A retrospective of Goldwave (aka useless nostalga)
Posted: Fri Apr 02, 2010 9:41 pm
We've discussed this before...cuz I saw the post last night while googling for stuff, so I was inspired to actually make good on something I said I'd probably do and that is to take screenshots so we can all remember (or in some cases, see for the first time) just how much Goldwave has grown up from it's younger days.
Since these early versions are 16-bit, I can't run them natively on my copy of Win7 as it's 64-bit, so not only would a win3.x app likely not even run, but you can't run 16-bit code in long mode, at least not at the native OS level; for that, you've got to use a virtual machine.
For all this I'm using a copy of Windows (for Workgroups) 3.11 under Virtual PC 2007. I've actually got two seperate Win3.1 "machines", one has Windows 3.1 fully installed and working with all proper drivers on MS-Dos 6.22. The other machine runs WfW3.1 on top of Windows 98/Dos 7.1 with a patched io.sys file to make this all work. Both machines are allocated 256MB ram (WAYYYYY overkill). Even though both machines are set up with the exact same drivers in the same manner, the one running on top of Win98Dos seems to boot up a bit faster...although it seems the delay is network related which just raises even more questions. I do have TCP/IP on the thing...and Win32s and in fact not only did Win3.1 see my NAS machine just fine (but couldn't handle the file names), but my Win7 machine recgonizes the Win31 machine n(and can see shares)...somewhat proving how compatible smb is and making me wonder why people have so many issues getting file sharing to work. But that little bit explains why the name of my virtual machine is "31-71", 3.1 on 7.1. Intel-VT hardware virtualization was activated in VPC as well.
Since my emulated card has drivers that support insane resolutions with 16.7m colors...my 3.1 desktop runs 1024x768 (my LCD runs 1600x900), so the embedded images are scaled down to fit better, they link to the full size png.
Scopetrax:
I ran this under actual MS-DOS 6.22 because I got what I thought was strange behavior under 7.10, but it turns out it behaved the same. While not exactly Goldwave, Chris did write it and it's thought of as the pre-cursor to Goldwave. I have to admit, I've got no idea how to really use it. I couldn't get any sound output from it but I attribute that to sound emulation...the one time I did get sound out of it was running it from dos prompt in 3.1 and it was shrill and obviously had a bit-depth mismatch.
Goldwave 1.0:
The very first version of Goldwave. It does bear a slight resemblance to the current UI. Despite the fact it reports over 200MB free, it fails at opening large WAV files due to the fact it obviously can't actually utilize that much ram...which is why I had to make a small wav file to cram on the vm for screenshot purposes. 1.0 was actually copied over to the PC last and picked up the registration info I entered for 3.03....which is the actual registration info I memorized from years of reinstalling Windows 95. A very basic WAV editor, but, for 1992, at a time when the CD was just turning 10, this was huge.
This is a list of the effects available in 1.0.
Goldwave 2.11
The farthest back oldversion.com goes is 2.11. So here it is. The obvious difference is the Device Controls is now called Device Controls and there's two scopes with the addition of the spectrum output, which is displayed. There's numerous new functions and the effects list has just about doubled.
Goldwave 3.03
Continuing with the trend of grabbing an early copy of every major revision, I picked up 3.03. The first thing I thought when I booted this up was "holy crap I haven't seen this in a while". I started using Goldwave somewhere around the 3.2x series...so this likely only predates me first using it by about a year. Device Controls has now taken it's "classic" look and has a couple of added visuals; spectrogram and the spectrum bars. This worked pretty much how I remembered it and was an enjoyable blast to my early days with this stuff. It also amazed me that, how over time, I never noticed how much large the number of toolbar icons got. This time, the about reports what must be a more realistic repsentation of how much ram can be utilized, since it reports 15 free and not the 240 some of Windows and the previous Goldwaves. Interestingly enough, when attempting to load a 3 minute wav file at 44/16 (you wanna guess how much fun it is to find a mp3 decoder for MS-DOS???) 1.0 and 2.11 both gave me "insufficient memory" errors. 3.03 was able to load and play the file without issue. I also saw "Deflashing to disk" when I ran an effect...a dialog box I hadn't seen in a LOOOOOOONG time.
Here's the effects list for 3.03. The volume features change, fades, maximize and shape. Filter features a noise gate and user-defined...which has input similar to expression evaluator. I briefly remember seeing this...but it was phased out either in 4.0 or before 4.0 becuase I didn't see it for very long. The High/lo pass filters are contained as presets in this..it's a function I never had a chance to understand because it was gone.
That's pretty much all I have for now. I can't remember what the last version of goldwave was that runs on 3.x, but I'm sure I'll stumble across it as I download other versions to play with.
Since these early versions are 16-bit, I can't run them natively on my copy of Win7 as it's 64-bit, so not only would a win3.x app likely not even run, but you can't run 16-bit code in long mode, at least not at the native OS level; for that, you've got to use a virtual machine.
For all this I'm using a copy of Windows (for Workgroups) 3.11 under Virtual PC 2007. I've actually got two seperate Win3.1 "machines", one has Windows 3.1 fully installed and working with all proper drivers on MS-Dos 6.22. The other machine runs WfW3.1 on top of Windows 98/Dos 7.1 with a patched io.sys file to make this all work. Both machines are allocated 256MB ram (WAYYYYY overkill). Even though both machines are set up with the exact same drivers in the same manner, the one running on top of Win98Dos seems to boot up a bit faster...although it seems the delay is network related which just raises even more questions. I do have TCP/IP on the thing...and Win32s and in fact not only did Win3.1 see my NAS machine just fine (but couldn't handle the file names), but my Win7 machine recgonizes the Win31 machine n(and can see shares)...somewhat proving how compatible smb is and making me wonder why people have so many issues getting file sharing to work. But that little bit explains why the name of my virtual machine is "31-71", 3.1 on 7.1. Intel-VT hardware virtualization was activated in VPC as well.
Since my emulated card has drivers that support insane resolutions with 16.7m colors...my 3.1 desktop runs 1024x768 (my LCD runs 1600x900), so the embedded images are scaled down to fit better, they link to the full size png.
Scopetrax:
I ran this under actual MS-DOS 6.22 because I got what I thought was strange behavior under 7.10, but it turns out it behaved the same. While not exactly Goldwave, Chris did write it and it's thought of as the pre-cursor to Goldwave. I have to admit, I've got no idea how to really use it. I couldn't get any sound output from it but I attribute that to sound emulation...the one time I did get sound out of it was running it from dos prompt in 3.1 and it was shrill and obviously had a bit-depth mismatch.
Goldwave 1.0:
The very first version of Goldwave. It does bear a slight resemblance to the current UI. Despite the fact it reports over 200MB free, it fails at opening large WAV files due to the fact it obviously can't actually utilize that much ram...which is why I had to make a small wav file to cram on the vm for screenshot purposes. 1.0 was actually copied over to the PC last and picked up the registration info I entered for 3.03....which is the actual registration info I memorized from years of reinstalling Windows 95. A very basic WAV editor, but, for 1992, at a time when the CD was just turning 10, this was huge.
This is a list of the effects available in 1.0.
Goldwave 2.11
The farthest back oldversion.com goes is 2.11. So here it is. The obvious difference is the Device Controls is now called Device Controls and there's two scopes with the addition of the spectrum output, which is displayed. There's numerous new functions and the effects list has just about doubled.
Goldwave 3.03
Continuing with the trend of grabbing an early copy of every major revision, I picked up 3.03. The first thing I thought when I booted this up was "holy crap I haven't seen this in a while". I started using Goldwave somewhere around the 3.2x series...so this likely only predates me first using it by about a year. Device Controls has now taken it's "classic" look and has a couple of added visuals; spectrogram and the spectrum bars. This worked pretty much how I remembered it and was an enjoyable blast to my early days with this stuff. It also amazed me that, how over time, I never noticed how much large the number of toolbar icons got. This time, the about reports what must be a more realistic repsentation of how much ram can be utilized, since it reports 15 free and not the 240 some of Windows and the previous Goldwaves. Interestingly enough, when attempting to load a 3 minute wav file at 44/16 (you wanna guess how much fun it is to find a mp3 decoder for MS-DOS???) 1.0 and 2.11 both gave me "insufficient memory" errors. 3.03 was able to load and play the file without issue. I also saw "Deflashing to disk" when I ran an effect...a dialog box I hadn't seen in a LOOOOOOONG time.
Here's the effects list for 3.03. The volume features change, fades, maximize and shape. Filter features a noise gate and user-defined...which has input similar to expression evaluator. I briefly remember seeing this...but it was phased out either in 4.0 or before 4.0 becuase I didn't see it for very long. The High/lo pass filters are contained as presets in this..it's a function I never had a chance to understand because it was gone.
That's pretty much all I have for now. I can't remember what the last version of goldwave was that runs on 3.x, but I'm sure I'll stumble across it as I download other versions to play with.