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On 23 Sep 2025, phigan said the following...

Re: Re: Creative Labs
By: poindexter FORTRAN to ZL4KJ on Sun Sep 21 2025 04:36 pm

Soundblaster, AdLib, and some other card. I didn't realize what I was missing out on, with a knockoff sound card a few steps above the PC speaker.

I didn't have a sound card for the longest time, but I did just run a cable from the PC speaker out on the motherboard into a boombox's AUX
in. Not very many things would support sending real audio to it, but
when they did it actually didn't sound half bad :).

for a long time i only had tandy computers and the games i played all had great sound. then i got interested in programming so basically until my first hand-made pc (an amd k6-2) i had no sound whatsoever (and not much multitasking to speak of either). i didn't realize until i started messing with DOS games in OS/2 that a lot of PC user's sound experience (without an adlib or sound blaster) was so bad.. i suppose everyone who was stuck with second hand 286/386 type systems.. the sound blaster went to the previous owner's new computer ;)

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Re: Re: Creative Labs
By: phigan to poindexter FORTRAN on Tue Sep 23 2025 10:09 am

Re: Re: Creative Labs
By: poindexter FORTRAN to ZL4KJ on Sun Sep 21 2025 04:36 pm

Soundblaster, AdLib, and some other card. I didn't realize what I was missing out on, with a knockoff sound card a few steps above the PC speaker.

I didn't have a sound card for the longest time, but I did just run
a cable from the PC speaker out on the motherboard into a boombox's
AUX in. Not very many things would support sending real audio to it,
but when they did it actually didn't sound half bad :).

for the crappy computers i had, i used a driver that allowed the pc speaker
to come up as a sound card in programs.

i'm not sure what type of computer you had where you could easily run a cable from your pc speaker to a aux in.
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