I can't remember if it had General MIDI, but I'll give a nod to the Gravis Ultrasound. I couldn't afford / justify a full one, so I got the ACE version. Of course the use of midi for games was almost gone by then.
AFAIU, the GUS was basically a DSP + sample RAM. With an appropriate driver, it should have been possible to load General MIDI instruments (maybe only what's needed for the game you are about to play, due to limited capacity) and let the DSP handle pitch and effects. It seems like such drivers existed, called ULTRAMID and MEGAEM. Whether that was a common thing to do at the time - no idea.
But what the GUS was popular for was games (and demoscene demos!) that used the hardware "natively" by loading their own samples and maybe own effects.
"a base frequency above 5.7 GHz" and 36MB L2 caches.
Also, I'm curious if there are any other dual/multi-ISA architecture chips that are really different and not just 64 bit extensions or things like THUMB.
I found a 1994 patent[0] from Samsung for a Dual-instruction-set architecture CPU with hidden software emulation mode.
IBM developed the PowerPC 615[1] that had either had an x86 core onboard, or it could translate x86 instruction into PowerPC ones. But it wasn't released.
The NEC V20 and V30 used a superset of the 8086 ISA, and had instructions that allowed it to emulate an 8080 and mix 8080 and 8086 code. This is how CP/M was implemented on the platform.
All right. I write and have written a bit about enterprise distros, but because all 3 of the main vendors are just remarkably unhelpful -- I think more from sheer incompetence than malice -- I do not look at them much. It is not very germane to what I do: no competent finance director would base their choice of enterprise OS on reviews in the Register. :-)
I don't know enough to even dispute the timing, so I will let it go.
But the core point here is that Linux has no kernel-integrated GUI, so it is possible to rip and replace it.
Whereas in the comments on my obit for Dr Tim King...
... there are people discussing how it was impossible to completely disable the GUI in AmigaOS 1... it fired up with a CLI in a window because the windowing system is in the ROM. King used it to replace terminal sessions in TRIPOS, if I understand it correctly.
(I was using a Sinclair ZX Spectrum back then myself, and after a while on an Amstrad PCW, moved to an Acorn Archimedes. When AmigaOS 1.x was current, an Amiga cost as much as a small car in the UK, and I had just gone to university and could not afford a bicycle let alone a car.)
Although they were written by different teams, you could no more disable the Amiga's GUI than you could boot a Mac Plus into text mode: it didn't have a text mode to boot into. The GUI was an integral core part of the OS.
AmigaOS was better structured, with kernel, multitasking layer, and GUI layer... but they were still one inextricable whole.
This is the reverse of Unix, including Linux, which is a 1960s minicomputer OS design. Its inextricable core concepts are dumb terminals on serial ports, and a filesystem, and it barely has any built in idea of "networking" or "a GUI" -- they are bolted on extras that came a decade or 2 later.
You can boot any Linux into single-user mode with no networking and no GUI.
Modern PCs no longer have a text mode. It's just a pixel-based framebuffer and a bitmap font in firmware. Machines built before 2020 had an emulation layer that intercepted writes to a "text console" and had the firmware render pixels to the framebuffer. Before that, that same emulation resided in the firmware running on the display device. Real text console has been dead since something like early 1990s.
You can build Linux without ttys or serial ports. You can't disable VFS and a root fs (initramfs or noinitramfs, but either one is there), but Linux is surprisingly modular.
City 17 is mostly based on Sofia, you can see a lot of Bulgarian signs in Half Life Alyx. Viktor Antonov designed it from his experience of communist (and later post Soviet) cities that were broken by lack of maintenance and useless megaprojects with no sense of community. It's not a vaguely European city.
Prague in DXMD is also broken, just by hate and social injustice instead of a brutal dictatorship. Makes sense that they look alike.
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