In a prior post, I discussed the ability of sound devices other than the PC Speaker to produce digitized sound. In this entry, I will share some recordings I have made of these digitized samples. Most of the samples will be voice, but there are some sound effects and even music.
First off, here is Touchdown Football for the IBM PCjr., with an 8088 CPU @ 4.77MHz and using the TI SN76496 :
Next, here is the same game in its Tandy version, running on a Tandy 1000 RL, which uses an 8086 running at 9.44MHz, using a PSSJ-based TI SN 76496 core :
This code is very speed-sensitive. Even on an RL in the slow 4.77MHz mode, it still runs too fast. I believe that the code was only meant for an 8088 running at 4.77MHz, not a V20, and not an 8086 (which is what the RL has).
Here is the same sample, but being run by a Tandy 1000 SX, which uses an 8088 CPU running at 7.16MHz and an NCR 8496 (clone of the TI SIN 76496) :
This time, the sample sounds much more appropriate than the chipmunk like rendering by the faster machine. However, this game was released when the only Tandy 1000 on the market was the 4.77MHz only 8088 CPU of the original Tandy 1000. A Tandy 1000 TX running at 4MHz sounds very similar. Because the SX can also run at 4.77MHz, I have been able to record the sample at that speed, and here it is :
If you compare this sample to the PCjr. sample, it becomes clear that the same voice is being used for both software versions. Therefore, in order to run this game at its intended speed, an 8088 running at 4.77MHz is necessary.
While Touchdown Football turned out not to be a PCjr. exclusive, the next sample clip is from The World's Greatest Baseball Game. This game, as far as I know, only officially supported PCjr. for enhanced graphics and sound. I have included the music and speech that play before you start a game :
The announcer does sound a bit more synthetic than the announcer for Touchdown Football, but the speech is easy enough to comprehend.
The next sample clip is a fairly long one, and it is my recording of the movement sounds and battle sounds from the original, 16-color version of Battle Chess. In this case, Battle Chess is running on a Tandy 1000 TX, 8MHz 80286, using an NCR 8496 clone of the TI SN 76496 :
Roughly, the clips are in the following order:
Pawn Moves
Knight Moves
Bishop Moves
Knight Takes Bishop
Bishop Takes Pawn
King Takes Bishop
Knight Takes Knight
Queen Takes Pawn
Rook Moves (King and Queen move silently)
Queen Takes Knight
Queen Takes Pawn
Knight Takes Queen
Queen Takes Knight
Rook Takes Queen
Bishop Takes Knight
Battle Chess in its 16-color version only supports PC speaker and Tandy 3-voice sound. The PC speaker version lacks movement sounds, and the sound quality is pretty awful compared to the Tandy sound. It was too awful to record, play the game in DOSBox if you want to hear it. Fortunately, the 256-color version supports a Sound Blaster and plays identically to the 16-color version. Interplay could have done better, as we will see soon enough.
Before I continue, I would note that I am recording all the Tandy 3-voice and PC Speaker samples through the RCA audio out jack of the Tandy 1000 TX. This jack provides line level output. I decided to avoid using my Tandy 1000 TL because a game may inadvertently utilize the Tandy DAC, and that is not the point of these samples. For the Adlib and Game Blaster and Sound Blaster samples, I recorded them off a Sound Blaster 1.5 with C/MS upgrade. That card only has an amplified out, so those samples are comparatively louder in these recordings than the Tandy and PC Speaker samples. I decided not to tamper with them.
The next three games support PC Speaker or Adlib for digitized sound. Wizardry, Bane of the Cosmic Forge and Super Jeopardy also supports the Covox Sound Master, Voice Master and the Innovation SSI-2001, but I do not have access to any of the Covox boards. [I will try to put up a recording from the SSi-2001 clone I purchased]. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure sounds very impressive with the Adlib. Additionally, both Wizardry and its sequel, Wizardry Crusaders of the Dark Savant uses the Adlib for digitized sound, even though they are quite aware of a Sound Blaster. The digitized sound in the Wizardry Bane intro is not very long, so I did not bother to record a PC Speaker reference sample.
Finally, I will demonstrate Activisions "Omnimusic" driver from BattleTech : The Crescent Hawks' Revenge. This driver provides digitized sound through the PC Speaker, the Tandy 3-voice sound chip, the Adlib and Game Blaster chips, the Sound Blaster DSP, the IBM PS/1 Audio/Game Card, the Covox Sound Master and the Innovation SSI-2001. It is a jack of all trades as far as sound devices of the late 80s and early 90s go. However, not all things are equal, as you can judge for yourself.
As you can hear, the PC Speaker only does the digitized sound effects, and not very well at that. The Game Blaster has a high pitched whine in its playback not heard with Tandy or Adlib, but the samples sound pretty decent The Sound Blaster provides reference quality samples.
There are other PC games that support digitized sound through an Adlib card or clone. These include Dungeon Master, Another World/Out of this World and Electro Man / ElectroBODY. All these games support Sound Blaster and that is what anyone with a Sound Blaster should use.
If you want some more samples of what the Tandy chip can do when pushed to incorporate digital samples, then listen to some of these recordings from my friend Cloudschatze's channel :
688 Attack Sub : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2A8GbsKcYQ
One on One : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2A8GbsKcYQ
Kings of the Beach : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2N7VLF0ZQo
Skate or Die : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8_z_CI37JE
Showing posts with label Sound Cards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sound Cards. Show all posts
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Vintage PC Game Music - Supporting as Many Early Music Devices as Possible
Music in PC games existed before the 1990s. First there was the PC Speaker, then PCjr. and Tandy 3-voice sound, next came expansion boards like the Adlib and Game Blaster and supported MIDI devices like the MT-32, and finally the Sound Blaster. My goal is to combine as many of these devices as practical in a single system. Since the PC Speaker is ubiquitous, the choice of systems seems unlimited.
Of the other devices, Tandy 3-voice sound first was supported in games in 1984 (PCjr.), and sound cards and MIDI devices first were supported in late 1988. However, the need for Tandy 3-voice sound limits the system to a Tandy 1000, since that chip was never implemented in a compatible ISA card. Additionally, only a Tandy with 8-bit slots and Tandy video should be considered, since modifying either gives real compatibility problems.
As I have previously indicated, the Tandy 1000 TL and the TX are the best candidates here. The TL/2 and TL/3 are not as good choices because they have one fewer slot than the older machines. That slot is better used by an ISA or SCSI interface that can interface to a hard drive.
The TL has a PSSJ sound chip which includes 8-bit digitized sound capabilities. It can support up to a 44KHz sample output rate. The Sound Blaster 1.0-1.5 only support a 23KHz sample output rate, but the 2.0 supports a 44KHz sample rate. The PSSJ and the Sound Blasters work similarly and both use IRQ7 (selectable, but early games insist on 7) and DMA1 (cannot be changed or fully disabled) and tend to crash when the other is present. They will not coexist happily in the same system, and there is nothing that can be done about it.
While the PSSJ may look better than the Sound Blaster for digital playback, there are two additional issues to consider. First, early games with digitized sound are not going to playback samples at 44KHz because they take up so much disk space. Even then, samples tend to be short, so any playback differences are not likely to be noticeable. More importantly, games using the Sound Blaster for digital playback will accept gameport input, games using the PSSJ will not during sample playback. If there is a good deal of sample playback, like in Outrun and Prince of Persia, the joystick will not work at all.
The TX doesn't have the PSSJ, therefore the Sound Blaster is the sound card with the best digitized support from early games. The Sound Blaster includes the Adlib chip and can easily include the Game Blaster chips for a few dollars. However, the TX has a built-in gameports that cannot be disabled, so the Sound Blaster's gameport will have to be disabled.
On the TL, separate Adlib and Game Blaster boards will be required. I am not so comfortable suggesting a Sound Blaster Pro because many games supporting Game Blaster will only write to I/O 220-223, and that is where the OPL2 chips are located on a Sound Blaster Pro. Similarly, many early Sound Blaster games will only support the Sound Blaster at I/O 220-22F. While a non-upgraded Sound Blaster will not cause trouble at I/O 220-223, it uses the rest of the I/O ports and the Game Blaster also uses those I/O ports for autodetection.
Additionally, an MPU-401 interface card will be required, few games support the Sound Blaster MIDI interfacer. There is a driver to allow most Sierra games to work with the Sound Blaster MIDI interface. With the MPU-401, you can connect to the MT-32, the FB-01 and the Casio devices supported in Sierra and Accolade games.
Therefore, on the TL, three cards are devoted to sound, and on the TX there are two. In my ideal system, one bay should be used for a 5.25" drive, and a second bay for a 3.5" drive. A TL has an extra bay for a hard drive, and the TX may require a slot-CF adapter, otherwise a bay or a hard card will be required.
Of the other devices, Tandy 3-voice sound first was supported in games in 1984 (PCjr.), and sound cards and MIDI devices first were supported in late 1988. However, the need for Tandy 3-voice sound limits the system to a Tandy 1000, since that chip was never implemented in a compatible ISA card. Additionally, only a Tandy with 8-bit slots and Tandy video should be considered, since modifying either gives real compatibility problems.
As I have previously indicated, the Tandy 1000 TL and the TX are the best candidates here. The TL/2 and TL/3 are not as good choices because they have one fewer slot than the older machines. That slot is better used by an ISA or SCSI interface that can interface to a hard drive.
The TL has a PSSJ sound chip which includes 8-bit digitized sound capabilities. It can support up to a 44KHz sample output rate. The Sound Blaster 1.0-1.5 only support a 23KHz sample output rate, but the 2.0 supports a 44KHz sample rate. The PSSJ and the Sound Blasters work similarly and both use IRQ7 (selectable, but early games insist on 7) and DMA1 (cannot be changed or fully disabled) and tend to crash when the other is present. They will not coexist happily in the same system, and there is nothing that can be done about it.
While the PSSJ may look better than the Sound Blaster for digital playback, there are two additional issues to consider. First, early games with digitized sound are not going to playback samples at 44KHz because they take up so much disk space. Even then, samples tend to be short, so any playback differences are not likely to be noticeable. More importantly, games using the Sound Blaster for digital playback will accept gameport input, games using the PSSJ will not during sample playback. If there is a good deal of sample playback, like in Outrun and Prince of Persia, the joystick will not work at all.
The TX doesn't have the PSSJ, therefore the Sound Blaster is the sound card with the best digitized support from early games. The Sound Blaster includes the Adlib chip and can easily include the Game Blaster chips for a few dollars. However, the TX has a built-in gameports that cannot be disabled, so the Sound Blaster's gameport will have to be disabled.
On the TL, separate Adlib and Game Blaster boards will be required. I am not so comfortable suggesting a Sound Blaster Pro because many games supporting Game Blaster will only write to I/O 220-223, and that is where the OPL2 chips are located on a Sound Blaster Pro. Similarly, many early Sound Blaster games will only support the Sound Blaster at I/O 220-22F. While a non-upgraded Sound Blaster will not cause trouble at I/O 220-223, it uses the rest of the I/O ports and the Game Blaster also uses those I/O ports for autodetection.
Additionally, an MPU-401 interface card will be required, few games support the Sound Blaster MIDI interfacer. There is a driver to allow most Sierra games to work with the Sound Blaster MIDI interface. With the MPU-401, you can connect to the MT-32, the FB-01 and the Casio devices supported in Sierra and Accolade games.
Therefore, on the TL, three cards are devoted to sound, and on the TX there are two. In my ideal system, one bay should be used for a 5.25" drive, and a second bay for a 3.5" drive. A TL has an extra bay for a hard drive, and the TX may require a slot-CF adapter, otherwise a bay or a hard card will be required.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Scoring Vintage ISA Sound Cards' Gaming Suitability
I have tried to make an objective rating system to judge the gaming suitability of a particular vintage sound card. I have avoided including more subjective qualities like measurement of audio output quality. My basic standard for rating each element of a sound card is as follows :
0 - Not present or not widely supported
1 - Useful but often troublesome or problematic
2 - Mainline support
3 - Superior Features
4 - The Best of the Best
1. Gameport
0.00 - None
0.50 - Crippled (2axis/2buttons only) or Non-standard : Covox Sound Master
1.00 - Standard : Sound Blaster 1.0-Pro 2.0
1.50 - Speed Sensitive : Sound Blaster 16-AWE64
2.00 - Speed Adjustable : Gravis Ultrasound
2. MIDI Hardware Interface
0.00 - None
0.50 - Not Widely Supported : IBM Music Feature, Pro Audio Spectrum, Gravis Ultrasound, Adlib Gold
1.00 - Sound Blaster MIDI
1.50 - Widespread UART MPU-401 Hanging Note Bug : Sound Blaster DSP 4.11-4.13
1.75 - Minimal UART MPU-401 Hanging Note Bug : Sound Blaster DSP 4.11-4.13 & CT-1747
2.00 - UART MPU-401, Sound Blaster DSP <= 4.05 or DSP = 4.16
2.50 - MPU-401 Hardware Emulation
3.00 - Roland MPU-401 or 100% Fully Compatible
3. Music Synthesizer
0.00 - None (Digital Only)
0.50 - Not Widely Supported : Innovation SSI-2001, Covox Sound Master, IBM Music Feature, IBM PS/1 Audio/Game Card
1.00 - Game Blaster
1.50 - Gravis Ultrasound, Creative CQM : Later Sound Blaster 16 & AWE32s, most 32s, all AWE64s
2.00 - OPL2 : Adlib, Sound Blaster 1.0-2.0, Thunderboard, Covox Sound Master II
2.25 - Dual OPL2 : Sound Blaster Pro 1.0, Pro Audio Spectrum; OPL3 : Sound Blaster Pro 2.0, 16, AWE32, 32; Pro Audio Spectrum Plus/16, Adlib Gold
2.50 - AWE32/64 EMU-8000, Waveblaster 1/2, OPL4
3.00 - Ensoniq Soundscape, Yamaha DB50XG, SW60XG, Roland SCB-7
4.00 - Roland LAPC-I, SCC-1 or SCB-55
4. Digital Audio Output
0.00 - None (Music Only)
0.50 - Not Widely Supported : IBM PS/2 Speech Adapter or Compatible, Covox Sound Master/Plus, Covox Voice Master
1.00 - Covox Speech Thing or Disney Sound Source, Roland RAP-10, Covox Sound Master II
1.50 - Adlib Gold, Pro Audio Spectrum
2.00 - Sound Blaster DSP 1.xx, Microsoft Windows Sound System, Gravis Ultrasound
2.25 - Sound Blaster DSP 2.00
2.50 - Sound Blaster DSP >= 2.01, Thunderboard
2.75 - Pro Audio Spectrum Plus/16
3.50 - Sound Blaster Pro, Sound Blaster 16 <= DSP 4.05
3.75 - Sound Blaster 16 >= DSP 4.05, Sound Blaster AWE32
4.00 - Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold (SPDIF)
Thus if you add up the total scores, you can get a good idea of the overall suitability of an ISA sound card for DOS gaming. A Sound Blaster 1.0 or Gravis Ultrasound gets a 6, Roland LAPC-I or SCC-1 would rank a 7, a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold a 10. A Sound Blaster AWE32 with SCC-1 would probably rate the highest at 11. Note that only the highest score for each individual category is counted. A basic AWE32 gets a 2.5 in the synthesizer category, not a 4.5.
0 - Not present or not widely supported
1 - Useful but often troublesome or problematic
2 - Mainline support
3 - Superior Features
4 - The Best of the Best
1. Gameport
0.00 - None
0.50 - Crippled (2axis/2buttons only) or Non-standard : Covox Sound Master
1.00 - Standard : Sound Blaster 1.0-Pro 2.0
1.50 - Speed Sensitive : Sound Blaster 16-AWE64
2.00 - Speed Adjustable : Gravis Ultrasound
2. MIDI Hardware Interface
0.00 - None
0.50 - Not Widely Supported : IBM Music Feature, Pro Audio Spectrum, Gravis Ultrasound, Adlib Gold
1.00 - Sound Blaster MIDI
1.50 - Widespread UART MPU-401 Hanging Note Bug : Sound Blaster DSP 4.11-4.13
1.75 - Minimal UART MPU-401 Hanging Note Bug : Sound Blaster DSP 4.11-4.13 & CT-1747
2.00 - UART MPU-401, Sound Blaster DSP <= 4.05 or DSP = 4.16
2.50 - MPU-401 Hardware Emulation
3.00 - Roland MPU-401 or 100% Fully Compatible
3. Music Synthesizer
0.00 - None (Digital Only)
0.50 - Not Widely Supported : Innovation SSI-2001, Covox Sound Master, IBM Music Feature, IBM PS/1 Audio/Game Card
1.00 - Game Blaster
1.50 - Gravis Ultrasound, Creative CQM : Later Sound Blaster 16 & AWE32s, most 32s, all AWE64s
2.00 - OPL2 : Adlib, Sound Blaster 1.0-2.0, Thunderboard, Covox Sound Master II
2.25 - Dual OPL2 : Sound Blaster Pro 1.0, Pro Audio Spectrum; OPL3 : Sound Blaster Pro 2.0, 16, AWE32, 32; Pro Audio Spectrum Plus/16, Adlib Gold
2.50 - AWE32/64 EMU-8000, Waveblaster 1/2, OPL4
3.00 - Ensoniq Soundscape, Yamaha DB50XG, SW60XG, Roland SCB-7
4.00 - Roland LAPC-I, SCC-1 or SCB-55
4. Digital Audio Output
0.00 - None (Music Only)
0.50 - Not Widely Supported : IBM PS/2 Speech Adapter or Compatible, Covox Sound Master/Plus, Covox Voice Master
1.00 - Covox Speech Thing or Disney Sound Source, Roland RAP-10, Covox Sound Master II
1.50 - Adlib Gold, Pro Audio Spectrum
2.00 - Sound Blaster DSP 1.xx, Microsoft Windows Sound System, Gravis Ultrasound
2.25 - Sound Blaster DSP 2.00
2.50 - Sound Blaster DSP >= 2.01, Thunderboard
2.75 - Pro Audio Spectrum Plus/16
3.50 - Sound Blaster Pro, Sound Blaster 16 <= DSP 4.05
3.75 - Sound Blaster 16 >= DSP 4.05, Sound Blaster AWE32
4.00 - Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold (SPDIF)
Thus if you add up the total scores, you can get a good idea of the overall suitability of an ISA sound card for DOS gaming. A Sound Blaster 1.0 or Gravis Ultrasound gets a 6, Roland LAPC-I or SCC-1 would rank a 7, a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold a 10. A Sound Blaster AWE32 with SCC-1 would probably rate the highest at 11. Note that only the highest score for each individual category is counted. A basic AWE32 gets a 2.5 in the synthesizer category, not a 4.5.
The Aztech Labs Sound Galaxy Nova Pro16 Extra
I found this card installed in a 386/486 vintage Packard Bell. I took it as it looked interesting.
The card has had the DAC/ADC functionality of a Sound Blaster 2.0, a UART compatible MPU-401, a gameport, a Yamaha OPL3 chip and also is Microsoft Windows Sound System compatible. It has a line in, a mic in, a line out and an amplified out (for headphones or unpowered speakers) and a gameport.
The card is set either via software or EEPROM, which is mostly jumper selectable. All but one jumper has its function marked on the card, and there are four :
J1 - PC Speaker Amplification - Closed = High, Open = Low
JX1 - Microphone Type - 1-2 Closed = Condenser, 2-3 Closed = Carbon
JMPCFG - Configuration Type - 1-2 Closed = EEPROM setting, 2-3 Closed = Software setting
JMPBO - Base Address - 1-2 Closed = 220H, 2-3 Closed = 240H.
There are DOS configuration utilities buried in its Windows drivers. They will be in the directory with the file, EASYSTAR.EXE, which functions as a gateway to the audio configuration and testing programs and the mixer application. If you know the settings, no drivers need be loaded on bootup. The HWSET utility can be used to set the IRQ and DMA values and should be used to set the mixer values, as the EEPROM will not store the mixer values, despite what the MIXTSR program says.
There are headers on the card for CD-in (4-pin white connector), Modem-in (4-pin blue connector), multimedia PC speaker (4-pin header) and a Waveblaster-compatible MIDI card.
The mixer functionality allows for 16 volume levels for the Master Volume, CD/Line In, FM/Wavetable, Sound Blaster Voice (DAC) and Microphone. All but the microphone can have the volume of the left and right channels independently selected.
The UART MPU-401 uses a separate resource setting than the Sound Blaster or Windows Sound System.
The Sound Blaster and the MPU-401 can use either IRQ 2/9, 3, 5 or 7, but will not share an IRQ. The card uses DMA 1 for the Sound Blaster and DMA 3 for the Microsoft Windows Sound System, and neither can be changed. Like a real SB 2.0, it can be set to I/O 220 or 240 only. Similarly, like the SB 16, the MPU-401 port can be set to I/O 330 or 300.
The Microsoft Windows Sound System can be set to I/O 530, 604, E80 & F40. It can use IRQ 2, 7, 10 or 11 and DMA 0, 1 or 3. I believe it uses DMA 3 and IRQ 10. The Galaxy drivers insert the following line in AUTOEXEC.BAT :
SET GALAXY=A220 I7 D1 K10 P530 T6
There are three proprietary CD-ROM interfaces on the card, Panasonic, Sony and Mitsumi.
The Microsoft Windows Sound System, MPU-401 and game port can be disabled.
The 16-bit portion of the card is used only for the extra IRQ and DMA signals for the CD-ROM interfaces. They can use IRQ 11, 12 or 15 and DMA 0 or 3. Otherwise the card should work in an 8-bit slot.
One warning about this card, when it grabs an IRQ, it does NOT like to play nice. If you set its IRQ to the mouse's IRQ, for example, your mouse cursor will stop working. There is a TSR in the DOS utilities to provide for some level of Sound Blaster Pro compatibility, but it will not provide stereo panning support for Wolfenstein 3D. The headphone output is really noisy, with lots of hiss. The game port is as speed sensitive as a real pre-16 Sound Blaster, so in a fast 386 or a 486 system you will probably want to use something else.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
SID and DOS - Unlikely but True Bedfellows
The Commodore MOS 6581 Sound Interface Device, the SID, is one of the most famous synthesizer chips of all time. Its inclusion in the Commodore 64 and 128 computers helped to popularize computer music, mostly in Europe. Like virtually every other popular synthesizer chip of the time, it made its way to the PC in some form. Commodore had no problem in selling its chips to outside and technically rival companies. During its market life, the SID appeared in two different but related PC sound cards.
I. The Entertainer
In 1987, Microprose was looking for a way to enhance the sound of some of its DOS games. These games had access to superior audio hardware on the Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST, but the U.S. market was increasingly turning to the PCs. Unless a PC owner had a Tandy 1000 with its 3-voice chip, he had to settle for the PC speaker, as there was no popular and cheap sound expansion hardware available at the time. Since Microprose was still developing games for the Commodore 64, it seemed a natural idea to interface its SID chip with the PC. They advertised a PC sound board called The Entertainer, which included a 6581 and a joystick port on an ISA card. The only place this advertisement has ever been known to be seen is in an introduction screen and the readme to Gunship v429.04. The readme discusses the card with the following text :
Support has been added for the MicroProse Sound Board - "The Entertainer".
Presence of the board is detected by the program and enhanced sound is
automatically generated. Two additional control keys have been added to
control the volume. Ctrl-V turns the sound down one notch. Alt-V turns
it up. Just pressing "V" alone still toggles the sound on & off.
Microprose, according to the ad, sold the card directly and it was available through "your local retailer". Two high-level Microprose employees have been contacted and have no memory of selling the card at that time, so it probably was not actually sold and if it was sold, it did not sell well. The Entertainer card, if it was actually released by Microprose, was not supported by Microprose except in Gunship, v429.04 & 429.05 and Sid Meier's Pirates!, v432.1, 432.2 and 432.3. It may also be supported in 432.4, which was a DOS conversion of the floppy PC booter from a Best of Microprose CD. It was not known to have been intentionally supported in any other company's games. The in-game ad and the text quoted above was removed for Gunship v429.05, so it is very possible that this was an idea that Microprose considered but which it did not follow through to market.
II. The Innovation Sound Standard SSI-2001
Not too long after the Adlib Music Synthesizer Card began to be adopted by Sierra and other companies, and the idea (and more, as we will see) of a SID-on-a-chip card was resurrected by a company called Innovation. It released a card around April, 1989 called the Innovation Sound Standard SSI-2001, which is a 6581 plus a speed-adjustable gameport. It cost $129.00, but with discounts and coupons you could have purchased one for $69.00. It may have only been available directly through Innovation. Support was poor, the following games are the only ones known to support it :
Airball - SFX only, slow PC req'd
Bad Blood - Music only
Battle Chess II - SFX only
BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge
F-19 Stealth Fighter
Falcon A.T.
Harpoon
Joe Montana Football - SFX only
Lord of the Rings Volume 1 - Floppy version only, SFX only
Red Storm Rising
Super Jeopardy
Ultima VI - Music only
Windwalker
I have verified that all the above games work with the Innovation emulation in DOSBox except for Super Jeopardy. While Mobygames claims that Lexi-Cross and Castles and its expansion Castles : The Northern Campaign support Innovation, I have personally verified that these programs do not have install options for Innovation, despite what the system requirements labels on their boxes may indicate. Asterix: Operation Getafix is also listed by Mobygames as supporting the Innovation, but it actually supports the InterSound MDO, a Covox Speech Thing-like device released by the French gaming company Coktel Vision.
The best informational article describing the card can be found in Computer Gaming World, Number 63, September 1989. It mentions that only Origin and possibly Mindscape were planning to support the card. Interplay and Microprose eventually did with more than one title. Although Commodore made PC clones, it never put its sound chips in them. The SSI-2001 is the only non-Commodore product I am aware of that used the SID chip prior to Commodore's failure in 1994.
I. The Entertainer
In 1987, Microprose was looking for a way to enhance the sound of some of its DOS games. These games had access to superior audio hardware on the Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST, but the U.S. market was increasingly turning to the PCs. Unless a PC owner had a Tandy 1000 with its 3-voice chip, he had to settle for the PC speaker, as there was no popular and cheap sound expansion hardware available at the time. Since Microprose was still developing games for the Commodore 64, it seemed a natural idea to interface its SID chip with the PC. They advertised a PC sound board called The Entertainer, which included a 6581 and a joystick port on an ISA card. The only place this advertisement has ever been known to be seen is in an introduction screen and the readme to Gunship v429.04. The readme discusses the card with the following text :
Support has been added for the MicroProse Sound Board - "The Entertainer".
Presence of the board is detected by the program and enhanced sound is
automatically generated. Two additional control keys have been added to
control the volume. Ctrl-V turns the sound down one notch. Alt-V turns
it up. Just pressing "V" alone still toggles the sound on & off.
Microprose, according to the ad, sold the card directly and it was available through "your local retailer". Two high-level Microprose employees have been contacted and have no memory of selling the card at that time, so it probably was not actually sold and if it was sold, it did not sell well. The Entertainer card, if it was actually released by Microprose, was not supported by Microprose except in Gunship, v429.04 & 429.05 and Sid Meier's Pirates!, v432.1, 432.2 and 432.3. It may also be supported in 432.4, which was a DOS conversion of the floppy PC booter from a Best of Microprose CD. It was not known to have been intentionally supported in any other company's games. The in-game ad and the text quoted above was removed for Gunship v429.05, so it is very possible that this was an idea that Microprose considered but which it did not follow through to market.
II. The Innovation Sound Standard SSI-2001
Not too long after the Adlib Music Synthesizer Card began to be adopted by Sierra and other companies, and the idea (and more, as we will see) of a SID-on-a-chip card was resurrected by a company called Innovation. It released a card around April, 1989 called the Innovation Sound Standard SSI-2001, which is a 6581 plus a speed-adjustable gameport. It cost $129.00, but with discounts and coupons you could have purchased one for $69.00. It may have only been available directly through Innovation. Support was poor, the following games are the only ones known to support it :
Airball - SFX only, slow PC req'd
Bad Blood - Music only
Battle Chess II - SFX only
BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge
F-19 Stealth Fighter
Falcon A.T.
Harpoon
Joe Montana Football - SFX only
Lord of the Rings Volume 1 - Floppy version only, SFX only
Red Storm Rising
Super Jeopardy
Ultima VI - Music only
Windwalker
I have verified that all the above games work with the Innovation emulation in DOSBox except for Super Jeopardy. While Mobygames claims that Lexi-Cross and Castles and its expansion Castles : The Northern Campaign support Innovation, I have personally verified that these programs do not have install options for Innovation, despite what the system requirements labels on their boxes may indicate. Asterix: Operation Getafix is also listed by Mobygames as supporting the Innovation, but it actually supports the InterSound MDO, a Covox Speech Thing-like device released by the French gaming company Coktel Vision.
The best informational article describing the card can be found in Computer Gaming World, Number 63, September 1989. It mentions that only Origin and possibly Mindscape were planning to support the card. Interplay and Microprose eventually did with more than one title. Although Commodore made PC clones, it never put its sound chips in them. The SSI-2001 is the only non-Commodore product I am aware of that used the SID chip prior to Commodore's failure in 1994.
Technical details about the Innovation card and its SID implementation are as follows. The card puts the SID chip and its 29 registers directly on the ISA bus. It can use ports starting at 280, 2A0, 2C0 or 2E0. 280 is the default, and it takes up 32 consecutive I/O ports (3 presumably mirrored or unused). The SID is clocked using the 14.318180 MHz clock from the ISA bus. This clock signal is divided by the counter and flip flops on the board by 16 to produce a base frequency of .89488625 MHz. By contrast, the base frequency of the SID in an NTSC C64 is 1.02272714 MHz and a PAL C64 is .98524851 MHz.
The filter capacitors on the Innovation board use a value of 1nF. This was proper according to the datasheet of the 6581, but in practice in the Commodore 64, different values were used. By comparison, the 6581 SID in a C64 uses 470pF capacitors and an 8580 in a C64C or C128D use 22nF capacitors (1nF = 1000pF). If Innovation had used the later 8580 chips in their card, the datasheet for the 8580 specifies 6n8/6.8nF/6800pF capacitors. The POTX and POTY pins are not connected on the Innovation board, so the two registers which correspond to the functionality provided by these pins are useless.
The gameport is addressable at the standard port 201, supports 4 axes and 4 buttons, can be disabled with a jumper and supports three levels of "sensitivity", also selectable by jumper. The Innovation card is the first sound card known to incorporate a standard gameport, a feature popularized by the Sound Blaster in 1990 and then ubiquitous on sound cards for the rest of the decade.
By using the joystick enable jumper and the four port range selections, one can install four boards and hence four SID chips in one computer, if you had the slots to spare. Two boards would provide fully-independent stereo channels, but no software was known to take advantage of this capability.
By using the joystick enable jumper and the four port range selections, one can install four boards and hence four SID chips in one computer, if you had the slots to spare. Two boards would provide fully-independent stereo channels, but no software was known to take advantage of this capability.
I know of exactly two Innovation boards known to be in existence, and each has minor layout differences compared with the other. Both boards clearly show the use of 6581 chips, not the later 6582/8580 chips. Here are images of both boards known to be in existence :
Earlier Board :
Later Board :
Earlier Board :
Later Board :
No one I know has ever seen a "The Entertainer" branded card. It works just like the Innovation board hard coded at port 280, but it also has autodetection port functionality at port 200. Gunship and Pirates! will only produce SID sound if they read a value of 45h from this port. The code string BA 00 02 EC in Gunship 429.05 executables EGAME.EXE/CGAME.EXE/TGAME.EXE and TITLE.EXE (the only version that uses unencrypted executables) must be replaced with B8 A5 00 90. Ditto for the disk images of Pirates! Once the code is bypassed and an Innovation card is in the system or the emulation is enabled in DOSBox, you will hear SID sound. Unfortunately, DOSBox uses the 1.02MHz frequency and 470pF Caps for the SID, so it will not sound exactly like the real boards would.
III. The Modern Replica SSI-2001
In 2015, the prayers of many were answered when members of the VOGONS forum produced a replica of the SSI-2001 using a redesigned ISA board built mainly from photos of the card. This is what my card looks like :
Improvements over the old card include :
Can use 6581 or 8580 SIDs.
Jumper based speed setting for NTSC clock frequency or canonical SID clock frequency
Audio input jack
4-pin audio output header (dual mono on pins 1 & 4, pin 2 is ground)
Plated holes for POTX and POTY inputs
Fully labeled jumper settings
The cards have been made by a VOGONS user named Fagear, who is based in the Russian Federation. His work is top quality and he had the good sense to use mini-jacks instead of the RCA jack on the original. This meant that you can use any old junky ISA sound card for a bracket instead of having to make a custom bracket. My card works great, although I had to find my 6581 SID chip from another source.
You may notice, if you order from a card from Fagear, that the markings on the ICs, except for the SID, are not the familiar 74 series designations. The chips on this card are clones or work-alikes of the 74 series from several manufacturers exported by V/O Elektronorgtechnica. This company was a part of Elorg, the Soviet state owned entity that controlled imports and exports of computer hardware and where Tetris was born. However, with one apparent exception, the Russian parts appear to be functionally equivalent and use the same pinouts as the western chips. The identifying information for every part, western or Russian is silkscreened underneath the part, as can be seen here :
The sole exception is the chip just below the silkscreened SID CLOCK on the replica board, hence the jumper if the Russian or Western part is used.
You cannot just swap a 6581 for an 8580 in these boards whenever you like. The 6581 uses +12v, which the ISA bus provides. The 8580 uses +9v, which is not present on the ISA bus. In order to use an 8580, you must install a 78L09 voltage converter. The location is just to the left of the POT X holes. You would probably need to remove it if you revert to a 6581.
Thanks to VOGONS user form member bristlehog, you can play back .sid files through this card through a DOS utility called SIDPLAY. However, you will need a fast PC, around at least a 500MHz Pentium III, for proper speed. This is because .sid files use 6510 CPU instructions and rely on the 6526 CIA or the 6569 VIC-II for their timing, so a fair amount of these chips must be emulated. That means CPU power.
If you want to order a Replica SSI-2001 and download the player software, you can find it in this thread : http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=27045
With this Board, I was able to verify that Super Jeopardy does output digitized sound. The output volume is so low as to make it almost useless. Activision got it right in the BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge, the voice in the introduction is nice and clear with an Innovation.
III. The Modern Replica SSI-2001
In 2015, the prayers of many were answered when members of the VOGONS forum produced a replica of the SSI-2001 using a redesigned ISA board built mainly from photos of the card. This is what my card looks like :
Improvements over the old card include :
Can use 6581 or 8580 SIDs.
Jumper based speed setting for NTSC clock frequency or canonical SID clock frequency
Audio input jack
4-pin audio output header (dual mono on pins 1 & 4, pin 2 is ground)
Plated holes for POTX and POTY inputs
Fully labeled jumper settings
The cards have been made by a VOGONS user named Fagear, who is based in the Russian Federation. His work is top quality and he had the good sense to use mini-jacks instead of the RCA jack on the original. This meant that you can use any old junky ISA sound card for a bracket instead of having to make a custom bracket. My card works great, although I had to find my 6581 SID chip from another source.
You may notice, if you order from a card from Fagear, that the markings on the ICs, except for the SID, are not the familiar 74 series designations. The chips on this card are clones or work-alikes of the 74 series from several manufacturers exported by V/O Elektronorgtechnica. This company was a part of Elorg, the Soviet state owned entity that controlled imports and exports of computer hardware and where Tetris was born. However, with one apparent exception, the Russian parts appear to be functionally equivalent and use the same pinouts as the western chips. The identifying information for every part, western or Russian is silkscreened underneath the part, as can be seen here :
The sole exception is the chip just below the silkscreened SID CLOCK on the replica board, hence the jumper if the Russian or Western part is used.
You cannot just swap a 6581 for an 8580 in these boards whenever you like. The 6581 uses +12v, which the ISA bus provides. The 8580 uses +9v, which is not present on the ISA bus. In order to use an 8580, you must install a 78L09 voltage converter. The location is just to the left of the POT X holes. You would probably need to remove it if you revert to a 6581.
Thanks to VOGONS user form member bristlehog, you can play back .sid files through this card through a DOS utility called SIDPLAY. However, you will need a fast PC, around at least a 500MHz Pentium III, for proper speed. This is because .sid files use 6510 CPU instructions and rely on the 6526 CIA or the 6569 VIC-II for their timing, so a fair amount of these chips must be emulated. That means CPU power.
If you want to order a Replica SSI-2001 and download the player software, you can find it in this thread : http://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=27045
With this Board, I was able to verify that Super Jeopardy does output digitized sound. The output volume is so low as to make it almost useless. Activision got it right in the BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge, the voice in the introduction is nice and clear with an Innovation.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Sound Blaster Drivers - When DOS Games Need Them
The Sound Blaster cards, before the software configurable 16s and the AWE32s, are for the most part are fine if you just install them in a system and note the hardware settings. While they came with installation and program disks, games usually don't care whether those programs are installed or not. All the game wants to know is that the settings are correct. Some require the user to input those values in an install program, others autodetect the values and some just assume that the card uses specific values and fails if those values are not set. Most games are fine with a SET BLASTER variable in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file, such one that looks like this for the Sound Blaster 16 :
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
With the Sound Blaster Pro and Sound Blaster 16 the installation disks provide very useful utilities for setting the mixer. The power-on-default mixer values are somewhat quiet, so the preset mixer values provided by these utilities allow these cards to output at a higher volume.
However, there are games that require some files off the installation disks. The two files that may be needed are SBFMDRV.COM and CT-VOICE.DRV. SBFMDRV.COM is a Resident FM Driver, CT-VOICE.DRV is a Loadable Digitized Sound Driver. Typically, a SET SOUND= variable with the installation path of the Sound Blaster installation or the directory where these files can be found is sufficient. However, games requiring SBFMDRV.COM may require it to be loaded before starting the game. The Adlib Sound Card Disks contain an equilavent file called SOUND.COM.
It is important that the CT-VOICE.DRV is matched with the card or a superior card with which it is intended to work. Thus a CT-VOICE.DRV for a Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 will not likely work with a Sound Blaster 2.0.
Finally, there is at least one game that requires the Resident CMS Driver, CMSDRV.COM to be loaded prior to beginning the game. The original file will work fine with a real Game Blaster but not a Sound Blaster with CMS chips. In that instance, the CMSDRV.COM file from the Sound Blaster 1.0-2.0 Install Disks must be used. Here are the list of games that require these files or come with these files :
SOUND.COM OR SBFMDRV.COM
Don't Go Alone
Hoosier City
Kingdom of Syree III: Black Magic, The
Yendorian Tales: Chapter 2
Words of Jesus
CMSDRV.COM
Miami Vice
CT-VOICE.DRV
Breakin (Shareware)
Innocent Until Caught
Pizza Connection (German original only)
Prehistorik
Stick Fighter 1 & 2
Titus the Fox?
The Clou
Traffic Department 2192
It is important to note that some games have one of these files statically linked or embedded in their files. Jill of the Jungle is an example of this. JotJ embeds Creative's SBFMDRV.COM in its EXE files, and the 1.0 version of the game will only produce music on a Sound Blaster, not an Adlib card, even if you don't want digitized sounds. JotJ supports a basic Sound Blaster and none of the more advanced features of the SB Pros or 16s. Versions 1.2(b), 1.2(c) and 1.2(d) support a pure Adlib for music, but with the music you will hear only PC speaker sound effects in 1.2(b) and 1.2(c) and no sound effects in 1.2(d).
Here is a list of all versions of the drivers mentioned above, and for the Sound Blaster, I indicate which versions came with a particular card's install disks :
Adlib SOUND.COM versions :
1.00 or 1.10
1.20
1.30
1.51 (by far the most common)
Creative Music System CMSDRV.COM versions :
3.10 - CMS/Game Blaster Required
3.20A - Sound Blaster Required
Sound Blaster SBFMDRV.COM versions :
1.11 - Sound Blaster Card Version (SB 1.5)
1.22 - Sound Blaster Card Version (SB MCV)
1.30 - Sound Blaster Pro Stereo Version (SB Pro 1)
1.30B - Sound Blaster 1.5 and 2.0 Version (SB 2.0)
1.32* - SB Pro 2 / SB Pro MCV Version (SB Pro 2)#
1.32* - SB Pro 2 / SB16
1.33 - SB16 / SB Pro 2 / MCV Pro 2 (SB16)
1.34 - SB 1.5 / SB 2.0 / MCV 2.0 (SB 2.0 late)
# - will refuse to load on a Sound Blaster 1.0-2.0.
* - There are two versions of this driver, one dated February of 1992 and one dated October of 1992. The February 1992 driver (7,276 bytes) supports stereo playback, the October 1992 (7,191 bytes) driver does not.
For the .COM files, running the file will reveal the version number. The CT-VOICE.DRV is not self-executing and most versions do not have a version number, at least not in plain-text format, when viewed with a hex editor. Thus file sizes are used to distinguish the versions.
Sound Blaster CT-VOICE.DRV versions :
SB1.0 - 2,377 bytes
SB1.5 - 2,493 bytes
SBPRO1 - 5,014 bytes
SB2.0 - 3,894 bytes
SB2.0 - 31,866 bytes 4.01 (late)
SBPRO2 - 5,108 bytes
SBMCV - 3,894 bytes (one byte difference from the SB 2.0 version)
SB16 - 18,560 bytes
SB16 - 31,842 bytes 4.05 (late)
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
With the Sound Blaster Pro and Sound Blaster 16 the installation disks provide very useful utilities for setting the mixer. The power-on-default mixer values are somewhat quiet, so the preset mixer values provided by these utilities allow these cards to output at a higher volume.
However, there are games that require some files off the installation disks. The two files that may be needed are SBFMDRV.COM and CT-VOICE.DRV. SBFMDRV.COM is a Resident FM Driver, CT-VOICE.DRV is a Loadable Digitized Sound Driver. Typically, a SET SOUND= variable with the installation path of the Sound Blaster installation or the directory where these files can be found is sufficient. However, games requiring SBFMDRV.COM may require it to be loaded before starting the game. The Adlib Sound Card Disks contain an equilavent file called SOUND.COM.
It is important that the CT-VOICE.DRV is matched with the card or a superior card with which it is intended to work. Thus a CT-VOICE.DRV for a Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 will not likely work with a Sound Blaster 2.0.
Finally, there is at least one game that requires the Resident CMS Driver, CMSDRV.COM to be loaded prior to beginning the game. The original file will work fine with a real Game Blaster but not a Sound Blaster with CMS chips. In that instance, the CMSDRV.COM file from the Sound Blaster 1.0-2.0 Install Disks must be used. Here are the list of games that require these files or come with these files :
SOUND.COM OR SBFMDRV.COM
Don't Go Alone
Hoosier City
Kingdom of Syree III: Black Magic, The
PGA Tour Golf
Romance of the Three Kingdoms II
Solar WindsYendorian Tales: Chapter 2
Words of Jesus
CMSDRV.COM
Miami Vice
CT-VOICE.DRV
Breakin (Shareware)
Elfland
Eye of the StormInnocent Until Caught
Pizza Connection (German original only)
Prehistorik
Stick Fighter 1 & 2
Titus the Fox?
The Clou
Traffic Department 2192
It is important to note that some games have one of these files statically linked or embedded in their files. Jill of the Jungle is an example of this. JotJ embeds Creative's SBFMDRV.COM in its EXE files, and the 1.0 version of the game will only produce music on a Sound Blaster, not an Adlib card, even if you don't want digitized sounds. JotJ supports a basic Sound Blaster and none of the more advanced features of the SB Pros or 16s. Versions 1.2(b), 1.2(c) and 1.2(d) support a pure Adlib for music, but with the music you will hear only PC speaker sound effects in 1.2(b) and 1.2(c) and no sound effects in 1.2(d).
Here is a list of all versions of the drivers mentioned above, and for the Sound Blaster, I indicate which versions came with a particular card's install disks :
Adlib SOUND.COM versions :
1.00 or 1.10
1.20
1.30
1.51 (by far the most common)
Creative Music System CMSDRV.COM versions :
3.10 - CMS/Game Blaster Required
3.20A - Sound Blaster Required
Sound Blaster SBFMDRV.COM versions :
1.11 - Sound Blaster Card Version (SB 1.5)
1.22 - Sound Blaster Card Version (SB MCV)
1.30 - Sound Blaster Pro Stereo Version (SB Pro 1)
1.30B - Sound Blaster 1.5 and 2.0 Version (SB 2.0)
1.32* - SB Pro 2 / SB Pro MCV Version (SB Pro 2)#
1.32* - SB Pro 2 / SB16
1.33 - SB16 / SB Pro 2 / MCV Pro 2 (SB16)
1.34 - SB 1.5 / SB 2.0 / MCV 2.0 (SB 2.0 late)
# - will refuse to load on a Sound Blaster 1.0-2.0.
* - There are two versions of this driver, one dated February of 1992 and one dated October of 1992. The February 1992 driver (7,276 bytes) supports stereo playback, the October 1992 (7,191 bytes) driver does not.
For the .COM files, running the file will reveal the version number. The CT-VOICE.DRV is not self-executing and most versions do not have a version number, at least not in plain-text format, when viewed with a hex editor. Thus file sizes are used to distinguish the versions.
Sound Blaster CT-VOICE.DRV versions :
SB1.0 - 2,377 bytes
SB1.5 - 2,493 bytes
SBPRO1 - 5,014 bytes
SB2.0 - 3,894 bytes
SB2.0 - 31,866 bytes 4.01 (late)
SBPRO2 - 5,108 bytes
SBMCV - 3,894 bytes (one byte difference from the SB 2.0 version)
SB16 - 18,560 bytes
SB16 - 31,842 bytes 4.05 (late)
Friday, May 24, 2013
The Price of PC Sound (and some other stuff)
How much do we pay for sound hardware in our PCs today, not including speakers? The answer is usually nothing, all PC motherboards come with onboard sound chips that are satisfactory for 95% of users. Before 1987, the answer would have been the same, since there was no sound hardware available for PCs. You were stuck with the PC speaker or the three-voice sound chip if you owned a Tandy 1000 or IBM PCjr.
In 1987, sound hardware products were being marketed and released for the IBM PC platform for the first time. The first device that was not tied to a particular application (like Bank Street Music Writer) was the IBM Music Feature Card. This $600 card provided a MIDI interface and a four operator OPP frequency modulation synthesis chip with eight channels and stereo sound. The card came with 240 preset patches and allowed up to 96 user-created patches. It was intended for professional musicians.
The second device may have been the Roland MT-32. While Roland had marketed a MIDI Interface called the MPU-401 prior to 1987, it was an external box that could be used with many systems when combined with the right interface card. There were interface cards for the Apple II, Commodore 64, all the major Japanese computers of the mid-80s and two cards for the IBM PC. The MPU-401 was also marketed toward professional MIDI musicians, but with the MT-32, Roland had a product with a price point that could be enjoyed by professional and non-professional musicians alike. (Consider that the Yamaha DX-7, the first and very famous all-digitized synthesizer, cost $1,955 in 1983). The MT-32 was derived from Roland's D-50 Synthesizer and used a technology called Linear Arithmetic to combine digital samples with waveform synthesis. It supported eight channels and one percussion channel. It supported 32 voices, with each channel requiring 1-4 voices depending on the sound selected. It has 128 preset patches, 30 percussion patches and allowed for up to 64 custom patches. It supported reverb and stereo playback.
The third device may have been a cheaper card manufactured by Ad Lib, Inc. called the Ad Lib Music Synthesizer Card. This card simply interfaced an OPL2 chip to the PC's expansion bus and was intended for the home musician or teaching children about music. The OPL2 is capable of nine channels of two-operator frequency modulated synthesis or six channels plus five percussion sounds. Its only supports mono output.
Seeking a competitive edge in the burgeoning market for PC games, Sierra sought to make its products technologically advanced. Almost all the non-PC systems had better audio capabilities, but their sound hardware was built-in. Thanks to Nintendo, the days of buying an all-in-one computer that could run applications and games were gone. However, people still prized their leisure time and still wanted to play games on their PC, especially the more complex games that were not generally found on consoles. So Sierra On-Line began to search for hardware products that could bring its PC games to the next level. Roland suggested the MT-32 and history was made. Then the Adlib came for the many more budget-minded PC game players.
In 1988, Sierra began to sell computer add-on hardware directly to its customers. It is the only company of the time I know of which did this. Thus if your local computer store did not carry the cards, you had an easy outlet to obtain them. Sierra would include flyers in its new games, beginning with King's Quest IV, explaining and hyping the benefits of these new sound cards. It would send you a demo cassette tape almost for free to show off these cards' capabilities. Here are the prices if you wanted to take the plunge.
1988
Adlib - $245.00/$195.00 (with/without Visual Composer)
MT-32 + MPU-IPC - $550.00
Sierra never offered IBM's card for sale, and its support for it in games was underwhelming. Eventually Sierra stopped shipping drivers and patches for it, and at least two games, King's Quest I SCI and Sorcerian will freeze with the driver. You paid MT-32 prices for the IBM Music Feature but ended up with Adlib sound quality with Sierra's games.
The idea of spending $550 just to hear PC game audio was not something many people were prepared to spend money on in 1988. According to the U.S.'s Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator, $550 has the same buying power today as $1,081.08. Who today is going to spend over one thousand dollars today on PC sound equipment? Someone who wanted to make music, whether as a professional or as a serious amateur. That games could use the module seems to be to have been like chocolate icing on the cake. Today you could not convince someone to spend a thousand dollars on a sound card for gaming regardless of how many channels and bit rates it supports, the human ear can only process so much.
1989
Adlib - $195.00/$175.00 (card only price decrease)
MT-32 + MPU-IPC - $550.00
Game Blaster - $129.95
MT-32 + MPU-IMC - $650.00
The Game Blaster was supported, presumably in an attempt to provide something better than the PC Speaker at a cheaper price point. The Game Blaster came packaged with Sierra's Silpheed. While the Game Blaster can provide twelve channels of stereo frequency and amplitude controlled square waves with a noise channel and an envelope channel, it frequently sounded like the Tandy 3-voice sound chip, only in stereo. The MPU-IMC was the Microchannel version of the MPU-401 interface for IBM PS/2 computers.
1990
Adlib - $175.00
Game Blaster - $129.95
Sound Blaster - $239.95
LAPC-I - $425.00
MT-32 + MPU-IPC-T - $550.00
MT-32 + MPU-IMC - $650.00
The LAPC-I arrives to deliver on the promise of having a synthesizer fully on the card. While it is better priced than the MT-32 and includes 33 additional sound effects, Sierra's games frequently sounded better on the MT-32 because it abused bugs in the device to make custom sounds. Note how the prices have not really moved from the previous years. However, by this time, Sierra would be offering deals if you bought a card from them, like two free Sierra games of your choice if you bought the MT-32. (At their prices, that was over $100 in savings).
With the LAPC-I, for the first time gamers can enjoy a discount from Sierra. The MT-32 requires a separate MPU-401 interface, which seems to increase the price by $100-200. The LAPC-I has the interface built-in except for the external ports and was slightly cheaper to manufacture. However, by this time the MT-32/LAPC-I only had two years before it would be supplanted in the market by the Roland SCC-1 and other devices.
Since the Adlib was an extremely simple card, clones began popping up once other vendors discovered which chips it was using and games from Sierra and other publishers were being released with support for it. The people at Ad Lib, Inc. thought they were being clever by scratching off the chip part instead of obtaining an exclusivity agreement with Yamaha for the chips being used. However, in 1987 the board was not yet a great success. By this year you would see a $20 rebate coupon for the Ad Lib in game boxes. If you bought a clone board, you could easily save yourself $50-60.
Sierra replaced the MPU-IPC with the MPU-IPC-T, and while these two devices are virtually identical, the -T version leaves off the SYNC connector on the expansion box. It does allow for easy changing of the I/O ports, but Sierra only supported the MPU-401 on I/O 330-331.
The Sound Blaster is also sold, and at this price it contained the Game Blaster chips. It provided an Adlib-compatible OPL2 chip, a joystick/MIDI interface for the first time and provided a widely-accepted standard for digitized sound output.
1991
MT-32 + MPU-IPC-T - $399.99
MT-32 + MPU-IMC - $499.99
CM-32L + MPU-IPC-T - $545.00/$449.95
CM-32L + MPU-IMC - $549.95/$499.95
CM-32L Macintosh - $545.00
LAPC-I -$445.00/$399.95/$349.99
MCB-1 - $90.00/$84.95 (combo w/LAPC-I is $449.95)
Game Blaster - $99.99
Adlib - $109.99
Sound Blaster - $170.00/$159.95/$149.99/$129.95
Sound Blaster MCV - $249.95
Sound Blaster MIDI Box - $129.95/$89.95
Thunderboard - $99.95
Pro Audio Spectrum - $249.95
CD-ROM Kit - $795.00
Supra 2400 Baud Modem (internal) - $88.88
Supra 2400 Baud Modem (external) - $128.88
Gravis Analog Joystick - $59.95
Gravis Eliminator Game Card - $44.95
Gravis Eliminator Microchannel Game Card - $79.99
All throughout 1990 and beyond, Sierra began talking about the benefits of CD-ROM technology, their adoption of it and its eventual replacement of floppy disks. CD-ROMs were a huge expense in the early days and while Sierra may have released some of the first PC CD-ROM games, the real killer apps for the technology were probably The 7th Guest and Myst. Interestingly, Sierra seemed to have better support for the Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrums, including stereo FM synthesis support and later 16-bit digitized audio than the Sound Blaster cards. Presumably by this time there were no difficulties in trying to purchase multimedia hardware from a computer store.
The CD-ROM kit include the Pro Audio Spectrum, a Sony SCSI CD-ROM drive, the CD-version of Jones in the Fast Lane and Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia. CD-ROMs were generally connected via SCSI or proprietary interfaces until IDE CD-ROMs became cheap enough to become the only standard most consumers would ever deal with. Sound cards would be the main way to connect a CD-ROM until the Pentium era.
The Pro Audio Spectrum allowed for stereo OPL2 music, 8-bit stereo digital output at 22K, a MIDI/joystick interface and a non-bootable SCSI interface. The Thunderboard was a Sound Blaster 2.0 clone without MIDI or Game Blaster support.
The CM-32L finally replaces the MT-32 for the external synthesizer version, and its capabilities are identical to the LAPC-I. The LAPC-I gets the MCB-1 external MIDI box to reach full parity with the CM-32L and MPU-IPC-T. The Sound Blaster MCV is the Microchannel version of the Sound Blaster for IBM PS/2 machines. The Sound Blaster MIDI box is an overpriced device, the functionality of which can be replicated with a standard joystick/MIDI interface cable.
The Sound Blaster prices kept dropping throughout the year. By this time, the Game Blaster chips were an upgrade and by the end of the year, Sierra would probably have been shipping the smaller 2.0.
Presumably to complement Dynamix's line of simulators, Sierra also began offering joysticks. The Gravis Analog Joystick sports three buttons and has a large base and hand-grip handle. It has a tension dial and the buttons are reconfigurable. Unfortunately it did not come with a trigger button. The Eliminator game card was a dual port card with an external dial to control the speed of the card.
By this time, Sierra had just started up The Sierra Network, its online entertainment portal. It was similar to CompuServe, Prodigy and America On-Line. The modems being offered were not very fast, but were cheap and apparently sufficient for their service's needs. In the next year, hardware manufacturers would advertise 9,600 and 14,400 baud modems.
1992
CD-ROM Kit - $795.00
CM-32L + MPU-IPC-T - $449.95
CM-32L + MPU-IMC - $549.95
CM-32L Macintosh - $449.95
LAPC-I - $399.95
MCB-1 - $84.95
LAPC-I + MCB-1 - $449.95
Sound Blaster - $129.95
Sound Blaster MCV - $249.95
Sound Blaster MIDI Box - $89.95
Thunderboard - $99.95
Pro Audio Spectrum - $249.95
Pro Audio Spectrum 16 - $199.95
1992 is the last year that Sierra would attempt to sell products directly for quite a while. Increasingly, advertisements from various hardware companies would put their ads into Sierra's Interaction magazine. Few new products to report, the most notable being the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 at a reasonable price.
1996
Thrustmaster Formula T2 - $129.95
Sierra Screamin' 3D - $199.95
The Sierra Screamin' 3D is a 4MB Rendition Verite 1000 card. It was bundled with good-to-decent games like Indy Car II, A-10 Silent Thunder, CyberGladiators and a demo of the Rendition version of Quake (vQuake). Sierra tried again to be predictive of the upcoming technology, but it missed the mark. Unfortunately, the Rendition chipset had an achilles heel, namely that 2D VGA performance was incredibly poor. While most games could greatly benefit when the VGA mode was translated into a Rendition mode, those games that could not benefit, like the DOS version of DOOM, were unplayable. In other words, if the game went beyond the standard Mode 12-13h features, the game slowed to a crawl on the Rendition cards, even on a Pentium II. DOOM was still extremely popular in 1996. While Quake was one of the Killer Apps for 3D gaming, it was 3dfx's Voodoo card that took off, even though it was not a 2D card.
The Thrustmaster Formula T2 was a gameport interface racing wheel with pedals, two buttons and a gear lever. It could be purchased with NASCAR Racing 2 or IndyCar Racing II for $149.95. Judging by youtube video it was quite a good product back in the day.
Monday, October 1, 2012
All You Ever Wanted to Know about the Creative Music System , a.k.a. the Game Blaster
I. Market History
In 1988, DOS games were finally beginning to support cards and devices that would allow games to expand their musical abilities beyond the PC Speaker and PCjr./Tandy 3-Voice sound. King's Quest IV, released in September, 1988, was the first DOS game to support sound cards and midi interfaces. It supported the Adlib Music Synthesizer Card, the Roland MT-32 Multi-timbral MIDI Sound Module (with a Roland MPU-401 midi interface) and the IBM Music Feature, all of which had been released the previous year.
While the Adlib would soon become supported by all developers, and the MT-32 would dominate the high end of PC gaming for several years, IBM's card was seen as overpriced and lacking in features. It was supported in games only by Sierra, and then as something of an afterthought. Could a third card succeed? Creative Technologies of Singapore thought it could.
In late 1987 or early 1988, Creative Labs, Inc. released the Creative Music System (CMS or C/MS as it was abbreviated) in the United States (it had previously been released in Malaysia and Singapore). It consisted of a half-length 8-bit ISA card (called the "Creative Music Card") and software to compose music on the card. The software came on five 5.25" Double Density 360KB disks (Master Disk, Intelligent Organ, Sound Disk 1, Sound Disk 2, Utilities Disk). It included the Intelligent Organ, which used text mode ASCII graphics to show piano keys, demos, lots and lots of songs, many of which composed by the company's founder, W.H. Sim. It also includes a TSR called CMSDRV.COM, which some of the programs use to communicate with the card.
The Creative Music System had no game support in the beginning, and without it, any consumer based audio PC device would be considered little more than a toy. Creative had a card it could not sell, which is the reason why the Creative Music System box and package is incredibly rare today. Creative teamed up with Radio Shack to sell a repacked version of the card in its stores under the name Game Blaster. The official name of the actual card in this package is the Game Blaster Music Board. Note that whether the card is in a box with the label "Creative Music System" or "Game Blaster", the card is functionally identical. The software came on one 5.25" or 3.5" Double Density disk (both included), with only the Intelligent Organ, a demo, a test card utility, CMSDRV.COM and drivers for Sierra's games. The disks that came with the Creative Music System were available separately along with other Creative Labs programs for the card.
Like Ad Lib, Creative reached out to game developers, and in the Game Blaster box it included a full copy of Sierra's Silpheed and drivers for Sierra's SCI games released at the time. Hereafter, I use the label "CMS" to refer to the boards and software support for them. I believe the card was also referred to as the Avenger Music Card in some countries.
While the Game Blaster was more successful than the Creative Music System, it was still unable to challenge the Adlib's increasing dominance over PC audio. Creative's card had one feature the Adlib lacked however, and that was stereo output. In the beginning, it was the poor man's stereo music card, because only high end solutions like the Roland MT-32 supported stereo until the days of the SB Pro. Unfortunately, its musical capabilities were not inspiring to game programmers despite its marketing as a music card. Programmers and consumers viewed square wave synthesis was seen as technically inferior to the FM synthesis of the Adlib. The Adlib was a simple card and easy to clone or implement. Creative decided to combine the CMS functionality with the Adlib functionality and add a MIDI interface, a joystick adapter and digital audio input and output functions to create a "Killer Card." This card was marketed as the Sound Blaster at the end of 1989.
It soon became apparent that the CMS functionality (which enabled Creative to advertise the card as a "stereo" solution) was unimportant to buyers, so Creative left out the chips in the 1.5 and 2.0 versions of the Sound Blaster. The chips could be added in as an upgrade from Creative, or in the 1.5's case, by buying the right chips from anyone who had two of them. Relatively few people bothered when the Adlib provided all the functionality that PC games needed. In mid-1991, Creative released the Sound Blaster Pro and eliminated support for CMS on the board and in their products.
II. Technical Qualities
The card has six jumpers to set the I/O address to 210, 220 (default), 230, 240, 250 or 260. It takes up the consecutive sixteen ($F) addresses from and including the I/O starting address set by the jumper. It uses no IRQs and no DMAs. It uses standard TTL Logic and a custom Creative Technology CT-1302 Programmable Logic Array for interfacing. The music is exclusively made by two Phillips SAA-1099 chips, one for the left channel, one for the right channel. SAA-1099s from Creative have CMS-301 stickers on these chips.
The left SAA-1099 is at I/O 2x0 & 2x1 and the right SAA-1099 is at I/O 2x2 & 2x3. The subsequent twelve I/O addresses are used by the CT-1302. For a long time, the function of this chip was a mystery, but now we know what it can do. One problem which Creative used this chip to solve was that of detection. While the game publisher could require a user to tell a program the hardware he had in his system, it would be difficult for a less savvy user to know or remember what he had or where in the I/O space it was. Creative decided to make it easy for the consumer and the game programmers by allowing the card to be detected by software.
In order for a card to be detectable in software in a PC, it has to give a reliable, non-random response to a read from the processor, the more distinctive the better. The SAA-1099s cannot be read, only written, so there was no reliable way to detect these chips in software. Here is where the CT-1302 comes in. For the remaining addresses, the card will store or latch an 8-bit value written to it at addresses 2x6 or 2x7, which is then read back by a program from address 2xA or 2xB. Port 2x4 always contains value 7F, giving this card an even more unique detection scheme. If the value read at 2xA or 2xB is the same as the value written at 2x6 or 2x7 and the unique value at 2x4 is 7F, then the card is detected. There must be two different I/O addresses involved in the reading/writing scheme, otherwise this scheme does not work reliably.
There is a volume wheel to control the amplified output to the RCA jacks and headphone minijack. They can drive speakers up to 8ohms. There are cards marked with CT-1300A and CT-1300B part numbers.
Each Phillips SAA-1099 chip supported six channels of sound using square waves with 12-bit frequency control and 4-bit amplitude control. Up to two of the six channels could be used for white noise generation or envelope generation with 8 preset envelopes. The chip can output in stereo through dual amplitude controls. Compare the TI SN76496 and its derivatives found in the IBM PCjr. and Tandy 1000 computers with three channels of square waves with 11-bit frequency control, 4-bit amplitude control, a separate noise generator and mono output. The SAA-1099 is almost a stereo clone of two AY-3-8910s, where each chip supports three square wave channels with a 12-bit frequency control, 4-bit amplitude control, a noise generator and a envelope generator.
In Creative's products, the SAA-1099s are clocked at 7.159MHz, which is exactly half of the OSC 14.318MHz signal. It its 1990 C/MS Programming Information manual, Creative Labs copies much of the SAA-1099 datasheet but fails to make any mention of the envelope generator functions or registers and also leaves out the most important noise selection (in which it uses the programmable frequency of a tone generators), giving the impression that the noise generator is only capable of three pre-selected frequencies. The manual gives the impression that the Game Blaster is less capable than it actually is, and doubtless may have contributed to the relative lack of use of the noise capabilities in DOS games. I am not aware of any game that used the envelope function. The chips Creative Labs used appear to be generic SAA-1099s (after you peel the CMS-301 sticker off them), so all the functions described in the SAA-1099 datasheet should be available.
The Sound Blaster 1.5 is the same card as the Sound Blaster 1.0 but it has two empty sockets for SAA-1099 chips. Once these are installed, and they can be obtained from IC suppliers, then CMS becomes available. No jumpers or other fiddling is required. With the 2.0, not only do the ICs need to be inserted, but a programmed PAL (write once) or GAL (rewritable) will need to be inserted into the third socket. Chuck(G) of the Vintage Computer Forums develpoed a method to deduce logic tables for PALs and used his method to determine the logic table for the PAL Creative used and programmed. The upgrade GALs programmed with the derived logic will work on all 2.0s except those with the CT1336A chip. On those boards, a newer upgrade chip or reversed engineered chip will be required. Once the three chips are installed, the CMSOFF jumper needs to be removed.
III. CMS Games & Software
Through various sources, including MobyGames and VOGONS forums, I have identified 83 unique DOS games that support CMS. In the chart below, I give the release year as reported by MobyGames, but I highly doubt, for example, that the DOS ports of Airball and Times of Lore were released in 1987 or 1988 respectively, or that patches were available for Sierra's 1988 games until 1989. (I have been corrected as to Times of Lore). Games that supported CMS were really available from late 1988 to 1992.
Unfortunately, due to the self-detection mechanisms described above, not all games work with a Sound Blaster with CMS. However, I have been able to make 75 of those 83 games work with a Sound Blaster with CMS. Many games, including all games from Sierra, Activision and LucasArts games, do not try to detect CMS and require the user to select CMS in an install program or with a command line argument to make the game work with CMS. Some games will play Adlib or Roland MT-32 music and sound if they detect one in the system even if they detect a CMS. In those cases, you need to manually select CMS by a command line argument.
This would not be a huge problem except that CMS cards are extremely rare. One to two come up on ebay in a year. Thus if someone wants to hear CMS on real hardware and not worry about compatibility or finding the right command line switches to get CMS working, they need a real CMS. Sound Blasters, the 1.5 and 2.0 are not as rare, and can be upgraded with Phillips SAA-1099 chips obtained from an IC supplier and a programmed GAL (with the caveat given above).
In many, many cases, CMS music in games will sound pretty awful next to the Adlib or the Roland MT-32, and sometimes even the Tandy 3-voice chip sounds better. Elvira and Conan are especially awful, and Sierra's support for games like Laura Bow 2 is pretty pathetic. However, Times of Lore uses it well, and Airball is unique in that it supports CMS and Innovation SSI-2001 (better than CMS) but not Adlib or Roland.
Some games and most of Creative's CMS software use CMSDRV.COM to access the Game Blaster and require it to be run as a TSR prior to the game or software being run. The driver provides basic interface services to the game through a software interrupt. CMSDRV.COM v3.10, used before the Sound Blaster, will refuse to load unless it successfully detects a true CMS or Game Blaster card. So will the Intelligent Organ executables found with true CMS boards. However, Creative included versions of these programs that will run with a Sound Blaster in its original 1.0 driver disks. The version of CMSDRV.COM that comes on the Sound Blaster 1.0 disks is v3.20B. If a game requires you to use CMSDRV.COM and its CMSDRV.COM fails to load because you have a Sound Blaster, just copy over the later version.
Some games will automatically detect a Sound Blaster, and if so, will allow CMS music to work. Sound Blaster detection is usually done by sending a report DSP version command to the card and reading back a value that would seem to make sense (1.5, 2.0 or 2.01). Thus some Accolade games will default to CMS music because it detects a Sound Blaster and the user did not load the SOUND.COM TSR from an Adlib disk or SBFMDRV.COM from a Sound Blaster 1.5 or above disk. These TSRs act exactly like the CMS TSR, and if a game advertises Adlib support but you cannot hear the sound in the game, try running one of these beforehand.
Silpheed (v1.0) had already been released without support for CMS, so the version (v2.3) in the Game Blaster box included the full game (on 5.25" and 3.5" disks) with support added for the CMS, volume control (which does not work with CMS) and text for Xacalite's speech (apparently his speech did not function correctly, so it was impossible to understand everything he said). Sierra did not leave out any of the other sound card drivers in this version and even added a driver for a Yamaha FB-01 MIDI module (connected to a Roland MPU-401 MIDI interface). Sierra would later release v2.4 in the Silpheed box and v3.0 with the PS/1 Audio/Game Card.
Drivers were included on the Game Blaster disk for King's Quest IV, Leisure Suit Larry II, Police Quest II and Space Quest III. For the later versions of King's Quest IV and Leisure Suit Larry II and all versions of Police Quest II and Space Quest III, there are two files. The first, CMS.DRV, is common to all games. The second, PATCH.101, is unique to each game. For the older versions of King's Quest IV and Leisure Suit Larry II (SCI interpreter versions 1.000.111 and 1.000.011 or earlier, respectively), there was a unique CMS.DRV for each game combining the two files identified in the previous sentence. There was a program called SG-INST.EXE which allowed you to change the I/O address of the driver. This should work with all Sierra SCI0 engine CMS drivers.
Finally, there are several instances where claimed support for CMS does not seem to really exist. In the list, I have identified games where I could not find any indication that CMS support was actually included in the game or that the support was broken and not fixable. Even the box will sometimes give false advertising. However, if anyone is actually able to get CMS working in these games, let me know.
In the table, Y = Yes, N = No, P = Patch Required. Many games will not recognize CMS at an I/O port other than 220-22F.
| Game | Release | Publisher | CMS/Game Blaster Only | I/O Port Select | Notes |
| Airball | 1987 | MicroDeal | N | N | |
| Altered Destiny | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | Y | N | |
| Arkanoid II: Revenge of Doh | 1989 | Taito Corporation | Y | N | "Special Version", not present on other versions |
| Bad Blood | 1990 | ORIGIN Systems, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess | 1990 | Interplay Productions, Inc. | N | Y | |
| BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge | 1990 | Infocom, Inc. | N | N | |
| Breach 2 | 1990 | Impressions Games, Mindcraft Software, Inc. | N | N | |
| Bubble Bobble | 1989 | Taito Software Inc. | Y | N | |
| Budokan: The Martial Spirit | 1989 | Electronic Arts, Inc. | N | N | |
| Castle of Dr. Brain | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Champions of Krynn | 1990 | Strategic Simulations, Inc. | N | N | |
| Chuck Yeager's Air Combat | 1991 | Electronic Arts, Inc. | N | N | |
| Codename: Iceman | 1989 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Colonel's Bequest, The | 1989 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Conan: The Cimmerian | 1991 | Virgin Games, Inc. | N | N | |
| Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail | 1990 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Day of the Viper | 1989 | Accolade, Inc. | N | N | |
| Death Knights of Krynn | 1991 | Strategic Simulations, Inc. | Y | N | |
| Don't Go Alone | 1989 | Accolade, Inc. | N | N | |
| EcoQuest: The Search for Cetus | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Elvira | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | N | N | |
| F-14 Tomcat | 1990 | Activision, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Fire Hawk : Thexder – The Second Contact | 1990 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | N | |
| Gunboat | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | N | N | |
| Harpoon | 1989 | Three-Sixty Pacific, Inc. | N | N | |
| Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Hero / Quest for Glory I | 1989 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Hoyle's Official Book of Games: Volume 1 | 1989 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Hoyle's Official Book of Games: Volume 2 | 1990 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Hoyle's Official Book of Games: Volume 3 | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure | 1989 | Lucasfilm Games LLC | N | N | EGA Version 1.4 for Support, All VGA Versions have Support |
| J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Vol. I | 1990 | Interplay Productions, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Jack Nicklaus' Unlimited Golf & Course Design | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | N | N | |
| Joe Montana Football | 1990 | SEGA of America, Inc. | N | N | |
| Jones in the Fast Lane | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Keef the Thief: A Boy and His Lockpick | 1989 | Electronic Arts, Inc. | N | N | |
| King's Quest I: Quest for the Crown | 1990 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella | 1988 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | Patches Required, Different for Old or New Version |
| King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder! | 1990 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | N | |
| Lakers versus Celtics and the NBA Playoffs | 1989 | Electronic Arts, Inc. | N | N | |
| Leisure Suit Larry 1 : In the Land of the Lounge Lizards | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals | 1989 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Leisure Suit Larry 5: Passionate Patti Does a Little Undercover Work | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Leisure Suit Larry Goes Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) | 1988 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | Patches Required, Different for Old or New Version |
| Les Manley in: Search for the King | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | N | N | |
| Loom | 1990 | Lucasfilm Games LLC | N | N | |
| Miami Vice | 1989 | Capstone Software | N | Y | Replace included CMSDRV.COM with CMSDRV.COM from Sound Blaster 1.0 Install Disk |
| Mixed-Up Fairy Tales | 1990 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Mixed-Up Mother Goose (16-Color High Res) | 1990 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | |
| Mixed-Up Mother Goose (256-Color Floppy) | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Night Shift | 1990 | Lucasfilm Games LLC | N | N | |
| Oil's Well | 1990 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | N | |
| Operation Wolf | 1989 | Taito America Corporation | N | N | Fails to Detect but Works Anyway |
| Paku Paku | 2011 | Paladin Systems North | N | Y | |
| PGA Tour Golf | 1990 | Electronic Arts, Inc. | N | N | Run SOUND.COM for Adlib Music |
| Police Quest II: The Vengeance | 1988 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | Patch Required |
| Police Quest III: The Kindred | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel | 1992 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Power Drift | 1990 | Activision Publishing, Inc. | N | N | |
| Prince of Persia | 1990 | Brøderbund Software, Inc. | N | N | v1.0 Only, Must remove Adlib chip from Sound Blaster to get C/MS Music, buggy unless patch, see comments below |
| Puzznic | 1990 | Taito Corporation | Y | N | |
| QIX | 1989 | Taito Corporation | Y | N | |
| Quest for Glory I: So You Want To Be A Hero (256-Color) | 1992 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire | 1990 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | N | |
| Rambo III | 1989 | Taito America Corporation | Y | N | |
| Rastan | 1990 | Taito Corporation | Y | N | |
| Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye | 1990 | Activision, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Silpheed | 1988 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | v2.2 and above |
| Sorcerian: Master Scenario | 1990 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | N | |
| Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | N | |
| Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon | 1989 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | P | Patch Required |
| Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers | 1991 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | N | |
| Spirit of Excalibur | 1990 | Virgin Games, Inc. | N | N | |
| Spot | 1990 | Virgin Mastertronic Ltd. | N | N | |
| Star Control | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | N | Y | Game will try all six I/O ports to detect Game Blaster, Must Remove Adlib chip to get Game Blaster music to work, Game will automatically enforce MT-32, Adlib, Game Blaster, Tandy and PC Speaker in that order |
| Strike Aces | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | N | N | |
| SU-25 Stormovik | 1990 | Electronic Arts, Inc. | N | N | |
| Test Drive III: The Passion | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | N | N | |
| The Dagger of Amon Ra | 1992 | Sierra On-Line, Inc. | N | Y | |
| The Game of Harmony | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | N | N | |
| The Secret of Monkey Island | 1990 | Lucasfilm Games LLC | N | N | |
| Times of Lore | 1988 | ORIGIN Systems, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Ultima VI: The False Prophet | 1990 | ORIGIN Systems, Inc. | N | Y | |
| Windwalker | 1989 | ORIGIN Systems, Inc. | N | N | |
| WolfPack | 1990 | Brøderbund Software, Inc. | N | N | Fails to Detect but Works Anyway |
| Games without CMS Support | |||||
| Xenocide | 1990 | Micro Revelations, Inc. | Box claims support, but not fully implemented in software | ||
| Secret of the Silver Blades | 1990 | Strategic Simulations, Inc. | Box claims support, card will make some horrible noises in game, but there is no entry at the music selection screen. Adlib overrides everything for music | ||
| Jordan vs Bird: One on One | 1988 | Electronic Arts, Inc. | Some Boxes have the System Requirements Label from Lakers v. Celtics, Game does not support Adlib, C/MS or Roland MT-32 | ||
| Sargon 5: World Class Chess | 1991 | Activision, Inc. | No switches for Game Blaster in Executable | ||
| Trump Castle II | 1991 | Capstone Software | Possibly Broken | ||
| Monte Carlo Baccarat | 1991 | Capstone Software | Possibly Broken | ||
| Hoverforce | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | Seems to Support Adlib/MT-32 Only | ||
| Stratego | 1990 | Accolade, Inc. | Seems to Support Adlib/MT-32 Only | ||
| Blue Max: Aces of the Great War | 1990 | Three-Sixty Pacific, Inc. | Box claims support, but seems to support Adlib only | ||
| Das Boot: German U-Boat Simulation | 1990 | Three-Sixty Pacific, Inc. | Box claims support, but seems to support Adlib only |
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