Sound Blaster Live! Primer

The Sound Blaster Live! represented Creative Labs return to products which could compete with other sound cards designed for the PCI Bus. First released in 1998, the Live! was Creative's first "real" PCI sound card. Things had changed, competing chipsets had improved in quality, Windows 95's standardization meant that sound drivers did not have to adhere to proprietary hardware as they did with DOS and the use of wholly-digital sound leveled the playing field compared to the DOS era. Let's explore their Live!

Packard Bell : PC-Compatibles for the Masses, 1990s Style

In the history of personal computing, we often discuss the great pioneers who brought digital computing from the universities and the state to ordinary people, companies like Apple, Tandy, Commodore, Atari.  These companies, which had big successes in the late 1970s and through the mid 1980s, did succeed in exposing millions of people to computer technology.  But these non-PC compatible computers did not become ubiquitous household items, they were very expensive and offered little assistance for day-to-day non-business activities.  The PC became dominant in the late 1980s in the US market and not too many years afterward in the rest of the world.  One of the key players in that success was Packard Bell, and in this blog post I will talk about the company and my recent experience with one of its PCs.

20th Century PC Game Remakes, Remasters, Sequels and Successors

The home computer has produced many, many classic and groundbreaking games.  Some games have been sufficiently successful to spawn a series, others have just been held to be a pinnacle in their own right without sequels.  Eventually, interest in many games and series that were once popular tends to wane and commercially many of these series were seen to have no future.  Occasionally, however, a long dormant game or series can be reactivated with a new sequel.  Since 2010, there have been quite a few new games released for the PC that are late sequels, remasters or spiritual successors of older classic PC games.  It is still somewhat rare for PC games to get remade, but those that do should be identified.  However, it is especially impressive for a game to be revived after ten years or more without a commercial release (budget re-releases don't count), so I am going to focus on those games.

In this blog article, I will try to identify games that were released during the twentieth century I will not be covering late ports or fan mods, otherwise the blog article may include too many games to manage.  Several games have been successfully ported to mobile devices, but tracking down ports is too much to manage with my ten-year rule.  I just don't have the time to track down every re-release of Dragon's Lair, Defender of the Crown or The Oregon Trail, games that always seem to be ported or rehashed.

Windows 3.0 Multimedia Edition - Early Windows Multimedia Gaming

Microsoft Windows 3.0 was the first widely adopted and truly successful version of Microsoft's graphical "Operating System."  It was released on May 20, 1990 and came on five 1.2MB floppy disks.  It could be purchased in a box and was the first version of Windows that was noted for being bundled with new PCs.  It had an incremental update, Windows 3.0a, released on October 31, 1990.

Windows 3.1 - The Dawn of Windows Gaming

Microsoft Windows released Windows 3.1 on April 6, 1992.  This was the first version of Windows that Microsoft really designed for gaming applications and was available to purchase at retail.  (Windows 3.00a with Multimedia Extensions was available from OEMs).  Windows 3.1 main draw was its support for multimedia, essentially sound cards, MIDI devices and CD-ROM audio.  Unlike the text command line parser of DOS, Windows was a graphical operating system with nary a command prompt in sight.  Most control was accomplished using a mouse.  For the first time users could easily access more than one program on a PC through the task switcher because the operating system was built for multitasking.