The Creative Labs Sound Blaster line of cards became the de facto DOS sound card standard in the early 1990s and carried through that dominance until the last DOS games. The Sound Blaster offered many useful features in a single card, an FM synthesizer, a gameport, MIDI functionality but most uniquely a digital sound processor designed to process digital audio input and output with minimal CPU intervention. Gamers saw the value in this "all-in-one" card and bought lots of Sound Blaster cards, which required game developers to support the card and giving Creative a huge lead in the market. Creative was naturally very protective of its technology, which was full of quirks and obscure hardware behaviors. Eventually sound chips from other manufacturers like MediaVision, Crystal Semiconductor, Electronic Speech Systems and Yamaha were available which promised some level of direct Sound Blaster compatibility.
Not everyone could use a Sound Blaster. For some PC gamers, the cost of the cards was out of reach to them. Systems with weird busses like Microchannel have few sound card options and those that are available are rare. Laptops usually did not come with ISA expansion and PCMCIA sound cards are also rare. Some systems just do not have enough slots for a sound card once more essential needs, like a hard drive, are added to the system. In this case a parallel port sound solution may be your only option. Finally there were people disgusted with Creative's monopolistic practices and refused to support the Sound Blaster ecosystem. In this article we will give an overview of digital sound solutions which offered no hardware Sound Blaster compatibility.
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