Owning a Sound Blaster back in the mid 90’s was probably a big deal – I wouldn’t know with my ESS AudioDrive. And although my ESS sound card wasn’t a real Sound Blaster from Creative, it was a compatible card which got the job done. Recently, a viewer sent me a Sound Blaster 32 PnP for repair. My first attempt to fix the card failed. There was just no way to get past a checksum error:
I put the card aside and focused on other projects. And as it turns out, that most probably was the right thing to do. Months after failing to revive the card, I stumbled upon a thread on Vogons describing a way to extract and update a small EEPROM chip on Sound Blaster cards! (You can read more about that in another post). Now, I finally have a fully working Sound Blaster 32 PnP – with two expansion slots for 30-pin SIMM modules! Technically, I can now equip this sound card with 2x 16MB SIMMs – for a total or 28MBs! Yes, 28MB because that is the maximum memory the soundcard supports.
But why does a soundcard need extra memory? You may have heard of Sound Banks – or Sound Fonts. Those files can be copied to certain Sound Blaster models – into the aforementioned memory. Those files then influence the playback of MIDI files. Needless to say that Sound Banks can completely change the way your sound card plays MIDI files. You can get anything from well balanced instruments to psychic, revolting tones! I guess it is personal choice.
Let’s explore some of those Sound Banks together in the following video:
There is a newer standard labeled ‘Sound Fonts’ (they usually come with the extension .sf2). However, those will only work with tools under Windows. Since this was a pure DOS experience, we are limited to .sbk files. If you are wondering where I found all those Sound Banks, then look no further.
And if you are here to get the GUS.SBK – well, I also got you covered!