And then three things happened at once
- Creative de-facto monopolized the industry often by unethical means (suing Aureal into bankruptcy, etc.), not letting much room for competitors, which in turn lead to diminishing quality on the part of Creative.
- Microsoft didn’t put hardware acceleration support into XAudio, which superseeded DirectSound.
- Game publishers realized the vast majority of gamers didn’t care about sound quality, so they could spent those resources on making the games look a little bit more realistic.
I had one. Besides, I love 80s/90s aesthetics.
Oh yeah, I forgot about Soundblaster. They have that stupid card a Transformer name and none of us ever questioned it.
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.
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.
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.
