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Thinking of buying 8-bit sound blaster 2.0 for my 5160, is it worth it?

you should get an SB Pro 2.0 instead. the card is technically a 16-bit ISA, but the extra 16-bit pins are only used by the CD-ROM circuitry. all of it's audio capabilities work in an 8088. i have one that we purchased in 1992, as our first ever sound card and i keep it in my BMI XT clone. it's really nice to have for older games. of course, most games that run well on an 8088 don't tend to use much sampled sound but most of them still use FM synthesis for music.

the sound capability is 8-bit stereo at 44.1 KHz. plus i can run 8088 Corruption with it. ;)
 
brad162 said:
Im thinking of getting a sound blaster 2.0 for my 5160, now my question is, with a 4.77mhz processor, is there even much i can do with it or would i be better off without?
Click to expand...

To reply to the original question "is there even much i can do with it", there's always:
8088 Corruption - full motion video on an original IBM PC.
 
After you get through the demos and the Sound Blaster software, there is not a whole lot of games that run playably and utilize an Adlib, Game Blaster or Sound Blaster at a stock XT speed.
 
Hmm... this will be really off topic, but since i'm really ignorant as this is all new to me, I just have to ask: is there a converter/transcoder so you can make your own TMV videos and use the 8088 flex player with them ? Or all there is is the 8088 Corruption demo ?
 
unmei220 said:
Hmm... this will be really off topic, but since i'm really ignorant as this is all new to me, I just have to ask: is there a converter/transcoder so you can make your own TMV videos and use the 8088 flex player with them ? Or all there is is the 8088 Corruption demo ?
Click to expand...

You have to make the encoder yourself, as neither Trixter or anybody else who made an encoder has gone as far as releasing it.

The method Trixter used in his converter was to take a block of pixels of 1/40 (X),1/25 (Y) of the total resolution, then blend the pixels into a 4x4 pixel image by grouping togeher pixels using average color values (it's equalent to reducing the resolution of the source video to 160x100 pixels before being cut into 4x4 pixel segments). Then this 4x4 image is compared to the 4x4 equalents of the CGA character set. The best match for color/pattern is then used.

Monochrome dithering techniques can also be used to find patterns, as Mike did with his converter (unless I am mistaken).
 
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