Funny I completely forgot just how bad sound cards used to be until the late 90's. Routing the audio from a cd rom drive to the sound card was a thing.
We didn't get digital audio from CD-ROM drives until we got WDM drivers, and those weren't super popular until the Windows 2000/XP era. I ran out of 4-pin CD-audio cables when I built my Pentium 4 2.0 GHz/GeForce 2/Sound Blaster Live system, and then realized that if I want to use VXD drivers to get better EAX effects I need to grab another cable for Redbook audio.
@@c6jones720 Eh, that was relatively easy once you figured out what settings would work with your build. The biggest problem for me was forgetting that IRQ 7 was shared between the printer port and the sound card. It normally wasn't a problem, until a sound-making screen saver started up during a long print job!
WSS does look like a 4 layer card. The digital section is laid out normally with internal pour and surface routing. The analogue section is laid out inverted, with the outer layers being ground pours for shielding and internal routing. Notice how most of the signal path traces are not visible on either of the surfaces, instead most components are connected straight to vias, many underneath the components instead of to the side, and nowhere else. Gives the whole card quite an eery look. This looks to be by far not the only design trait, it actually is a really nice card. Actually arguably this inverted shielded layout probably doesn't do much, but it doesn't hurt either. The ground pour near signals does help, and just avoiding silly signal loops and tight component placement and routing helps a lot, and component selection helps a lot as well. Many soundcards with that AD WSS codec are quite clean! And yes Creative is just thrown together on 2 layers everything cutting right across not a care in the world.
I remember working with this card... The included speech recognition system was excellent+ when used properly, (possibly the best available at the time), but it definitely was not a general-purpose sound card.
It's definitely an odd one, if only the Sound Blaster compatibility was less broken. Seeing a Microsoft logo on any type of PCB add on card still weirds me out a bit. Is there a patch for MMX I'm missing?
@DOSStorm There an individual who redid the MIDI for an SC-55 and it sounds amazing. Not only on it but also the MU2000EX and other soundfonts. th-cam.com/video/LwfeO4uVAUI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=WvRlJlHHiZipwIi1
@@Vanessaira-Retro That looks and sounds amazing, thanks for sharing! I didn't realize how sort of whacky the DOS version of the game is until I played the SNES version years later. The DOS version is the one I grew up on, since I never had a SNES.
@DOSStorm I started with the SNES version, so when I heard the DOS version as well as the DOS version of Street Fighter 2. I cringed a bit. If you want the files just let me know.
Given how old it was and that time was basically the wild west of sound cards (or anything, really) I think it's not half bad! Always nice to hear (haha!) or see something different.
The FM synth is a real OPL3 so it will mostly sound like an SB16 for music. The digital sound is where it has problems and it doesn't work most of the time even on really popular games like Doom or Duke3d.
Yeah chips like the cheap and ubiquitous opti929 just look at the datasheet... it just piggy backs off one of these, but adding midi routing, game port, sound blaster emulation and optical drive address logic. WSS is quite fortunate for those since it only needs a couple flow control pins, 8-bit data bus and 2-bit address bus, so the cost of the package doesn't explode with the number of IO lines, which get expensive. Of course until AC97 came about which had even fewer pins and became an even more obvious choice.
Are you saying that the voice reader feature used pre-recorded speech and not synthesised text to speech when reading text aloud? That's not very good at all. The performance of the WSS card in Mystic Towers was particularly troublesome. Since I've not played One Must Fall, I don't really know what it should sound like. To me the WSS card sounded just fine when you played Tyrian 2000.
Yeah, it's prerecorded speech. The best you get for unknown words is the option for it to read out individual letters. Tyrian and Descent support WSS natively so they work perfectly without the need for SB emulation. Mystic Towers and OMF are using the emulation which is why they sound off.
Seems like businesses would have been better off just buying Sound Blaster cards… I think the rare ASP upgrade enabled some text to speech functionality. Maybe if Creative had marketed that to businesses, then maybe more software would have been developed to take advantage of the ASP for business use.
100%. I would say Creative's implementation of text-to-speech was quite a bit better than what Microsoft did here. The software doesn't actually require a WSS card to work either, and the same WSS driver/software package actually contains special drivers for Sound Blaster cards. There is no real advantage of using an SB16 or something with a WSS driver though, you're much better off using Creative's driver which has MIDI support. I just question whether anyone needed TTS for any business related activity in 1992. It seems like it was a fleeting gimmick especially considering how poor the dictionary is.
Dude that looks like an IBM PS/1 G44. Is that right? I had one mine was at 20 MHZ. But it was the only one with the 5.25 bay below the 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives. Let me know please !!!!!!!
Funny I completely forgot just how bad sound cards used to be until the late 90's. Routing the audio from a cd rom drive to the sound card was a thing.
We didn't get digital audio from CD-ROM drives until we got WDM drivers, and those weren't super popular until the Windows 2000/XP era. I ran out of 4-pin CD-audio cables when I built my Pentium 4 2.0 GHz/GeForce 2/Sound Blaster Live system, and then realized that if I want to use VXD drivers to get better EAX effects I need to grab another cable for Redbook audio.
@@physbryan ands all those dos games where you had to st up interrupt numbers...
@@c6jones720 Eh, that was relatively easy once you figured out what settings would work with your build. The biggest problem for me was forgetting that IRQ 7 was shared between the printer port and the sound card. It normally wasn't a problem, until a sound-making screen saver started up during a long print job!
WSS does look like a 4 layer card.
The digital section is laid out normally with internal pour and surface routing.
The analogue section is laid out inverted, with the outer layers being ground pours for shielding and internal routing. Notice how most of the signal path traces are not visible on either of the surfaces, instead most components are connected straight to vias, many underneath the components instead of to the side, and nowhere else. Gives the whole card quite an eery look.
This looks to be by far not the only design trait, it actually is a really nice card. Actually arguably this inverted shielded layout probably doesn't do much, but it doesn't hurt either. The ground pour near signals does help, and just avoiding silly signal loops and tight component placement and routing helps a lot, and component selection helps a lot as well. Many soundcards with that AD WSS codec are quite clean!
And yes Creative is just thrown together on 2 layers everything cutting right across not a care in the world.
I remember working with this card... The included speech recognition system was excellent+ when used properly, (possibly the best available at the time), but it definitely was not a general-purpose sound card.
HammerFall! A man of culture.
I have been known to enjoy some Power Metal from time to time. :)
Just subscribed, youtube recommended your video and glad it did. Keep these great videos coming!
I'm definitely going to keep making them. Thanks for watching!
One of the few soundcards I have yet to use. Neat video!
DOS Storm, do you want a redone MIDI patch for Mega Man X?
It's definitely an odd one, if only the Sound Blaster compatibility was less broken. Seeing a Microsoft logo on any type of PCB add on card still weirds me out a bit. Is there a patch for MMX I'm missing?
@DOSStorm There an individual who redid the MIDI for an SC-55 and it sounds amazing. Not only on it but also the MU2000EX and other soundfonts.
th-cam.com/video/LwfeO4uVAUI/w-d-xo.htmlsi=WvRlJlHHiZipwIi1
@@Vanessaira-Retro That looks and sounds amazing, thanks for sharing! I didn't realize how sort of whacky the DOS version of the game is until I played the SNES version years later. The DOS version is the one I grew up on, since I never had a SNES.
@DOSStorm I started with the SNES version, so when I heard the DOS version as well as the DOS version of Street Fighter 2. I cringed a bit. If you want the files just let me know.
@@Vanessaira-Retro Yes! If you could pass those along to my email, Twitter or just Archive.org that would be great. Thank you.
Given how old it was and that time was basically the wild west of sound cards (or anything, really) I think it's not half bad! Always nice to hear (haha!) or see something different.
the sb emulation sounds better than expected, but it did allow for a whole breed of sbpro and wss compatible clones later
The FM synth is a real OPL3 so it will mostly sound like an SB16 for music. The digital sound is where it has problems and it doesn't work most of the time even on really popular games like Doom or Duke3d.
Yeah chips like the cheap and ubiquitous opti929 just look at the datasheet... it just piggy backs off one of these, but adding midi routing, game port, sound blaster emulation and optical drive address logic. WSS is quite fortunate for those since it only needs a couple flow control pins, 8-bit data bus and 2-bit address bus, so the cost of the package doesn't explode with the number of IO lines, which get expensive. Of course until AC97 came about which had even fewer pins and became an even more obvious choice.
2:56 - уже заблокировали звук из за лицензии.
You had me there for a second, I was checking my channel for restrictions. 😆
Are you saying that the voice reader feature used pre-recorded speech and not synthesised text to speech when reading text aloud? That's not very good at all. The performance of the WSS card in Mystic Towers was particularly troublesome. Since I've not played One Must Fall, I don't really know what it should sound like. To me the WSS card sounded just fine when you played Tyrian 2000.
Yeah, it's prerecorded speech. The best you get for unknown words is the option for it to read out individual letters. Tyrian and Descent support WSS natively so they work perfectly without the need for SB emulation. Mystic Towers and OMF are using the emulation which is why they sound off.
Seems like businesses would have been better off just buying Sound Blaster cards…
I think the rare ASP upgrade enabled some text to speech functionality. Maybe if Creative had marketed that to businesses, then maybe more software would have been developed to take advantage of the ASP for business use.
100%. I would say Creative's implementation of text-to-speech was quite a bit better than what Microsoft did here. The software doesn't actually require a WSS card to work either, and the same WSS driver/software package actually contains special drivers for Sound Blaster cards. There is no real advantage of using an SB16 or something with a WSS driver though, you're much better off using Creative's driver which has MIDI support. I just question whether anyone needed TTS for any business related activity in 1992. It seems like it was a fleeting gimmick especially considering how poor the dictionary is.
Dude that looks like an IBM PS/1 G44. Is that right? I had one mine was at 20 MHZ. But it was the only one with the 5.25 bay below the 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives. Let me know please !!!!!!!
Saw the title, clicked "don't recommend channel".
Thanks.
Are you an elitist weirdo or something?
Not appreciating the sheet joke? Like the... spreadsheet?