1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to [email protected]
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
The motherboard had nothing but the case usually had a speaker just to make a "beep" sound. I had to play Wolfenstein with that shit because my dad didn't have a sound blaster until he also got a CD-ROM drive to play Doom since he could only find a copy on CD and not floppy disk.
And even now, a SoundBlaster32 is better than the in-built audio stuff motherboards do have. Though it's not worth getting one just for games.
If you want good sound, buy an external usb DAC. It will be away from all electro magnetic interference and will be way better than any consumer stuff.
Modern built-in DACs are insulated well enough for good sound. You only want to spend money on an external one if you want excellent sound.
How quickly we forget the chip tunes of the PC Speaker, I used it in a computer lab one day to play a nearly undetectable high freq wave using logo. The PC Speaker was a pretty flexible little speaker
I used the Amiga disk drive to play music. It sounds like you would imagine. And will destroy the drive if you play too much.
My fairly modern computer, originally released in 2014 (yes, that's modern compared to a lot of the computers I own), has no sound card.
I picked up a Yamaha AG06, which has a USB connection and creates both audio inputs and audio outputs to/from my PC. I can quickly plug in my phone or a Bluetooth receiver (which my phone connects to), and get other audio into my headphones with very little trouble. I prefer it this way, and if my next PC has onboard audio, I'll probably disable it in favor of the AG06.
On Windows you need audio drivers. Why? We will never know
Every OS needs drivers for every device.
The only difference is whether they're included in the OS or if you need to obtain them separately.
Back in my days of dos games, you didn't download a driver for your sound card, instead, you told the game where to find the device, and what device it was, and the drivers were built into the game.
Drivers. Drivers everywhere.
I still use my external soundblaster to connect to my 5.1 amp. I have HDMI to my TV and then toslink to my amp, but it was inconvenient having to have the TV on for listening music.
Until I upgraded to Linux Mint recently I actually DID use a Soundblaster card (modern one from 2018) to drive my super nice headphones and speakers
Too bad mint weirdly hated it despite recognizing it, but the new speakers have a fine DAC so....
I had to play Wolfenstein 3D with the little wafer speaker on the motherboard.
Back in my day, there was a little speaker in the case that connected to the motherboard by a couple of wires.
It sounded terrible and we liked it, because it was better than nothing.
I still use those, how else can you hear your POST codes?
Most BIOSes can show them on screen and most motherboards have LEDs to indicate WTF is going on before the screen becomes active. Also, boot up failures are extremely rare compared to 1990-s.
We had floppy drives but they started making the disks rigid! Rigid!!! If only we could go back to the good old scuzzy times....
I think the only floppy disk that I know of that I didn't use was the 7"? I think it was 7. The one that's larger than the 5.25" that was really common.
From there I've used or handled just about every type of digital storage. The 5.25" floppy disks are classic, but easily near the bottom of my list for favorites. They're down there with anything on tape (which is useful but always a hassle), and early USB drives when they used the cheapest solid state IC they could find and no matter what you did the IC was always painfully slow and there was nothing you could do about it because every manufacturer did that shit.
3.5" was rigid on the outside, floppy in the middle. Still a floppy diskette in my view.
Yeah, the inside of a 3.5" was still just a little floppy magnetic thing. I was just trying to be silly and channel my old-man-yells-at-cloud vibe.
Eight inches, not seven. Got a story with that...
Back when I was in school, I was working on the side on expanding an ERP system for a customer. Said customer got a stack of printouts from their main supplier each January: The new price list. They meticiously typed that 300+ pages list into their own ERP system, and then checked it for errors. This took the boss and his wife a good part of January and February. Every year.
So I told him that the main supplier already has that data in a computer, why does he not ask to get the price list on disk, and I see whether I can get them into the system via a software import. He called them, asked me back if "IBM Format" would be OK, and I said yes. Surprise: The supplier had an IBM mainframe and sent us an 8" floppy. Luckily, the boss knew the right people with the right equipment and got me a copy on 5.25" and in ASCII (the original was in EBCDIC).
It took me one day to figure out the format, write an importer, and run it to completion. Boss and wife were very happy.
Dr. Sbaitso says "'sup."
Soundblaster? Pfff, Covox users club assemble!