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The History of PC Audio
JP's Website The History of PC Audio Posted on 2024-06-29 This is a brief, abridged, and possibly in accurate history of audio on the IBM PC compatible. It's based on an exhibition I prepared for Synthesised, a special event at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, England.
Games like Epic Pinball used this to great effect, playing quality Amiga-style sample based audio on a 386, when you'd need a Pentium to get the same performance using software-based mixing with a regular Sound Blaster card. Games like 1996's Quake didn't bother with a MIDI soundtrack at all, instead filling all that spare space on the CD with a proper Nine Inch Nails sound track. Soon after that CPUs became powerful enough to decode heavily compressed but high quality MP3 files whilst still playing the game, and so the PC based sythesiser was rendered redundant from about 1996 onwards.
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