I had to play Wolfenstein 3D with the little wafer speaker on the motherboard.

Those whippersnappers have it so easy these days! They don't even know what an interrupt is any more!

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 was a rebel and went with the Pro Audio 16

But you got the connector for a Joystick for free!

Ah, i remember might & magic 3. loved it, because it sent speech through the crappy pc speaker. So cool

You had to use Voodoo to see the magic 3d graphics

Still running Creative SoundBlasterX G5

Amazing card, and the series is very much alive

Dr. Sbaitso was the speech systhesis DOS program that was included with most Soundblaster cards. You could tell Dr. Sbaitso about all of your problems.

I had one. Besides, I love 80s/90s aesthetics.

Dr. Sbaitso says "'sup."

"Your sound card works perfectly"

What? They did have onboard sound. The problem is that if you used the motherboard speaker to make anything more decent than a beep, you basically needed to build an entire sound engine from scratch and very few games did so. It also wasn't worthwhile because a shitty two pin speaker could not compare to the speakers of a professional sound system which you needed the soundcard to hook up into, and CPU bandwidth was such a limitation back then than even when games could play WAV they would use MIDI to offload the musical instrument synthesizing for the soundtracks to the sound card. Designing a game that used the onboard sound speaker was basically the realm of assembly hacking geniuses.

The Yamaha YM3812 sound chip was the backbone of computer sound & music generation for almost a decade.

In the grand scheme of things they were relatively inexpensive. You could spend a lot but you didn't need to.

I'm still rocking an Audigy 2 on my main computer for that 1/4" jack on the front bay

Wait. When did onboard sound get good enough that you don't need a soundcard? My computer is "only" 12ish years, and it has a soundcard. The reason used to be that internal ones sounded like shit.

Gravis Ultrasound with red pcb reporting..

220/5/1

Long live the Gravis Ultrasound Max!

Back when MIDI and the quality of your synthesizer actually mattered!