Creative Labs has effectively made the term "Sound Blaster" a generic term, so much that nearly all references to a sound card are a reference to a "Sound Blaster or 100% Compatible". Since this phrase appears on all but some of the newest application boxes (slowly but surely, DirectSound is making a foothold), it goes without saying that every sound card manufacturer in the world has broken their backs to make sure that their sound cards are compatible with the Sound Blaster, no matter how out-dated it may be.

Some companies even went so far as to keep making their sound boards ISA cards simply for the sake of backward compatibility with the Sound Blaster. Well, times have changed and some companies realise this, and Creative Labs was hard at work preparing for the Future. For months we heard about the Sound Blaster Live and how it was going to be a PCI card that was fully backward compatible with the ISA Sound Blaster, but then something unexpected happen.

Somebody else did it first.

Meet Ensoniq. In a time when ISA slots were becoming available in smaller number on modern motherboards Ensoniq saw the market for a PCI Sound Card. But how could a card compete in the market without being backward compatible with the popular crap we acknowledge as a Standard? Realistically? It couldn't. And they knew it. The Answer was obvious to anybody who is active in the Emulation Scene. Software Emulation. The results shown in the Ensoniq Audio PCI show that the limits of hardware are not so rigid as many people seem to think, and with a little software Magic the Ensoniq Audio PCI was soon running most Sound Blaster software without much of a hitch.

Even though it had it's quirks, and even though it used System Memory to store it's midi samples, the card was cheap, it was compatible (at least as compatible as any other non-Creative Labs sound board) and it did what it was supposed to. It provided a fully functional PCI Sound Board that offered the performance boost of the PCI bus without giving up support for the Sound Blaster.

Now Meet Creative Labs, the Company who started out a nobody. They made a good Sound Card in a time when the PC Speaker competed against Tandy 3 Voice Sound, The Game Blaster, and AdLib. (We'll leave the Amiga, MAC, and Atari ST out of this.)

At the time of the Ensoniq Audio PCI, even Creative Labs had not created an acceptable solution to the PCI sound card problem, and as always the bigger company made it's move. Several things that were supposed to happen never did. Ensoniq's Patent on the Software Emulation. The Sound Blaster Live. And the dominance of the Audio PCI. Instead, as you would guess, Creative Labs bought out the competition, slapped their own name on it, and below is the result.

Suddenly the cheap, viable solution was an expensive Genuine Creative Labs Sound Blaster (the price more than doubled). Creative Labs liked Ensoniq's software emulation method so much, they bought the company. To add insult to injury Creative Labs went so far as to claim the card as their own, and then re-lable an inferior sound card as the Ensoniq Audio PCI. This gave the illusion that Ensoniq had not actually created the PCI 64, and Creative Labs knew very few people would know any better.

The standard that Creative loved so much can now been found in the Sound Blaster Live! Amazing, that after the aquisition of Ensoniq the Sound Blaster Live suddenly reappears.

Is this a bad thing? Maybe not. After all, even I myself would love to have a Sound Blaster Live. But would Ensoniq have been able to make the same card for half the price? How about future cards? Future standards?

Let's focus our attention on the Video Card market. Rendition is being purchased by Micron. 3Dfx has overpriced hardware that is about to be hit from all directions with a new generation of chips by a wide variety of manufacturers all boasting higher performance at a lower price point than 3Dfx's star chipset, the Voodoo 2. ATI still has the majority of the OEM market and has the money to stand out on this Generation Round and still come out financially on top. Intel has entered the market. And there is even a possibility that S3 might redeem themselves. But will it matter?

Will 3Dfx's Glide make the decision to move on into the future difficult? Will 3Dfx be able to continue selling Voodoo 2 cards until the market is ready for a followup Voodoo chipset? Will Developers actually care that the Riva TNT might actually have more potential?

There have been superior cards to the Sound Blaster line for years, after all, and none of them have been accepted simply because they were not "standard". Ask any Gravis Ultrasound owner how they feel about that one.

The market IS different now, though. DirectX should mean the end of hardware dependent system requirements, but one can only hope. With any luck, venders will embrace Direct 3D 6 and gives the rest of us our share of game play.

Otherwise, the next best thing we can hope for is "3Dfx or 100% Compatible." If that happens, 3Dfx will only have themselves to blame, and then we'll all have to suffer for it.