What made you think there was a definite market for a discrete sound card in the 1980s? Thirty years after the original Sound Blaster card was launched, we caught up with founder and CEO of Creative Technology, Sim Wong Hoo, to talk about the history of the iconic Sound Blaster brand.ĬPC: Let’s start right at the beginning.
#Sound blaster software for changing voices Pc
It was the final part of the equation needed to transform the PC into a proper gaming machine. It changed the PC’s sound forever and sold by the bucketload. The result was an audio system that could give you decent music in games, as well as sampled speech and sound effects. AdLib was one of the first companies to market a synthesizer expansion card for the PC, making a massive difference to games, but the Sound Blaster went one step further by combining a synthesizer with basic sampling capabilities. In the days before we had very powerful CPUs and masses of storage space, this meant complicated musical scores could be performed in games using tiny files, without needing masses of processing power, or a massive hard drive to store a recording. This started with basic FM synthesisers such as Yamaha’s OPL2, which modulated frequencies to simulate instruments, and then later went up to ‘wavetables’ of sampled instruments to create much more realistic sounding music. In the same way, with early games, the sounds are generated by a synthesiser card, and a game’s music file just tells it which sounds to generate when.Ĭreative changed the name of its music card to 'Game Blaster' and halved the price In a Word document, the fonts are stored somewhere else, and the Word file just stores the formatting, meaning you can store a huge number of words and pages in a very small file size.
Rather than playing back a music recording like current games, early game music was a bit like a Word document. If you wanted proper music in your games then you needed a synthesizer card. While the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga had half-decent sound capabilities, most PCs came equipped with only a mono PC speaker, which simply blurted our chirps and beeps like an excitable 1970s telephone. It seems bizarre now, but at that time, gaming was still considered to be a frivolous novelty for the PC, which was primarily a business machine. Now celebrating its 30th birthday, the Sound Blaster made a massive impact when it was launched back in 1989.
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