Category Archives: Creative Labs

Gravis Ultras

While researching 1990s sound cards with wavetable synths, I came across an interesting resource called Rich Heimlich’s Patch Set Overview, namely issue #5 from July 1995. When I tried to unearth older issues of same, I stumbled upon a curious … Continue reading

Posted in Creative Labs, Internet, PC history, Sound, UltraSound | 18 Comments

E-mu SoundEngine

An interesting piece of hardware popped up at the OS/2 Museum not long ago. It’s an E-mu SoundEngine General MIDI sound module from 1993. This module has very close ties to the original Creative Wave Blaster upgrade module, even though that’s not … Continue reading

Posted in Creative Labs, E-mu, MIDI, Sound, Wave Blaster | 13 Comments

The Wave Blaster II Does Talk!

As previously mentioned, the Wave Blaster II (aka WB2) documentation makes no mention of possible bidirectional MIDI communication. But while trying the Wave Blaster II control panel with various host cards out of desperation, an interesting thing happened: When attempting … Continue reading

Posted in Creative Labs, Wave Blaster | 15 Comments

Sound Blaster 1.0 or 1.5?

According to some sources, a Sound Blaster model CT-1320C is a Sound Blaster 1.5. But according to Creative’s own reference materials (which do contain many inaccuracies and cannot be taken as gospel), the only difference between a Sound Blaster 1.0 … Continue reading

Posted in Creative Labs, PC hardware, PC history, Sound Blaster | 19 Comments

Sound Blaster DIAGNOSE and Disabled MPU-401

Today I finally solved a nagging problem that always seemed like it had to have some sort of reasonable solution. Creative’s DIAGNOSE.EXE utility is quite useful when working with any Sound Blaster 16 derivatives (Sound Blaster 16, AWE32, Sound Blaster … Continue reading

Posted in Creative Labs, Sound, Sound Blaster, Undocumented | 3 Comments