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From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: CRAP Poll: My Mouse Is...
Date: Sun, 02 Jun 2024 13:50:20 -0400
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On Sun, 02 Jun 2024 06:53:32 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

>Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, 01 Jun 2024 08:58:29 -0400, Mike S. <Mike_S@nowhere.com>
>> wrote:
>
>> >On Sat, 01 Jun 2024 05:48:11 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:
>> >
>> >>I had a SB16 ISA with Creative's WaveBlaster daughter card. Ha!
>> >
>> >I remember the Waveblaster. If I didn't have the Roland card, I think
>> >I would have had that instead.
>
>> I remember looking at the Waveblaster with some envy. Don't mistake
>> me, I was quite happy with my Gravis Ultrasound, but it was undeniably
>> falling behind the times, and compatibility issues were /always/ a
>> problem. While I was confident at the time that the GUS was superiour
>> technology -at least conceptually- it was getting harder to deny that
>> the Waveblaster offered better sound.
>
>Really? I thought GUS had better audio than SB and its WB. I remember 
>playing classic DOOM 1 with a college guy's GUS. OMG esp. MIDI in E1M8 
>boss level. :O

It depends.

For games designed specifically with the GUS in mind, the MIDI could
be excellent, especially if they made custom patches for the thing
(some of the default patches the GUS shipped with... are not so good).

But the WaveBlaster - and its sequels - had several advantages. One
being that they were, overall, cleaner sound. The GUS had some messy,
noisy output; it picked up signal from the rest of the computer's
electronics pretty easily. Of course, how could the output was on the
Wave Table depended a lot on the board you plugged it into but...
well, look, I loved my GUS but it was pretty bad when it came to
noise. 

The Wave Blaster also, if I recall, had an advantage in its RAM. I
think. My memory of the Wave Blaster  architecture is sort of hazy and
based on what I read about it in magazines thirty years ago. The
original Wave Blaster might have just used a ROM set; I think later
revisions used onboard RAM. But the stock 256KB on the GUS could
easily be exceeded and 

The long-and-short was that -while custom patchsets designed for GUS
might have the advantage- if playing anything else -whether some
random MIDI file downloaded off some FTP site or a game using generic
GeneralMIDI format- the Wave Blaster had the edge.

At least, that's the way it seemed to me. Again, I've never actually
OWNED one of the devices. But I recall listening to downloaded WAV
files playing captured MIDI playback and the Wave Blaster always
seemed to have the edge. 

But that's also part of the problem: what sounds great to one person
can sound terrible to others. I've heard many people seriously claim
that they consider the OPL3 Soundblaster Doom soundtrack to be the
superior and definitive version over the Gravis. Others say that title
belongs to the SoundCanvas and say the overdriven guitar on the GUS is
weak. Myself, the GUS version will always remain the best rendition
(and I can't be the only one, since most Doom ports use GUS Emulation
as the default MIDI playback ;-). So I guess it's all in the ear of
the... erm... belistener?

Nonetheless, I'd have happily nabbed a WaveBlaster had I ever come
across one. I doubt it would have actually REPLACED my beloved Gravis
-if only because, in an era of 386 and 486 CPUs, every cycle offloaded
to the Gravis to process audio meant smoother gameplay- but I'd have
been quite happy with it. Especially the later revision of the Wave
Blaster.

TL;DR: anybody wanna donate a Wave Blaster to my collection? ;-)