Editing Sound Blaster (section)

==Creative Music System and Game Blaster==

===Creative Music System===
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[[Image:Creative_Music_System.jpg|thumb|Creative Music System sound card]]
The history of Creative [[sound card]]s started with the release of the Creative Music System ("C/MS") CT-1300 board in August 1987. It contained two [[Philips SAA1099]] integrated circuits, which, together, provided 12 channels of [[Square wave (waveform)|square-wave]] "bee-in-a-box" stereo sound, four channels of which can be used for noise.

These ICs were featured earlier in various popular electronics magazines around the world. For many years Creative tended to use off-the-shelf components and manufacturers' reference designs for their early products. The various integrated circuits had white or black paper stickers fully covering their tops to hide their identities. On the C/MS board in particular, the Philips chips had white pieces of paper with a fictitious "CMS-301" inscription on them.  Real Creative parts usually had consistent '''CT ''number''''' references.

Surprisingly, the board also contained a large 40-pin DIP integrated circuit bearing a "CT 1302A CTPL 8708" (Creative Technology Programmable Logic) [[Screen-printing|serigraphed]] inscription and looking exactly like the DSP of the later Sound Blaster. Software, including Creative's own, use this chip to automatically detect the card (by trying certain register reads and writes).

===Game Blaster===
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A year later, in 1988, Creative marketed the C/MS via [[Radio Shack]] under the name '''Game Blaster'''. This card was identical in every way to the precursor C/MS hardware. Whereas the C/MS package came with five floppy disks full of utilities and song files, Creative supplied only a single floppy with the basic utilities and game patches to allow [[Sierra Online]]'s games using the [[Sierra Creative Interpreter]] engine to play music with the card and it also included a later revision of the game [[Silpheed]] that added C/MS support.