Timeline / Gaming Audio

1970s

• The Gooch Synthetic Woodwind (1972): The granddaddy of all sound cards. It connects to a CDC Plato terminal and provides basic musical features and nothing more.
• ALF's Music Card MC16 (1979): If the Gooch Synthetic Woodwind is the granddaddy of all sound cards, this is the father of all sound cards, and in fact pioneered a lot of industry firsts. It was the first soundcard for a desktop computer (the Apple ][), and uses a three-channel PSG not unlike those in the Apple II cards that followed. It is also in fact the first expansion card made for the Apple II. And it was the inspiration for Texas Instruments' SN76489 PSG chip^note which was in fact a miniaturized MC16 with a fourth white noise channel which was eventually used in the Sega Master System and ColecoVision, among many other consoles of it's day. Despite being a best seller, few games supported it- it was mostly supported by music software- and it was eventually overshadowed by the Mockingboard.

1980s

• MOS Technology 6581 and 8580 aka Commodore SID (1981): The infamous SID chip found on all Commodore 64s and 128s. The chip was designed with music production in mind and thus has features like an envelope generator and ring modulators.
  
  The chip itself has three channels of audio, each three channels has independent generators for pulse, sawtooth, triangle and noise. A low-pass, high-pass and band-pass filter is also integrated into the chip. They were even designed to receive audio input to act as an effects processor, and were also equipped with a hardware random number generator primarily to drive the noise channel, but could be used to generate random numbers for the OS.
  
  A revision of the 6581, called the 8580, improved upon the design and fixed some errors in the design of the 6581 that was not discovered until the chip entered production, the 8580 could perform wave combination of the output of two generators in a cleaner manner than the 6581, additionally the 8580 fixes flaws in the filter implementation in the 6581. Unfortunately the fix had turned out to be one for a Good Bad Bug, as fixing the output combination caused the chip’s playback of digitised speech to become muffled.
  
  Both revisions have their fandoms and at one point were the center of a fandom rivalry, they're now extremely sought after, with fakes floating around on eBay and ASIC and FPGA reimplementations of the chip like the SwinSID costing hundreds of dollars.
• The Mountain Computer Music System (1982): Quite possibly the first digital audio card in the world, for the Apple II. It is a wavetable synthesis card, capable of 8 channels of 8-bit audio. However, its high cost and lack of support in games meant it was only used by professional musicians and thus had a niche market.
• The Mockingboard (1983): The de facto sound card for the Apple ][, based around General Instruments' AY-3-8910 PSG. Sound I cards have three PSG channels out of a single AY PSG, Sound II cards carry a pair of AY PSG chips for a total of 6 channels. Other sound cards from the company includes the Speech I which uses a Votrax SC-01 (or a later Votrax SSI-263 drop-in replacement) voice synthesizer chip, and a Sound/Speech I card which comes with an AY chip and a SC-01 chip. Later cards introduced a model with two AY chips with one SSI-263 voice synthesizer chip. Most games can take advantage of the presence of two cards, but have music written for only 9 channels of audio due to also being ported to the PC, whose de facto sound card is the Ad Lib. Most games expect to find the first card in Slot 5 and the second card in slot 6.
• The PC-9801-26 (1984) and PC-9801-26K (1985): The de facto sound card for the PC-98 in the 80s, whose base configuration only has a interrupt-driven beeper just like it's PC cousin.
  
  At the heart of the -26 series of cards is a Yamaha YM2203 OPN, a sound chip affording it 3-channel FM music and 3 PSG audio channels. The -26K version of the card is basically the same as the -26 series of cards, but with a revision to its timing circuit to support faster CPUs like a 286.
• The Commodore Sound Expander (1985) and the Magic Talker (1984): "Sound cards"^note for certain value of "card," these were external modules that connected to the C64/128's expansion port for the Commodore 64 and it's beefier sibling, the Commodore 128. Despite the SID being one of the most advanced PSG synthesizers of its time, FM synthesis was still desirable on the C64/128. As a result, a Commodore marketed the Sound Expander as a way to "add Hi-Tech digital audio" to the computers^note Blatant Lies: The card added FM music synthesis, not digital audio. The module adds a YM3526 OPL-1 synthesizer to the computers for 9 channels of FM synthesis music. Given the simplicity of the design and that the YM3812 OPL-2 chip is pin-compatible and backwards compatible with the YM3526 OPL chip, it is possible to "upgrade" the card to OPL-2. On a brief note, the Magic Talker was a speech synthesis box with a limited vocabulary of 235 words.
• The Commodore Paula (1987): The audio chip of a Commodore Amiga, used across all computers in the family as well as on the CDTV and CD32 consoles. The chip internally has four audio channels downmixed to two output channels- two channels output to the left speaker, and two more outputs to the right. The chip internally only handles 8-bit samples, but a hack can be performed to increase the sample accuracy to 14-bit at the expense of losing two channels.
• The IBM Music Feature Board (1987): IBM's official sound card for the PC platform. Sporting a Yamaha 2164 at its heart, it is capable of 8 FM music channels. While the card produced good quality music, IBM priced it exorbitantly, targeting professional musicians. Also, few games support the card (although most Sierra titles should work). As a result, it has a low install base.
• The Creative Music System (1987): Creative's first sound card. It has two Philips SAA1099 chips to produce 12 channels of stereo PSG square wave output. It was competitively priced to the AdLib as compared to the IBM Music Feature Board. However, card was late to market as the market had transitioned to FM music by the time the card came out. Additionally, the fact that many games half-assed their music on the card made consumers think negatively of it compared to the AdLib. Creative would eventually rebrand the card as Game Blaster and sold all remaining stock at a loss.
• The AdLib (1987): The de facto sound card for PCs in the 80s. It is an FM Synthesis card built around the Yamaha 3812 OPL-2 FM chip. Officially, it is capable of functioning in two modes: a 9 FM channels mode or a 5 FM channels plus one percussion channel mode. However, hackers later discovered a third mode which turned the card into a rudimentary one-channel PSG. Most games only use the 9 FM channels mode and used creative methods to work around the lack of drums. But unfortunately, there were many sloppy ports whose music sounded horrible due to mismanagement of the BGM. A gold version using the OPL-3 chip was later released, which saw improved MIDI performance and stereo output, but by then the card was already overshadowed by the SoundBlaster from Creative Labs, which not only had AdLib compatibility via an onboard OPL-2 (later OPL-3) chip, but was also capable of digital audio. In AdLib's defense, the OPL chips has a hack that puts it into a PSG mode, however once this mode is entered the card becomes incapable of playing music until it is hard-reset, meaning developers had to choose between whether they want background music with very rudimentary sound effects generated by the MIDI instruments, or single-channel PSG audio at the expense of losing the ability to play back any music whatsoever. AdLib did try to add the ability to support PCM digital audio alongside music to the Gold. However, their slow pace (the Gold was their only other product) and ignorance of market demands (the late 80s saw competing systems like the Amiga and Atari ST which could do multichannel digital audio, while the entire AdLib line was only capable of FM music with a digital audio kludge that had sacrifices) and the high price of the AdLib Gold card, was their downfall.
• The Covox Speech Thing (1987): An external sound "card" that attaches to the parallel port. It is actually quite trivial to make at home, and offered 8-bit mono sound. In it's time, it was marketed as the perfect companion to the AdLib, as it could produce sound without taking away the Ad Lib's abilitiy to produce music.
  • Disney Sound Source (1991): An advanced version of the Covox Speech Thing produced by Disney in partnership with Covox. The design was improved, however the device is not backwards compatible with the Covox Speech Thing. Many AdLib owners will usually also have either a Covox Speech Thing or Disney Sound Source as well for sound effects production.
• Konami SCC (1987) and SCC+, MSX Audio (1986) and MSX Music (1987): Sound cards for the MSX series of computers, despite most MSX machines already coming with decent sound to begin with (a single AY-3-8910 like the Mockingboard for the Apple II). The Konami SCC was technically the first sound card for the MSX and was in fact a 5-channel wavetable card, but only supported Konami games and had ROM with preprogrammed samples. The SCC+ changed the ROM out for a paltry 64 kilobytes of memory (user upgradable to 128 kilobytes) to provide it a little bit more flexibility. The MSX Audio card added a 9 channel OPL-1 FM synth and a single ADPCM audio channel to the MSX, and one can in fact install two MSX Audio cards to get 18 channel FM music and stereo ADPCM audio. The MSX Music was an oddity, it is a stripped-down version of the MSX Audio, but nonetheless was adopted as the official standard.
• The SoundBlaster (1989): The de facto sound card of the Wolfenstein 3-D era, usurping the throne from AdLib. The card came with a Yamaha OPL-2 chip for music and backwards compatibility, but its selling point was that it could also do digital audio, albeit only at 8-bit resolution at 22KHz, and in mono. Still, many players bought the card just to hear a S.S. Officer yell "Halt, Wolf!" The SoundBlaster Pro added stereo audio and upgraded the MIDI synthesizer to the much-improved OPL-3, then 16-bit CD quality came with the SoundBlaster 16. Sales of these cards were further bolstered by the Windows port of Myst, the real KillerApp for the card (and CD-ROM drives, which at the time required either a proprietary or SCSI interface which many SoundBlasters coincidentally also have) which required the card for the audio portion of its FMV, as well as by educational titles like the Living Books and Reader Rabbit series. It remained the de facto standard until Intel introduced the AC'97 audio specification in 1997. It is also widely cloned.

1990s

• The PC-9801-73 (1991): Another sound card for the PC-98, this time using a Yamaha YM2608 OPNA sound chip. The chip consists of 6 FM channels, 3 PSG channels, a ADPCM channel, and a percussion channel that uses ADPCM samples drawn from an onboard ROM.
  
  Nonetheless, the sound card is famous as the origin of many memorable Touhou Project tunes like Drunk as I Like, U.N.Owen Was Her, and Bad Apple.
• Gravis UltraSound series (1992): The only card other than the SoundBlaster 16 to receive clones, and the first wavetable card for the PC. The original card used a ForteMedia created GF-1 chip and was true wavetable only, but uses tricks to emulate a PCM codec and OPL-2 for SoundBlaster and AdLib compatibility. Later models included a real PCM codec as well for digital audio playback in addition to the GF-1 chip, but SoundBlaster and AdLib compatibility were still emulated. The cards also have memory for user-uploadable samples, called Patches. The GF-1 supported up to 1MB of memory and came with 512KB onboard, with the user being able to purchase an upgrade kit if more memory is so desired. Epic Megagames had a partnership with Gravis, and thus many of their games sounds better on Gravis cards than on anything else^note They would also plug Gravis products in their games and anywhere they can get a word in.
  
  The card was also popular among Demoscene users as the wavetable part was designed for Commodore Amiga MOD music playback in mind, and Gravis gave away the API for free.
• The PC-9801-86K (1993): A part that can be considered to be a cut-down version of the PC-9801-73. It drops the Yamaha YM2608 OPNA for a YM2612 OPNB, a chip that can function as either 6-channel full FM or 5-channel FM + 1 ADPCM (and is in fact the very same chip found in a Sega Genesis). PSG audio is handled by external support chips.
• Midway DCS (1993): A sound card, for arcade machines and Pinball tables. Being wavetable based, it produced far superior music and sounds than what base arcade boards- and indeed, what most home computers (barring the Amiga and Macintosh) and consoles at the time it was introduced- was capable of. It was even capable of producing CD-quality fully-voiced music that transparently looped, as heard in Revolution X. The Mortal Kombat cabinets also used it for better quality BGM and high quality speech (the base board for the first few Mortal Kombat games only had an 8-bit audio DAC and an OPM FM synthesizer). Several models were produced, and Midway used it well until they shifted their business towards gambling machines.
• Microsoft Windows Sound System (1993): More of an audio standard than a particular card, it is a set of specifications put forth by Microsoft to ensure all the cards support the same base instructions so Microsoft could create a universal driver to drive them instead of relying on the manufacturers' own proprietary drivers. Microsoft settled on a standard revolving around the Analog Devices AD1848 SoundPort codec and OPL-3 FM synthesizer. Not many cards that support the specification was produced, and it was largely ignored or considered as yet another SoundBlaster clone owing to Microsoft actually specifying SoundBlaster and AdLib backwards compatibility as a mandatory requirement.
• Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 (1994) and AWE64 (1996): Creative upgrades its SoundBlaster line to compete with Gravis. The AWE32 has the audio codec and OPL-3 of a SoundBlaster 16, but also an E-Mu 8000, a wavetable chip from sampler manufacturer E-Mu Systems. The card was capable of everything a SoundBlaster 16 can do, but has an additional 32 channels for wavetable audio split up into two interfaces. Most games only use one interface, but music production software like Cakewalk Pro Audio could use both. It also introduced the SoundFont instruments sample format, which is incompatible with Gravis' Patch instruments sample format. Like the Gravis, the card has onboard memory for samples and could be upgraded with more memory by the user. A more compact version of the card, the AWE64, was later introduced. The AWE64 raised a stink as it moved from industry standard SIMM RAM slots to a proprietary daughterboard upgrade where card memory is concerned, and Creative charged heftily for the upgrades. Consequently adapter daughterboards that allows a DIMM to be installed on the cards were unofficially produced. PCI versions of the AWE64 were later introduced, but it required a special cable called the SB-Link to be connected to the motherboard (and the motherboard must have the header), otherwise the card will fail to work in DOS. Only a limited number of the PCI version of the card was produced and it remains a rarity.
• The PC-9801-118 (1995): The last first-party C-Bus sound card to appear for the PC-98 platform, after that the system migrated to modern AC'97 audio connected via an Audio Modem Riser slot. The heart of this card is a Yamaha YMF297, a dual-mode sound chip that can switch between running as a pure OPL-3 YMF262 compatible, or in YM2608 OPNA compatibility mode. The chip was designed by Yamaha on NEC's commission and thus is unique to said PC-98 sound card.
• Turtle Beach Topaz and Maui (1995): high end cards that emphasizes on sound clarity by using high-quality OPAmps on their cards, but not really popular due to their price, and that their reputation for gaming headphones overshadows their sound cards.
• MSX Moonsound (1995): The Moonsound was a wavetable card and is the most advanced sound card for the MSX platform, released late into the platform's life. It uses a Yamaha OPL4, which was capable of both FM synthesis and wavetable. The Moonsound has 128KB of memory for user samples.
• VIA Envy (1995): Remember VIA, the budget chipset manufacturer who at one point owned S3 Graphics? Well, they tried breaking in to the sound card market with the modest success of their Vinyl codecs, and they did manage to get a cult following among mobile DJs. While the card comes in various formats including PCI and PCMCIA, The PCIe revision of the VIA Envy was pretty much the only chipset to have a Expresscard support model, which were in turn made into Expresscard sound cards by several niche manufacturers. Coupled with high-quality high-impedance pre-amps to be able to handle high-powered amplifiers like those used at dance halls and concert venues being found on the cards, allowed DJs to use the laptop's audio out for monitoring while using the Envy to output the final product.
• Gravis Ultrasound Plug 'n Play (1995): The Ultrasound gets a major upgrade. While the GF-1 was a good chipset, it suffered from several idiosyncrasies and limitations that became increasingly apparent as time went on- It's maximum RAM limit was a measly 1MB, and it's polyphony was arbitrarily tied to the sample rate- the more voices playing simultaneously, the worse the samples sound.
  
  With the Ultrasound Plug 'n Play, Gravis turned to a new wavetable synthesizer co-developed by AMD, called the InterWave. The synthesizer's maximum RAM limit for the new chip was 16MB, a huge amount at the time^note Though the effective maximum RAM was 8MB as 8MB SIMM modules were never produced and the largest SIMM module available to the market was 4MB, however there are unofficial user upgrade instructions that added a second set of SIMM slots to enable the use of four 4MB SIMM modules. Additionally, it could handle up to 32 stereo voices with no quality drop whatsoever^note This compared to the original GF-1's 32 mono voices and that the sample rate drops as the polyphonic notes increased. Lastly, it has an arbitrary mode that lets it emulate an OPL-3 synthesizer in hardware.
  
  However, the upgrade does come with its own set of downsides. While the InterWave was developed to be as compatible with the GF-1 as possible, there were nonetheless some issues pertaining to compatibility, particularly if the game or software was using the GF-1 in an undocumented way. A number of games had to be patched to fix support for the card. Additionally, it uses yet another sample format that is completely different from the GF-1, which needed a conversion program that was also provided by Gravis to convert the samples to a format supported by the new card.
  
  Nonetheless, MIDI lovers consider the card equal or even superior to Creative's SoundBlaster AWE32.
• Intel AC'97 (1997): Yet another audio standard. It was implemented by Intel's own chipset audio, the AVance Logic ALC-650 (later acquired by networking semiconductor conglomerate RealTek), C-Media's CMI-8738, VIA's Vinyl chipsets and many other manufacturers. Officially, it usurped the SoundBlaster as the defacto sound standard and moved MIDI processing to software, but not for long, as it was quickly discovered that the specification had flaws- notably, it lacked DOS support when DOS compatibility was still a big deal, and software MIDI processing was detrimental to the CPUs of the time. Additionally, it's stereo only when immersive gaming was becoming a fad and gamers were demanding surround sound audio capable sound cards.
• Esoniq AudioPCI (1997): The first PCI soundcard, and one that did not required a SB-Link cable from the motherboard to function. It also has a wavetable synthesizer owing to Esoniq's linage as a synthesizer manufacturer. However, these cards do not support user-uploadable samples. Creative would later buy the company out in their spending bout (which also saw the purchase of Esoniq's competitor and Creative's existing wavetable part supplier, E-Mu Systems).
• Aureal Vortex (1997) series: Notable for being the first to have true three-dimensional audio via their A3D technology; achieved cult-classic status due to the very high quality of its positional audio. Sadly, they were hit by a groundless lawsuit by Creative, and while they won the suit, the victory was a pyrrhic one- Aureal would shortly after declare bankruptcy. And in another cruel twist, their assets and patents would be acquired by none other than Creative.
• The SoundBlaster Live series (1998): Creative attempted to retake the crown from Intel... and succeeded. These offered surround sound when the AC'97 specification only offered stereo sound. Additionally, it was quickly discovered that lower-end CPUs of the time could not reliably produce multi-polyphony MIDI without eating out tons of CPU processing cycles. Like the AWE cards before it, the Live and Audigy cards offloaded MIDI playback to a SPU, the E-Mu 10kx (x=1 on the Live!, and 1 through 4 on the Audigy), on the card, freeing up precious CPU cycles that actually produced noticeable frame-rate improvements in games. However, unlike the AWE cards, SoundFonts are now stored in the computer's main memory instead of in dedicated memory on the card itself, the reasoning being that the PCI bus was fast enough to let the Live and Audigy cards load the instruments from memory on-the-fly. Earlier versions of the Live were also the last SoundBlaster cards to offer DOS support, using technology from Esoniq which they acquired before they started working on the card.
• Trident 4DWave (1999): Trident's own PCI surround sound capable card, capable of 4-channel audio, plus wavetable technology and full DOS support without an SB-Link cable. It's the go-to card for the folks who can't locate a DOS-compatible SoundBlaster Live!, but still needed DOS support. The wavetable part itself is a curiosity, it uses code licensed from Creative and in fact uses the same SoundFont technology and is fully compatible with fonts for the SoundBlaster family of cards. One nifty trick it can do is routing the calls to the OPL-3 to the wavetable part in DOS, and with the right samples loaded and right settings applied the music is almost indistinguishable from an AWE32.

2000s

• The SoundBlaster Audigy series (2001): Not wanting to give up without a fight so easily, Creative continues to improve on their sound card offerings despite winning the battle against Intel's AC'97 specification. The Audigy cards represents the next generation of Live! cards, with gradual improvement done to the E-Mu engine and sometimes offering additional features like video capture and firewire. Ironically, the Audigy series would outlast its successor, the X-Fi, and is still being produced in limited quantities in the form of the Audigy RX and FX for musicians to this day.
• NVidia SoundStorm (2002): The result of NVidia attempting to commercialize what they learnt while building the chips for the original Xbox. Advertised as a "DirectSound accelerator," the chip includes a wavetable synthesizer that uses Microsoft's DLS DirectMusic sample library format. It can only be found as a part of the nForce 2 MCP2-T southbridge chip on specific motherboards, and still needed a codec chip, usually an AC'97 chip, to output to speakers. The codec chip can still talk directly to the CPU if needs be, but usually the SoundStorm will act as a middleman to take the burden off the CPU.
• Intel HD Audio (2004): Yet another specification from Intel, implemented by C-Media, RealTek (who now owns AVance Logic), VIA and many other manufacturers. This time, the specification allows for surround sound, very high sample rates, but still relegated MIDI processing to software. However, by this time CPUs had went multi-core and are indeed fast enough to play multi-polyphonic software-MIDI without breaking a sweat, and additionally many game developers are now moving towards digital music playback and have music in MP3, OGG, MP4-AAC or WMA format. By the time you're reading this, MIDI is mostly dead. And thus, this time the specification sticks.
• SoundBlaster X-Fi (2005) and X-Fi Titanium (2008): The last innovation to Creative's cards, sporting an E-Mu 20k series wavetable synthesizer, where 20k1 is a PCI part and 20k2 is a PCIe part with an ARM7TDMI co-processor, now mostly repurposed to do positional audio, although the wavetable engine can still handle MIDI playback if necessary. These cards once again have RAM onboard to allow games to cache samples to them. Additionally, after the transition to PCIe, the cards gained an ARM7TDMI processor to help move data to and from the CPU memory, increasing performance further. However, the writing is on the wall, and Creative would go on to create a few more sound cards that are CPU driven but have better OPamps to improve sound clarity before dropping out of the radar as a soundcard manufacturer as sound cards become a niche item.
• C-Media Oxygen HD (2006): While Creative were churning out their X-Fi, C-Media came up with the Oxygen HD as an effort to compete as their codecs' popularity among motherboard manufacturers was waning because manufacturers were switching to RealTek (or VIA) due to lower costs. These Oxygen HD chips were used in several high-end "designer" cards like the Asus Sonar series, and still have a niche following, even though one rarely hears of C-Media nowadays.

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