Sound Blaster Pro (CT1330)

Released in May 1991, the Sound Blaster Pro was the first Creative card to comply with Microsoft's MPC standard. It used a pair of Yamaha YM3812 chips to provide stereo music, although this was rarely used by games. It also added a mixer to provide a crude master volume control, and a high and low pass filter.

	Released	May 1991
	Bus	ISA 8-bit
	FM Synth	Yamaha YM3812 (x2)
	Audio Codec	None
	Standards	Ad Lib, Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro
	Ports	Speaker-Out, Mic-In, Line-In Game port
	CD-ROM	Panasonic/Matsushita
	Wavetable	None
	Plug & Play	No
	FCC ID(s)	IBACT-SBP
	See Also	Sound Blaster Pro II (CT1600), Sound Blaster 2.0 (CT1350)

It was fully Sound Blaster and Ad Lib compatible, and was the first card from Creative Labs to have a CD-ROM interface on-board. Most Pro cards support only the Panasonic (Matsushita/Panasonic) CD-ROM drives. The Pro is still an 8-bit ISA card, as all the previous Sound Blaster cards are, even though at first glance it looks like a 16-bit card because of the 'AT' section on the connector, but note that these are not wired to anything.

The Pro also got a revised mixer chip which added stereo support. This CT1345 is the middling variant of mixer chip found on Creative cards. It succeeded the CT1335 found on the Sound Blaster 2.0, and was superceded by the CT1745 found on the Sound Blaster 16. It provided 8 levels of software volume control on both left and right channels for Master, Voice, MIDI, CD and Line-In sources, and 4 levels for the Microphone output source. The output mixing path took signals from the Voice, MIDI, CD, Microphone and PC speaker sources.

The DSP chip is CT1341 with DSP version 3.01. The bus interface chip is CT1336.

The following games titles support dual-OPL2 (SB Pro) only on a Sound Blaster Pro 1.0:

• Formula One Grand Prix
• F-15 Strike Eagle III
• Hi-Octane (also Pro Audio Spectrum 16)
• Ultima Underworld

 

Board Revisions

Known board revisions include 69142.

 

Competition

In 1991, there was still very little in the way of competition for Creative Labs. The Ad Lib Gold was released this year, and is probably the closest direct competitor to the Sound Blaster Pro.
For those who could afford one, Advanced Gravis launched the UltraSound this year, but while having excellent onboard wavetable capabilities it wasn't backward-compatible with Ad Lib or Sound Blaster, relying on games to be written to directly support it.
If your budget didn't stretch to a Sound Blaster, you would have bought the Ad Lib music synthesizer card instead.

 

In the Media

Setting it Up

Downloads

Operation Manual (missing) Get in touch if you can provide this missing item!

Original Utility Disks (missing) Get in touch if you can provide this missing item!

DOS and Windows 3.x Drivers For CT1330 Only For the above set of drivers, If you have not already installed SB Pro drivers into Windows 3.1 and DOS, you must first download and install the drivers from the files SBP2WU.EXE and SBP2DU.EXE.

 

More Pictures

The Sound Blaster Pro retail box (CT1330)