02/01/2023
I bought this last year but never got the time, or inclination, to unbox it. It was a whim of nostalgia more than part of the ‘digital project’ I’m currently gearing myself up to starting.
When I moved from the Amiga to the PC in ‘94 one of the biggest losses was in music creation opportunities. Gone were the 4 channel audio output, the tracker software, the easy sampling software and readily available MIDI options replaced by a system speaker that could adequately make beeps. It was a quantum leap backwards.
It wasn’t just the output that was limited though as input options were seriously thin on the ground. It was a time on the cusp of the multimedia revolution for PCs when CD-ROM drives and sound cards were just about to break into the mainstream at a tremendous cost.
This was a time when the Atari ST was king of the studio, the Amiga the king of the demo scene and the PC was king of the spreadsheet.
To make anything above and beyond a word processor work required in-depth knowledge of MSDOS and the fiddling of autoexec.bat and config.sys files as you attempted to shuffle resources from limited supplies… Ah, who needs a mouse eh?
My purchase of a Sound Blaster Multimedia pack ie a sound card and a CD-ROM drive in pre Windows 95 1995 taught me more about PCs than in any other era. A PC had no idea what a CD-ROM drive was let alone attempt to detect it and same with the sound card. No plug and play software no device friendly BIOS. Limited DMA resources became a three handed juggling act with each piece of software often requiring custom autoexec.bat and config.sys boot files just to make it produce sound or give you a mouse option. I never ever got ‘The Flight of the Amazon Queen’ to work on PC as I could never free enough resources for it to start.
But I digress, it was 1995 and the misery that was Windows 3.11 was about to end and a new multimedia savvy operating system was about to arrive… Windows 95.
Now whilst Windows 95 declared war on DOS games bringing with it the dawning of the DirectX era, much to the chagrin of many a DOS gamer, it made multimedia a truly workable commodity.
There was a sudden explosion of creative software and peripherals as the PC market rapidly expanded beyond the business machine and into the ‘anything’ machine. The Amiga community abandoned the now bankrupt and obsolete Amiga en masse as did the now defunct Atari ST scene. Pockets of resistance persisted but to the market the PC was undisputed king of the hill.
Perhaps the happiest consequence of so much disruption in the market was that many of the creative companies involved in those scenes now began to develop for the PC and the do anything product we are similar with now quickly emerged.
Evolution Dance Station was one of these early packages. Arriving in 1996 it pushed beyond Amiga trackers by blending easy to use sample based software with a more Atari based MIDI experience.
The keyboard hooked up to the I/O port on the sound card (they all had one of these at the time) and acted like a modern USB MIDI keyboard controller like the Akai MPK mk3 I currently use. There was no widespread USB then of course with it only making its first
appearance in 1996.
It must have been 1999 when I acquired my first Evolution Dance Station in PC World, no doubt from the bargain bin. I’d already moved on from my first PC, a Hyundai 486 SX25, to an Acer Acros Pentium 66 MHz and had my first digital camera picked up in 1997 that saved images to floppy disk. I was peak ‘tech junkie’ investing in the first ridiculously expensive ‘photographic quality’ inkjet printers and manipulating digital images in early digital art packages like Adobe Photo Deluxe and Kai Goo, the ones that came free with the Logitech Play Snappy in fact.
It was no OctaMED or Notator but the Magix Dance Station software was competent enough and the supplied samples good enough to produce some ok tunes that I may have inflicted on a few friends by posting them cassettes in the post. I suspect they have all now, quite rightly, perished though there maybe a hard drive and a few tapes in the garage still so who knows what horror might turn up in the future. I was very keen on sampling dialogue back then and dropping it into the mix in a very 1986 Sputnik style.
Problem was 1999 was also when I set the company up and as the unfolding years saw business eat into my free time the Evolution Dance Station like many other ‘hobbyist’ pursuits was abandoned and the equipment sold off.
So when this popped up on eBay and was being sold by Havens Hospices it seemed to satisfy a craving for purposeful nostalgia whilst benefiting a good cause.
I haven’t done anything with it yet though beyond discovering Windows 10 shuns it vehemently even in compatibility mode and that it managed to kill a Windows XP mouse driver on a failed attempt to install. Ah, the good old days!
I think a proper Windows 95 era PC with a period Soundblaster card will be necessary to get this working to peak performance. A future project perhaps but for now it is a piece of personal memorabilia with which to decorate the office.
