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

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.

"Your sound card works perfectly"

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

I was a rebel and went with the Pro Audio 16

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.

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

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

Gravis Ultrasound with red pcb reporting..

220/5/1

Long live the Gravis Ultrasound Max!

You should still buy sound cards as they are significantly better, at least the ones in the 100€ range. Just because there are premium mainboards with acceptable sound doesn't mean it is great.

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.

We had floppy drives but they started making the disks rigid! Rigid!!! If only we could go back to the good old scuzzy times....

This hasn’t crossed my mind in decades. Not even in a “remember when” sense.

Got a second hand ISA interface SoundBlaster 64 at a computer fair in San Diego when I was visiting there for the best summer of my life in 1998. If I remember correctly it was $4.

Money well spent.

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

My fairly modern computer, originally released in 2014 (yes, that's modern compared to a lot of the computers I own), has no sound card.

I picked up a Yamaha AG06, which has a USB connection and creates both audio inputs and audio outputs to/from my PC. I can quickly plug in my phone or a Bluetooth receiver (which my phone connects to), and get other audio into my headphones with very little trouble. I prefer it this way, and if my next PC has onboard audio, I'll probably disable it in favor of the AG06.

I still use my external soundblaster to connect to my 5.1 amp. I have HDMI to my TV and then toslink to my amp, but it was inconvenient having to have the TV on for listening music.