Music Devices are the Hot New Home Peripheral
issue5_products_msdos_music_top.png

By John Williams

PC'S SOUNDING BETTER AS PUBLISHERS RUSH TO SUPPORT NEW CARDS

With the introduction of King's Quest IV in October of last year, Sierra hoped to turn the industry's attention to the problem that the PC has had for a long time — its lack of sound capabilities. With the exception of the Tandy 1000's with their 3 voice sound and the ill-fated PCjr, MS-DOS machines have been capable of little more than a "beep-beep" for all too long.

King's Quest IV came with drivers for new hardware devices, the IMF from IBM, the MT-32 from Roland, and the Adlib Music Card. When we introduced these music cards (and King's Quest IV) to the public, we fully expected our words to fall on deaf ears. We were pleasantly surprised.

The computer owning public has been very receptive to the new music cards. Adlib, in particular, has been a very big seller and is now carried in well over 1,000 stores throughout the U.S. and Canada. Roland has had trouble keeping up with demand for their top-of-the-line MT-32 and another player in the music card fray, Creative Music Systems, is beginning to pick up some sales ith their low-cost CMS board.

While we were pleased to see our work was appreciated, we were really surprised to see how fast our competitors were ready to jump on the music card bandwagon. Many of our competitors ignored EGA cards as unimportant until very recently, so their willingness to work with the music card people came as a shock. Expect music card support from top publishers like EA, Konami, and Microprose sometime in the near future.

If you still haven't learned about the magical difference a music card can make in your machine, you can find more information in the Winter '88 Sierra Newsletter, and use the order form for Sierra's sample music cassette or call Sierra's Order Desk at 1-800-344-7448.


This website is © 2010-2011 David Reese. All rights reserved. All images and content, including, but not limited to, the Interaction Magazine logo and articles from the magazine, are the property of their respective owners. Interaction Magazine has been made available to the public on the SierraGamers website, and is considered a part of the public domain. Image hosting provided by Photobucket.