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by haspok 5 days ago
The early Soundblaster cards sucked. Even the SB16. The first real comparable product to the Amiga was the Gravis Ultrasound in 1992.

Don't even mention SVGA, with it's pre-VESA non-standardised chaos, and abysmal high res performance. OK, the 320x200(240)x256 was actually quite usable for games, quick enough to run Doom in 93. But for video editing, there wasn't really anything on the PC that even compared to the Genlock, at least not for that price.

And to top it off, AmigaOS had preemptive multitasking (in 1985!), Windows 95 was the first real OS to do that (not counting OS/2 and NT) with graphics (not counting Linux or any unixes), yay, that's 10 years for you.

In 91 I sold my Commodore 16, and got an XT with Hercules graphics and the built-in PC Speaker. Not even on the same planet as the Amiga.

In 92 or 93 I got my first 386, with VGA but no sound card for a while, though I secretly wanted an Amiga 500 instead, but it wasn't my call. However around 92/93 PC gaming and the demoscene (!) really took off, so I got a soundcard as soon as I could, and life was very swell after that.

1 comments

I think the Gravis Ultrasound is in the same category as the Apple IIGS sound card, which came out in 1986. And I put the Apple IIGS sound card much further ahead than the Amiga Paula.
The IIgs had the Ensoniq DOC (ES5503): 32 oscillators allowing for ~16 stereo voices at the same time. But it only had 64K of sound RAM.

The GUS (that kickstarted alsa on linux) is based on the DOC II (ES5504), which is more or less a 16-bit version of the DOC that could address 1MB of sound sample RAM.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NTrYGFlImQM

VCF East: The Story of Ensoniq – Al Charpentier, Bill Mauchly, Joe Friel: When Bruce Crockett, Bob Yannes, Charles Winterble and Albert Charpentier left Commodore in late 1982, they named the company Peripheral Visions.

Listen as Albert & Bill will tell their tangled story of how they become Ensoniq.