The Tech Pioneer Behind Sound Blaster Has Passed Away (engadget.com) 79
"Singaporean inventor and tech pioneer Sim Wong Hoo passed away on January 4th at the age of 67," reports Engadget:
Sim may not be a household name these days, but he founded Creative Technology (or Creative Labs in the US), the company behind the Sound Blaster brand of sound cards, back in 1981. Sound Blasters were some of the first sound cards available to consumers, and there was a time when you had to make sure your system worked with them if you wanted to listen to music and play games.
Sim established his business in the US and started selling Sound Blasters a few years later, after which Creative became the first Singaporean company to be listed on the Nasdaq exchange. The integration of sound boards into the motherboard ended Sound Blaster's popularity, but Bloomberg says the cards provided audio for more than 400 million PCs.
Under his leadership, Creative also launched a range of MP3 players, and Sim once tried to take on Apple by spending $100 million on advertising and marketing in its bid to dethrone the iPod. In 2006, Creative sued Apple for violating its patent for portable media system menus. The companies filed more lawsuits against each other after that before Apple settled with Creative and paid the company $100 million for the technology outlined in its patent.
Sim established his business in the US and started selling Sound Blasters a few years later, after which Creative became the first Singaporean company to be listed on the Nasdaq exchange. The integration of sound boards into the motherboard ended Sound Blaster's popularity, but Bloomberg says the cards provided audio for more than 400 million PCs.
Under his leadership, Creative also launched a range of MP3 players, and Sim once tried to take on Apple by spending $100 million on advertising and marketing in its bid to dethrone the iPod. In 2006, Creative sued Apple for violating its patent for portable media system menus. The companies filed more lawsuits against each other after that before Apple settled with Creative and paid the company $100 million for the technology outlined in its patent.
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A: Take out the SoundBlaster card.
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It was pretty ordinary compared to other systems at the time that had decent audio capabilities onboard (e.g. Amiga, Mac, Atari ST). The market for the Sound Blaster only existed because the PC was so bare-bones.
Re: Those Were the Days My Friends (Score:2)
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Other systems were customisable - Amigas had Zorro, Macs had NuBus, Suns had VME and later SBus. Most of them had proper card discovery/configuration and IRQ sharing long before PCs got that with PCI, too.
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the PC would eclipse it sooner or later.
As it turned out, later... Much later.
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Could have been worse though, you could have bought a Gravis Ultrasound instead, like I did. Adding a Sound Blaster emulator did not make things easier.
The later innovation that was EAX frikkin rocked. At least until Microsoft decided that low-level access to video was good, but somehow bad for audio.
I did some work for creative once (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for a web site and game dev company called MediaX that was in charge of such celebrity websites as N'Sync, whee-ha. And one of the projects we worked on long, long ago for Creative (not so long ago that they were called Creative Labs, though) was a music sales website called MuVo, which they shitcanned once we were done with it. This is unfortunate because it had a killer feature, you could rate other reviewers and it would weight their reviews in the review scores presented to you accordingly. They kept the name for their mp3 players [wikipedia.org], which the site was supposed to accompany, but the players were never popular (perhaps in part because they didn't have an associated music purchase site, like the players which did become most popular... hmm) and they petered out.
Anyway, as the network admin I was asked to set up the server infrastructure, which for some reason (customer request, I think) was a pair of windows frontend servers, IIS using ASP+Jscript, a pair of database backend servers, and a dual-attach FC array, load balancing and firewalling by cisco boxes, and HA by WLBS (nee Wolfpack.) It was all surprisingly solid, and the one thing that did give me an appreciation for Microsoft's web server architecture is that you could plug different languages into ASP, and combine them not just in a single project, but even a single document. You got jscript and vbscript out of the box, but you could add in perl for example (with ActiveState PerlScript.) Everything else about ASP was kind of terrible, but that was neat.
Creative's products were the standard and benchmark for PC audio for decades, but now we've literally arrived at CPU vendor provided chipset audio. (And good riddance to Realtek.) And the other products Creative was known for were their mp3 players, which are also all but gone due to cellphones. Now it seems like they're surviving on speakers, and licensing tech to Intel...
Re: I did some work for creative once (Score:2)
Interesting, I actually bought a 64MB MuVu mp3 player back in the day. It was great and had long battery life and a really small form factor.
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I got a SoundBlaster 16 - I recall it was gamer related pack, as it came with a simple joystick, 2x cd-rom drive, and speakers. That was my first purchase from Creative.
Rebel Assault game was included I think.
I got a few other items from Creative over the years, but it's been some years since I got anything from them.
Maybe I will look them up again, to see if they got anything interesting going.
BTW, Sim never married. He said something about family life not suiting someone starting (or was it running a comp
Re:I did some work for creative once (Score:5, Interesting)
And good riddance to Realtek
What's wrong with Realtek? I mean sure their audio chips weren't anything to write home about but by-n-large they have gotten the job done in a perfectly adequate way for over 20 years, happily providing surround sound, digital audio, pass through of advanced codecs such as DTS without any issue. Their driver was transparent (by which I mean it just worked in the background without interfering or making demands of the user), their hardware is universally supported, and one can't argue that they withstood the test of time while at the same time making yet another expensive add-on card in the PC irrelevant.
Not sure why you're celebrating their irrelevance rather than treating it with ... cautious indifference.
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What's wrong with Realtek?
The drivers are crap on all platforms, even the OSS ones. I presume this is due to poor documentation, but it doesn't really matter why. All that matters is that having Realtek means having problems. I don't even care even slightly about audio output quality of onboard audio (if I do care about audio quality, I'm not using internal analog audio at all, period) but the headache factor of Realtek has always been massive.
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Examples please. In my experience across many platforms for many years the Realtek drivers have never once been ... anything. Not good, not bad, virtually non-existent and completely irrelevant to the user in every way. I've never installed them, never tweaked them, and never had an issue caused by them. They have a shitty application to apply APOs which can be uninstalled without any negative consequence what so ever, and the audio system continues to in every sense of the word "just work".
They just work w
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Realtek got a bad rep because they serve the low cost end of the market, so many of the products that their chips end up in are crap. However, as you say, they actually work just fine, and what's more Realtek doesn't make much effort to prevent them being reverse engineered for open source drivers.
One of their TV tuner chips sparked the low cost Software Defined Radio revolution, because it was easily hackable.
Their network chips work fine. Not the highest performance, but they get the job done.
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Nothing to do with Soundblaster, but - back around the turn of the millennium, I wrote a web forum using ASP JScript on IIS 4.0. I went with JScript because there was a possibility the site might change hosting providers, I thought it might be easier to adapt to Netscape's (or was it someone else's?) Javascript-based server.
Then, quite a few years later, I had to work with PHP (which I'd actively avoided for a very long time) and was struck by how similar the basic structure was to ASP. Between that and the
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Yeah the language plugability was great.
We had a website at work, in the the very early 2000s that used Python as the underlying language (which was really useful to us as a company that had been using the langauge since the 1990s).
Eventually we ended up using PHP for most of this stuff, which I kinda hated , but it was at least ubiquitous.
I never understood why... (Score:2)
... when even with 8 and 16 bit systems home such as zx81, spectrum, BBC B, ST, Amiga you could plug in multiple peripherals and they would Just Work, early PCs required you to screw around with IRQs, sometimes manually setting jumpers and then hope for the best.
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Simple: all the machines you mention had only one extension port. Plug in an extension and that's it - unless that extension was itself designed to accept another one piggybacking on it, in which case the software that drove it was designed to let another extension be visible transparently.
The PC with its interrupts was designed to let you run several cards that could generate different interrupts.
Re:I never understood why... (Score:4, Informative)
With the Apple II you had to tell the port meaning where you actually plug the card. In comparison a little jumper is nothing next to the fact that you could plug the card in any slot.
Setting the address, irq and dma was dead simple with the pc if you had some clue of where all the other things were. Creative infamously made a little mistake by defaulting to an IRQ often used by a parallel port, which they changed later (from 7 to 5). All you need to do was make sure no two things used the same and that your programs knew where the device is (often with an environment variable set at boot).
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It wasn't really that simple when you had several devices that needed an IRQ and gave you limited choices. Often you were forced to choose between e.g. a network card or a sound card.
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Plug and Play on PC was fraught with issues because it came late in the PC lifespan (1993-1995) where there was a significant install base of non-Plug and Play cards in use. The problem was that you needed to map out the resources that were consumed by the non-PnP devices to avoid those resources from being re-allocated, and there was no standard way to do so. Early BIOSes let you manually block out the IO, Memory, IRQ and DMA resources that were used by non-PnP cards, but that required one to know where everything was.
Configuring exclusions in BIOS was a "standard way". It did require that you knew where everything was, but you could accomplish that either by being the person who configured the non-PnP hardware, or by using a system info tool to determine what was configured where. The big problem with early PnP hardware was NOT that (anyone who knew what they were doing could handle that) but that a lot of PnP cards had very painfully limited settings. For instance, lots of cards had two or maybe four profiles that they
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No, the Amiga has multiple expansion ports. The reason Amigas worked so well was the Zorro architecture. [wikipedia.org]
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Amiga and Mac had automatic configuration of expansion cards (Zorro and NuBus, respectively). The PC was built to be as cheap as possible using off-the-shelf parts only. The ISA bus is basically just the 8088/8086 system bus brought out to edge connectors. There's no way for cards to indicate what resources they need/are using and no standard way for software to reconfigure cards.
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Well it didn't take long for the PC to have mod playback using that very first Soundblaster. Famous PC game Starcontrol 2 (open source released as Ur-Quan Masters) music was composed in Amigas and played back from actual mods during gameplay, and that wasn't the only one, i seem to remember Heroes of Might and Magic and some more. Of course there were players and eventually composer programs. I clearly remember downloading .mod and .s3m from bbs and playing them with my soundblaster 1.5 (which i still have,
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All it really needed to be was a digital to analog convertor, and yes, I understand they added synthesizers to them because the lack of memory was still an issue back then
It's the opposite of that. They made the Adlib clone Game Blaster first, then they added PCM to the design to make the Sound Blaster. And memory was only used for buffering on sound cards at the time, there were no PC sound cards with sound fonts (or anything like) until later. Maybe GUS or PAS?
The Amiga's 4 variable rate 8-bit digital to 2 analog thing was unsophisticated, but it proved the concept, even with low memory - it was widely used by games developers on the original 512k A500 for example. Implementing that in 1989 would have been cheap
No, it wouldn't have been, because the Amiga's sound hardware was only cheap because of the Amiga's design — where the custom chips had direct access to [the bottom part of] main memory. In order for PCs to do
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I had a couple of them. They sounded great, could really blow a SoundBlaster away, but support was awful. Plus this was pre-internet so you had to dial up their BBS in Vancouver to download drivers and software. My dad was not pleased with the phone bills.
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crashes (Score:2)
Nothing crashed DOS or Windows more than SoundBlaster drivers. *shudders*
SB had great outputs when it was working, inputs were always noisy.
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The interesting part is that there were enough people with this problem that alternative community "fixed" drivers became a thing.
I still run Audigy 2 today (because quality of outputs for a proper 5.1 analogue setup between Audigy 2 and any integrated motherboard sound card is night and day), and the only way I would ever try to run it is with those drivers. Original Creative drivers are a shitshow to this day.
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You can have my Gravis Ultrasound if you manage to pry it from my old, rusted PC.
What is your name? (Score:5, Funny)
Hello Name,
I am Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
Say whatever is on your mind freely, our conversation will be kept in strict confidence.
So, tell me about your problems.
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One can tell the mods aren't old enough to have enjoyed the Eliza-alike Dr. Sbaitso [wikipedia.org].
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The whooshing sound being played by a SoundBlaster AWE32!
I passed by the Creative Labs office in Milpitas, CA last week. Their company sign, unfortunately, is in a terrible state of disrepair, but thought about how great their sound cards were back in the 90's.
ChatGPT vs Dr. Sbaiso? Bring it on.
Re:What is your name? (Score:5, Informative)
Who are the clueless mods that downvoted to this to -1 ??
Dr. Sbaitso [wikipedia.org] that was a text-to-speech demo that came with the Sound Blaster that was loosely based off of ELIZA [wikipedia.org]
TIL: SBAITSO stood for SoundBlaster Artificial Intelligence Text-to-Speech Organizer
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I'd love to see them ported to IRC and Matrix. :)
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Who are the clueless mods that downvoted to this to -1 ??
To be fair, it is the ramblings of an Anonymous Coward. The fact that it happens to be relevant is entirely secondary.
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The funny thing is that when Dr. Sbaitso says
memory contents will be wiped off after you leave
I truly believe it, whereas I wouldn't trust any program/web/AI today. At all.
Oh yeah, him: (Score:2)
The guy who literally sued Apple for daring to organize Music by Genre, Artist, Album and Song.
An "obvious invention" if ever there was one.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't know, it's Apple, inventor of the "look and feel" lawsuits. If anyone deserves a lawsuit over something obvious, it's them.
Bullshit.
In Memory (Score:2)
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I think I have an AWE32 somewhere. I'll join you in the tribute.
Re: In Memory (Score:2)
I remember trying to automate soundfonts using MIDI on an AWE64G, sporting 4MB of onboard memory dedicated for them and 20bit convertors. The card which I, too, still have, rests in its box.
Creative could have used plain MIDI CC for control (Control Change, it's in the name, right?) and automation (volume, pan, envelopes and such), but instead they used much more obscure RPN/NRPN. And unlike CC, I couldn't even remember any of these codes or draw them in Cakewalk. What a mess that was as an introduction to
And nothing of value was lost. (Score:1)
They strong-armed companies into including Creative only features under the threat of lawsuits including the "Carmack Reverse."
Fuck 'em
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Up until the Sound Blaster 16 they were open and good. Then they switched tactics. Similar to Apple until the Apple // family.
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Sound Blaster made deals with Yamaha to deny chip supply to Adlib.
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Yeah, this guy used a lot of dirty tricks to get a short-term monopoly on sound cards in the early 1990's.
When motherboard manufacturers started integrating sound chips into the motherboard, he got a taste of his own medicine.
Re: And nothing of value was lost. (Score:1)
aureal went bankrupt by frivulous creative lab lawsuits then creative bought them cheaply and buried the aureal vortex tech.
Poor long term support (Score:1)
Both with the Soundblaster Live and the Audigy, Windows software support ended long before the hardware was broken or hardware wise no longer compatible. There were some hacks and inofficial driver packages, but I did not have much luck with these.
Eventually, I got both running under Linux though. Which became easier in the sense of less tinkering required over the years. Today, if you install a new (x)Ubuntu version the Audigy at least will run without any extra configuration needed.
Nostalgia (Score:1)
Back in 2000 I replaced my cheap sound card with a Creative kit (sound card and 4.1 speakers) and the sound was beautiful. Some time later, when I wanted it to work on Linux too, it was the very first time I had to compile a kernel module. 1 or 2 years later, it was working with the default kernel, but not with the EAX effects that made the difference on Windows.
I never had Creative sound card (Score:1)
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I loved my Zen, it took many a drop and kept going. The fact it's native organization software was essentially MS File Explorer (as opposed to downloading iTunes and dealing with all that) made it a wonder to work with. And never forget... THE SMELL OF THE PORT
Sound blaster card in the 286 (Score:1)
Sound blaster card in the 286, playing Wolfenstien, was the best gaining experience of my life.
An important stepping stone in digital audio (Score:5, Informative)
Re:An important stepping stone in digital audio (Score:4, Funny)
Some of us still have PTSD from the days of setting Ports, IRQ and DMA channels. Have some consideration for others when digging out the past.
Creative Zen (Score:1)
SoundBlaster cards were great. MP3 players... not (Score:2)
SoundBlaster cards were great. Their MP3 players not so much.
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Hey, the Creative MP3 players did start a common /. meme... you know, the "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." (This was the /. review of the original iPod on release).
Bad hardware for me (Score:1)
Still going strong... (Score:1)
...as I write this, I'm listening to music on YouTube played back via a SoundBlaster ZxR - which came with an analogue volume knob. That's the killer feature for me, but the sound quality isn't bad either.
As for the DOS days, I never did have a problem with any of my ISA SoundBlasters, which culminated in the AWE64. They just worked under DOS, although yes, the older ones did need configuring (IRQ7, as used for the printer port, was a good one to use, or IRQ5 as the later ones defaulted to). On the other ha
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My liver! (Score:2)
SoundBlaster gave rise to an early meme, long before they were called such.
It allowed digital sounds to play, where before you just had a few tones or even just clicks.
So Wolf 3D had a Nazi get shot, and the guy croaked "Mein leben!", my life, as he died.
This got misinterpreted by teens as "My liver!"
Anyone still use an external soundcard today? (Score:1)
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I use an outboard Roland DAC/ADC when I care about noise.
For daily work some ancient Gateway speakers and a webcam are totally fine.
SOUNDBLASTER! Loved and hated it (Score:1)
I loved the quality of the sound from the late 90's that I got from my Soundblaster card. Good quality sound, my games sounded great! For the most part, it worked like it was supposed to function.
Then I had problems with IRQ conflicts on later systems that would cause my whole system to take a dump. As a fledgling computer nerd, I had to cut my teeth learning to fix things like that. Maybe I should thank Sim Wong Hoo for making me learn more about computers and how to fix problems?
I didn't really notice whe
It was not one of the first (Score:1)
Aureal 3D was the greatest loss (Score:1)
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It's taken until the PS5 for 3D audio via headphones to become main-stream again after Creative Labs patent trolled Aureal's A3D audio tech into oblivion
Fuck no. You're talking shit. Creative hit Aureal back in '98 or '99. Positional audio has been implemented in many many games over the past 20 years.
It certainly didn't take the coming of the Pisstation 5 for it to be main stream in games.
Childhood and teen days memories (Score:1)