Wow, in headphones you can really hear the beautiful frequency response that card has for the FM synth. A fitting last hurrah for a brand that rarely compromised its quality
@@radovanm.2392 You know what, i find the distorted crunch actually compliments FM sound. It was a key "feature" of Megadrive, though for different reasons. FM can sound pretty thin, it gets really lush at 6op, kind of tolerable at 4op, and tends to be super thin with 2op as used by DOS games. The distortion introduces some added intermodulation which thickens it right up. Maybe it's even intentional?
The OPL3 FM-synthesis on this card sounds *very* distorted. Yesterday I was trying to figure out why and found out it's because the two quad-op-amps LF347M are connected only to a 5V power supply, whereas they should be fed at least 7 Volts according to the datasheet. Replacing them with low-voltage rail-to-rail op-amps LMV324M fully resolved the problem.
Thank you for your positive review of the Adlib Multimedia advanced sound board, a Short Slot 16bit 44khz audio card that was fittingly designed and built in the Quebec City. I would like to point out a few discrepancies, the card shipped with the jumper on (JP1) and is there to allow the programable chip select to be used on the media connector for a modem, ide, scsi or network add on daughtercard across all the ASB line of cards.. remember the days of only 5 slots!........ The design around the CS4232 was due to the built in DSP to allow an adlib emulator upload to the DSP so functionality is not lost when the AMC is used and is PnP control enabled. This card was the ONLY short slot sound card to obtain windows 95 certification BTW. Oh yes I almost forgot, I was the 'guy' that designed the new Quebec sound cards, if you look on the back of it, it has my initials MKP (Mark Keith Pickering) in the trace layer...
Interestingly, the ASB 32/64 card you showed earlier in the video (around 3:41) had a jumper on the Adlib Media Connector on the lower end - just like the one you had to install on the ASB16. I suspect these cards shipped with the jumper installed, and it was to be removed when an expansion board was added allowing the expansion board to selectively enable/ disable the on-board OPL.
Yes, probably. I also noticed the jumper on the ASB64 later during editing of the video. I don't know, where this ASB16 comes from, may be it was rescued from a scrap yard and someone salvaged the jumpers previously. We'll never know.
I once threw an adlib card across the room in frustration trying to get it to work in windows 3.11. The card survived just fine and I was eventually able to get it to work.
I believe any CS4232 card behaves similarly in an 8-bit slot; ie this card does not really have a leg up on 16-bit versions, which will only be able to use limited IRQ, and have WSS and IDE controllers disabled in an 8-bit slot. Pretty nifty card though, the build quality is impressive.
I've never bothered to look at an ISA pinout before. wow that isn't too complicated actually. Very neat. I don't recall ever owning an Adlib, just one ISA 16 Soundblaster that got replaced with it's PCI version for 2 decades until motherboard audio became the norm. Have heard they sound great, though. (Edit: woah, hit of nostalgia with that riser. Compaqs and Packard Bells used them. and whoo boy was the latter tempermental for me)
Amazing video really. I love your very logical thinking in finding and handling the errors. Each video I see, gives me slightly more knowledge every time. Please keep producing videos =)
You are brilllant Sir, this is ground breaking to me. The riser card idea is fantastic too, I'm trying to diagnose the problem with a ct1600 and that will be invaluable.
Regarding the AdLib Media Connector, was this the predecessor to the future Creative cards that had a general-purpose expansion connector? The Audigy (I think) had such a connector that looks very much the same, and in my case I used it to add optical/TOSlink and SPDIF I/O via an add-on card that was made by a hobbyist and sold on Ebay at the time - this was like...2001-ish? Edit: I should add, this might have been on both the Audigy and Live! cards, can't remember and I don't have those cards anymore. I can't remember what the connector officially supported from Creative.
My 1st sound card was an 8bit ad-lib in my IBM xt made a world of difference to not only my interest in computers but the sound quality was amazing compared to my friends spectrums & commodore's , by the time soundblaster & the 386 came out i was hooked
That last music track took me way back. What was that game called where all the little men marched out? I had forgotten all about that game! Interesting video, thanks.
if you look at 3:59 you can actually see the jumper JP1 being present on the Multimedia connector, so i guess that was just a thing you had to do if there was nothing plugged into there.
JP reference designator stands certainly for the whole connector given the footprint (outline) and placement, and you'll notice that 0.1" pitch connectors generally get a JP designator, doesn't mean jumper; and "Adlib Media Connector" silkscreen is centered across the whole connector as well! Curiously Batyra's soundcard website (linked) depicts the card with the jumper link installed just like you figured out. The picture is dated 2019, it predates your video. Odds are this is how they received the card, how it comes from the factory, and the jumper needs to be removed if the connector were to be populated with an extension that potentially never came out. According to the datasheet, CS4232 has an "external peripheral port" which can house either a CS9233 wavetable or an OPL3. Though i'm not sure what for, since the wavetable chip just speaks MIDI; but it also has an ISA bus interface on board. Some sort of contingency measure or misread the CS4232 datasheet and thought they'd need to divert CS from OPL3 if they expand the card with a CS9233?
Great sleuthing and coverage. I hadn't seen or heard of that card; maybe there are more of them out in the wild. Being an 8-bit card that also supports Windows Sound System, it should be capable of 16-bit 44.1KHz output as well. One question: The card you show at 3:40, I noticed it has a 14.31818 MHz crystal on it. That is suspiciously the same crystal in the original PC, which is divided by 12 to get the 1.1193182MHz clock for the PIT. Do you think the card with the 14.31818 MHz crystal has some sort of PC speaker routing/emulation, like the Pro Audio Spectrum cards do?
Thank you. As I said in the video, WSS unfortunately didn't work, it was initialized, but neither were the games able to detect it properly, nor did it play any sound, when I set it manually. Since I never saw an 8-bit capable WSS sound card, I assumed, that it needs the full 16-bit bus for the data transfer. I'm still not sure about that. And about the crystal, the presence doesn't mean much. Many high quality sound cards avoid using the 14.3MHz frequency from the ISA bus and use instead own oscillator for higher quality. From experience I also can tell, that such cards usually run better in faster systems (f.e. P2/P3). I'm currently working on an own sound card and I'm using dedicated 14.3MHz crystal as well. Divided by two you get a perfect OPL/CMS clock as well. I don't know if I want to use the crystal in the final version, but for prototyping, it's handy to have it. In regards of the card in the video, may be it has a pass through of PC speaker as well, but most likely it hasn't. At least I don't know about that feature in the CS4232 chip, but who knows?! The crystal is not necessary a hint that it is such a pass through.
@@necro_ware I appreciate your clarification, thank you. Shame about the WSS portion; I guess that leaves the PAS series as the only cards capable of 16-bit audio output while installed in an 8-bit slot. (The GUS technically qualifies, sort-of, as you can use it in an 8-bit slot but can't use DMA, so the only way to play 16-bit samples is to upload them to the card via PIO and then play them, limited by onboard memory of course.)
Just a quick one, I would say putting a ground plane in the edge connector where there is a pin scraping against the pcb surface is a hugely awful idea. Enough insertions and you're going to have a direct short to ground
If you’re managing to dig out the ground plane burried deep in the PCB you’ve got worse problems; like completely removing gold plated connectors and snapping the card in half.
Would guess the addon card has its own midi syth on that replaced or compliments the OPL thats why the pins get passed through the interface maybe software controlled 5.1 support? With 2 OPL 3s
Those are PCI cards. It's unlikely, that I'll make a review on them since I'm collecting only ISA Sound Cards. I have couple of PCI sound cards too, but they live somewhere in the spare parts box :)
What an odd situation with the OPL3. Presumably, the card would have shipped with a jumper in place? The manual does mention the following, not that it's helpful any longer. :) Question: After installing the ASB 16 DOS drivers, I don't hear the game's music. What should I do? Answer: Check to make sure that all the cables are in the proper place as specified in the manual. However, if you do not get any result, make sure that jumpers 1 and 2 on JP1 are closed. This will enable the Yamaha OPL3 synthesizer.
Yes, I found it in the documentation afterwards as well :) It is also not quite precise at that point, they say jumper at position 1 and 2, where it's not clear if they mean one jumper over the pin 1 and 2, or two jumpers at the first two pairs.... Well, now I know, that they really mean two jumpers at the first two pairs and it works now :)
THE best 80s sound card made in mid 90s; the logic of how retro computerist can value something today alas wasn't sufficient to really move the needle back at the time, as seems the market for sound cards was always more price conscious than quality conscious (excepting the narrow market of musicians with more serious to professional interest)
I think we, retro nerds, are glad to see such card, because it is part of AdLibs story, which was very important back than and because it would be a good option for an old XT. Not everybody is a period-correctness extremist ;)
@@necro_ware not really. It's all digital. The most analog circuits are after the DA, which also have been put in a chip (think tripath amps). The combination of a Yamaha soundchip cloned, a wave table, sound blaster compatible processor, the digital circuitry of a tripath amp, the dna/irq routing, and some sound inputs can be very easily put in an fpga.
@@ProDigit80 On the second thought, you are probably right in regards of digital, the YMF262 has external digital to analogue converter, so it must be digital indeed. But still, I think it's going to be hard to implement it in FPGA. A dozen of companies were trying to implement it in their ICs back in the days and not one succeeded to get the genuine sound. I guess, that's for reason, but if you have an idea, I can only cheer you up to go for it. My concerns shouldn't be a real reason not to create something like this.
Late reply, but there was a project being worked on a couple years ago that sounds like what you were talking about. Search "The one sound card to rule them all" for a video explaining the project. It's a shame it seems that COVID has stalled development...
I am from Germany ;) "Netto" means taxes not included and it's not quite true, that the tax has to be always included. In normal shops yes, but there are shops for companies, for example "Metro", where you can pay "Netto" prices.
@@necro_ware maybe he bought it in the supermarket named "Netto". Then it was included tax. ;-) But i don't think, that "Netto" sold soundcards back in time.
@@logipilot For the SB1.0 it was usually either the way you had it, or all of the ICs were soldered. They started to install the CMS into sockets with SB1.5, where later revisions were even delievered with the CMS chips at all.
I love these and trade some mad rare soundcards for one! I have a bunch of sb16/32/awe cards... Not trading my sb pro 2.0 / pas 16 tho lol. Looking for an adlib and thunderboard.
Haha.. well.. * finger quotes * "Ad Lib". ;-) Interesting though. I had never heard of this. After the Gold fiasco, I didn't really hear much about them at all. But then I saw a serial card on eBay the other day that was supposedly an Ad Lib product. I figured it was a bogus listing at first, assuming somebody found a random I/O card from who-knows-where in Asia, with no discernible identifying marks on it, and just thought ... "Sure... It's a green board with the same gold lines on the bottom thingy, and some computer chips on it. Looks like an Ad Lib to me!" But there was a hastily made instruction sheet with Ad Lib branding on it, which confused me more than it answered any questions. Now I see this, with the account of what happened to the carcass of the company, and some puzzle pieces are starting to fit together.
Yeah, though what I find intriguing is that "Made in Canada". I'm asking if it still was designed by the same people. May be only the name traveled through the world, but not the team of engineers. At least this cards were obviously very well done, so the thought is may be not that wrong....
@@necro_ware Haha.. I have my doubts about the legitimacy of that claim. ;-) But yeah, once those drop-in codecs showed up, it was pretty easy to manufacture a decent sound card. Creative gets a lot of hate - and a lot of it is well deserved. But the initial SB DAC, as janky as it is, sits neatly in the "cheap and cheerful" category for me. Essentially bit-banging audio samples to make a device that could be manufactured easily and relatively inexpensively... It's a total hack, but an effective one, and it got digitized sound into the hands of a whole era of PC users. Can't be too mad about that.
@@necro_ware As mentioned by Francois Menard in several old USENET posts, the engineering group responsible for the design of the Ad Lib Gold was hired by Mediatrix after Ad Lib's bankruptcy/acquisition, making the Audiotrix Pro and Audiotrix 3D-XG something of spiritual successors. I don't know that I've ever seen any reference to who may have engineered the later cards that were released under the Ad Lib Multimedia moniker, but do recall at one reference mentioning that the ASB 32/64 was the only member of that group designed "in house."
@Nick Wallette Despite how much disagreed I am with the former behavior of Creative. I'd never say, that they don't deserve a place in the history. They made many interesting solutions, it's just that if Creative wouldn't make that game, we'd probably have even better solutions back in the days. MediaVision showed for example, how it works. And in regards of "Made in Canada" it's not that wrong to think that way. For example Nokia was sold years ago to China, but the most design and management work is still done in Finnland until today. I have a phone by HMD/Nokia and it is a really good product in my opinion.
@@necro_ware You should also replace the LF347M op-amps with LMV324M or something similar to get rid of the ugly FM-synth distortion. The 5V power supply is not enough for them as they require 7V or more, according to the datasheet.
Nice video. I actually kind of detest creative labs for their garbage products and business practices. I owned at least 70% of the Sound Blaster cards they made over the years and was never really happy with any of them. I did love my PAS16 and Vortex 2 based cards from Turtle Beach. Also had a TB Maui that was interesting.
@@necro_ware I can recall playing Unreal Tournament on a Vortex 2 card with headphones and actually being able to hear other players above and below me. Creative never had anything that compares.
Aureal A3D is still unmatched for 3D positional audio. It is in a way slightly cartoony/exaggerated but there is no 3D positional audio (software or hardware) that allows you to pinpoint sounds better; especially above and below. In all other respects the card is very outdated.
@@soylentgreenb Next to nobody runs a soundcard in a PC these days for good reason. I've got at least 4 Creative SB PCIe cards and they are all still shit. I'm much happier with a high end motherboard based audio solution. Running an Aurus x570 master at the moment with a 3950X. The A3D cards were just so much fun to play with.
in the late 90's I was a computer tech in Quebec, Canada and these crystal cards were in 75% of "clone" pc's. They were around 12$ brand new (distributor price). Quebec is a communist place so people usually buy base models of everything so Sound Blasters were very rare.
Hah.. yeah, ironically, this would be the easier one. Although, frankly, if your "clone" of the Sound Blaster was less concerned about authenticity, and more concerned with having the most effective, compatible card you could make, then there wouldn't be a great deal of difference. There are plenty of all-in-one codecs, like this Crystal chip, that can give you a good DAC with SB/P/16 compatibility. And they're so tightly integrated, that it's kind of hard to screw it up. Do a half-decent job laying out the PCB and you're golden.
Wow, in headphones you can really hear the beautiful frequency response that card has for the FM synth. A fitting last hurrah for a brand that rarely compromised its quality
Nope. As long as the card uses the LF347M op-amps, the FM-synthesis sounds like rubbish. They need to be replaced with LMV324M or something similar.
@@radovanm.2392 You know what, i find the distorted crunch actually compliments FM sound. It was a key "feature" of Megadrive, though for different reasons. FM can sound pretty thin, it gets really lush at 6op, kind of tolerable at 4op, and tends to be super thin with 2op as used by DOS games. The distortion introduces some added intermodulation which thickens it right up. Maybe it's even intentional?
The OPL3 FM-synthesis on this card sounds *very* distorted. Yesterday I was trying to figure out why and found out it's because the two quad-op-amps LF347M are connected only to a 5V power supply, whereas they should be fed at least 7 Volts according to the datasheet. Replacing them with low-voltage rail-to-rail op-amps LMV324M fully resolved the problem.
scams scam scammers AdLib yamaha sound opl midi
Thank you for your positive review of the Adlib Multimedia advanced sound board, a Short Slot 16bit 44khz audio card that was fittingly designed and built in the Quebec City. I would like to point out a few discrepancies, the card shipped with the jumper on (JP1) and is there to allow the programable chip select to be used on the media connector for a modem, ide, scsi or network add on daughtercard across all the ASB line of cards.. remember the days of only 5 slots!........ The design around the CS4232 was due to the built in DSP to allow an adlib emulator upload to the DSP so functionality is not lost when the AMC is used and is PnP control enabled. This card was the ONLY short slot sound card to obtain windows 95 certification BTW. Oh yes I almost forgot, I was the 'guy' that designed the new Quebec sound cards, if you look on the back of it, it has my initials MKP (Mark Keith Pickering) in the trace layer...
Oh! What a pleasure! Thank you very much for this interesting insights and of course a big thank you for creating this great sound card :)
"...they tend to explode in flames sometimes, which can be very exciting as well." :D :D :D
Made me laugh out loud. :D
Interestingly, the ASB 32/64 card you showed earlier in the video (around 3:41) had a jumper on the Adlib Media Connector on the lower end - just like the one you had to install on the ASB16. I suspect these cards shipped with the jumper installed, and it was to be removed when an expansion board was added allowing the expansion board to selectively enable/ disable the on-board OPL.
Yes, probably. I also noticed the jumper on the ASB64 later during editing of the video. I don't know, where this ASB16 comes from, may be it was rescued from a scrap yard and someone salvaged the jumpers previously. We'll never know.
I once threw an adlib card across the room in frustration trying to get it to work in windows 3.11. The card survived just fine and I was eventually able to get it to work.
Great video, while the fix was simple I think this is first time I've seen someone use oscilloscope to diagnose a PC add-on card in situ!
well, it was less of a fix, more a try to find out what's going on )
I believe any CS4232 card behaves similarly in an 8-bit slot; ie this card does not really have a leg up on 16-bit versions, which will only be able to use limited IRQ, and have WSS and IDE controllers disabled in an 8-bit slot. Pretty nifty card though, the build quality is impressive.
Really cool that you got the FM working :)
I've never bothered to look at an ISA pinout before. wow that isn't too complicated actually. Very neat. I don't recall ever owning an Adlib, just one ISA 16 Soundblaster that got replaced with it's PCI version for 2 decades until motherboard audio became the norm. Have heard they sound great, though.
(Edit: woah, hit of nostalgia with that riser. Compaqs and Packard Bells used them. and whoo boy was the latter tempermental for me)
Amazing video really. I love your very logical thinking in finding and handling the errors. Each video I see, gives me slightly more knowledge every time. Please keep producing videos =)
You are brilllant Sir, this is ground breaking to me. The riser card idea is fantastic too, I'm trying to diagnose the problem with a ct1600 and that will be invaluable.
Oh, and there also was Adlib wavetable daughterboard! I also have it!
Regarding the AdLib Media Connector, was this the predecessor to the future Creative cards that had a general-purpose expansion connector? The Audigy (I think) had such a connector that looks very much the same, and in my case I used it to add optical/TOSlink and SPDIF I/O via an add-on card that was made by a hobbyist and sold on Ebay at the time - this was like...2001-ish?
Edit: I should add, this might have been on both the Audigy and Live! cards, can't remember and I don't have those cards anymore. I can't remember what the connector officially supported from Creative.
Oh ! That was an odd jumper placement indeed !
My 1st sound card was an 8bit ad-lib in my IBM xt made a world of difference to not only my interest in computers but the sound quality was amazing compared to my friends spectrums & commodore's , by the time soundblaster & the 386 came out i was hooked
That last music track took me way back. What was that game called where all the little men marched out?
I had forgotten all about that game!
Interesting video, thanks.
Lemmings ;)
Necroware
Little bastards :)
if you look at 3:59 you can actually see the jumper JP1 being present on the Multimedia connector, so i guess that was just a thing you had to do if there was nothing plugged into there.
I love how the pcb is clean
JP reference designator stands certainly for the whole connector given the footprint (outline) and placement, and you'll notice that 0.1" pitch connectors generally get a JP designator, doesn't mean jumper; and "Adlib Media Connector" silkscreen is centered across the whole connector as well!
Curiously Batyra's soundcard website (linked) depicts the card with the jumper link installed just like you figured out. The picture is dated 2019, it predates your video. Odds are this is how they received the card, how it comes from the factory, and the jumper needs to be removed if the connector were to be populated with an extension that potentially never came out.
According to the datasheet, CS4232 has an "external peripheral port" which can house either a CS9233 wavetable or an OPL3. Though i'm not sure what for, since the wavetable chip just speaks MIDI; but it also has an ISA bus interface on board. Some sort of contingency measure or misread the CS4232 datasheet and thought they'd need to divert CS from OPL3 if they expand the card with a CS9233?
Im on the way Home Form a Business trip. TH-cam notifyed my that your Video ist online - i Made a Stop with some Burger King "food" :)
I'm glad, that I gave you a good reason to stop :D Gutten Appetit!
nice sound card, thank you for another great video
Great sleuthing and coverage. I hadn't seen or heard of that card; maybe there are more of them out in the wild. Being an 8-bit card that also supports Windows Sound System, it should be capable of 16-bit 44.1KHz output as well.
One question: The card you show at 3:40, I noticed it has a 14.31818 MHz crystal on it. That is suspiciously the same crystal in the original PC, which is divided by 12 to get the 1.1193182MHz clock for the PIT. Do you think the card with the 14.31818 MHz crystal has some sort of PC speaker routing/emulation, like the Pro Audio Spectrum cards do?
Thank you. As I said in the video, WSS unfortunately didn't work, it was initialized, but neither were the games able to detect it properly, nor did it play any sound, when I set it manually. Since I never saw an 8-bit capable WSS sound card, I assumed, that it needs the full 16-bit bus for the data transfer. I'm still not sure about that.
And about the crystal, the presence doesn't mean much. Many high quality sound cards avoid using the 14.3MHz frequency from the ISA bus and use instead own oscillator for higher quality. From experience I also can tell, that such cards usually run better in faster systems (f.e. P2/P3). I'm currently working on an own sound card and I'm using dedicated 14.3MHz crystal as well. Divided by two you get a perfect OPL/CMS clock as well. I don't know if I want to use the crystal in the final version, but for prototyping, it's handy to have it. In regards of the card in the video, may be it has a pass through of PC speaker as well, but most likely it hasn't. At least I don't know about that feature in the CS4232 chip, but who knows?! The crystal is not necessary a hint that it is such a pass through.
@@necro_ware I appreciate your clarification, thank you. Shame about the WSS portion; I guess that leaves the PAS series as the only cards capable of 16-bit audio output while installed in an 8-bit slot. (The GUS technically qualifies, sort-of, as you can use it in an 8-bit slot but can't use DMA, so the only way to play 16-bit samples is to upload them to the card via PIO and then play them, limited by onboard memory of course.)
Just a quick one, I would say putting a ground plane in the edge connector where there is a pin scraping against the pcb surface is a hugely awful idea. Enough insertions and you're going to have a direct short to ground
The ground plane is inside of the PCB on the multilayer cards. You can't scratch through to it.
If you’re managing to dig out the ground plane burried deep in the PCB you’ve got worse problems; like completely removing gold plated connectors and snapping the card in half.
Oh, that jumper... sneaky!
Seus vídeos são nostalgia pura!!!
large ground plane but they couldn't bother to have dummy contacts for the ISA slot sadly.
Канал OLDROBOT --- th-cam.com/users/OLDROBOT
Thanks for reminder. I made the info points in the video, but forgot to put the links into the description. Just updated!
Great video man!
Well a lot of 16 bit sound cards were 8 bi tv compatible including the sound blaster pro 2.0
Would guess the addon card has its own midi syth on that replaced or compliments the OPL thats why the pins get passed through the interface maybe software controlled 5.1 support? With 2 OPL 3s
I think, that was the plan, however I found only modem add-on cards. I guess Adlib eventually never came up with the actual idea of that header.
Very amusing. Thanks 👏
That’s something you don’t see anymore, “Made In Canada”
You should get some Hercules cards like the Fortissimo and do videos on them. Or even later cards like the famous Santa Cruz.
Those are PCI cards. It's unlikely, that I'll make a review on them since I'm collecting only ISA Sound Cards. I have couple of PCI sound cards too, but they live somewhere in the spare parts box :)
is that the FNIRSI-5012H osciloscope?
Yeah that's what wiped out their competition. Not anti-competitive practices.
What an odd situation with the OPL3. Presumably, the card would have shipped with a jumper in place? The manual does mention the following, not that it's helpful any longer. :)
Question: After installing the ASB 16 DOS drivers, I don't hear the
game's music. What should I do?
Answer: Check to make sure that all the cables are in the proper place as
specified in the manual. However, if you do not get any result, make sure that
jumpers 1 and 2 on JP1 are closed. This will enable the Yamaha OPL3
synthesizer.
Yes, I found it in the documentation afterwards as well :) It is also not quite precise at that point, they say jumper at position 1 and 2, where it's not clear if they mean one jumper over the pin 1 and 2, or two jumpers at the first two pairs.... Well, now I know, that they really mean two jumpers at the first two pairs and it works now :)
To be fair, the German manual is the only one where the Jumper is not mentioned, but in the French and English Version 😂
@@copyright_karl Exactly, that was actually the reason why I was asked to take a look. The owner didn't find anything about it in the German manual...
Wavetable! Where to run?
I don't understand the question
THE best 80s sound card made in mid 90s; the logic of how retro computerist can value something today alas wasn't sufficient to really move the needle back at the time, as seems the market for sound cards was always more price conscious than quality conscious (excepting the narrow market of musicians with more serious to professional interest)
I think we, retro nerds, are glad to see such card, because it is part of AdLibs story, which was very important back than and because it would be a good option for an old XT. Not everybody is a period-correctness extremist ;)
Great video as usual.
Someone should make these cards into an FPGA, and mass produce them for retro PC projects (like mini DOS and Windows 98 Se PC's)
It's quite hard to create analogue synthesizers in FPGA and make it sound like the real thing. That's why nobody managed to make it so far.
@@necro_ware not really. It's all digital. The most analog circuits are after the DA, which also have been put in a chip (think tripath amps).
The combination of a Yamaha soundchip cloned, a wave table, sound blaster compatible processor, the digital circuitry of a tripath amp, the dna/irq routing, and some sound inputs can be very easily put in an fpga.
@@ProDigit80 On the second thought, you are probably right in regards of digital, the YMF262 has external digital to analogue converter, so it must be digital indeed. But still, I think it's going to be hard to implement it in FPGA. A dozen of companies were trying to implement it in their ICs back in the days and not one succeeded to get the genuine sound. I guess, that's for reason, but if you have an idea, I can only cheer you up to go for it. My concerns shouldn't be a real reason not to create something like this.
Late reply, but there was a project being worked on a couple years ago that sounds like what you were talking about. Search "The one sound card to rule them all" for a video explaining the project.
It's a shame it seems that COVID has stalled development...
In Germany tax is always included unless stated otherwise (it‘s a law). So it most likely was 240€ including tax.
€? In the 1/2 90s? He clearly said DEUTSCH MARKS. Also, has that law always been on the books?
I am from Germany ;) "Netto" means taxes not included and it's not quite true, that the tax has to be always included. In normal shops yes, but there are shops for companies, for example "Metro", where you can pay "Netto" prices.
@@necro_ware Very interesting. Thanx :)
@@necro_ware maybe he bought it in the supermarket named "Netto". Then it was included tax. ;-) But i don't think, that "Netto" sold soundcards back in time.
@@eltrash Yeah, that must've been it :)
Believe me (or not) my SB1.0 had soldered cms chips and socketed FM chip, Serial number in the low 1000s I sold it last year for 140€ :(
Why shouldn't I believe that? It's absolutely common for the SB1.0
@@necro_ware The other way round was more common ;) I got my card directly at the soundblaster booth at the cebit 90´ !
@@logipilot For the SB1.0 it was usually either the way you had it, or all of the ICs were soldered. They started to install the CMS into sockets with SB1.5, where later revisions were even delievered with the CMS chips at all.
Great video!
What's the brand of this oscilloscope ? It looks very handy !
Hi, it's FNIRSI-5012H. It promises 100MHz, but it can handle about 35MHz at best. However, for my retro repairs it is good enough.
@@necro_ware Thanks !
What about make a video about Gravis ultrasound?
Planned
I love these and trade some mad rare soundcards for one! I have a bunch of sb16/32/awe cards... Not trading my sb pro 2.0 / pas 16 tho lol. Looking for an adlib and thunderboard.
Haha.. well.. * finger quotes * "Ad Lib". ;-)
Interesting though. I had never heard of this. After the Gold fiasco, I didn't really hear much about them at all. But then I saw a serial card on eBay the other day that was supposedly an Ad Lib product. I figured it was a bogus listing at first, assuming somebody found a random I/O card from who-knows-where in Asia, with no discernible identifying marks on it, and just thought ... "Sure... It's a green board with the same gold lines on the bottom thingy, and some computer chips on it. Looks like an Ad Lib to me!" But there was a hastily made instruction sheet with Ad Lib branding on it, which confused me more than it answered any questions. Now I see this, with the account of what happened to the carcass of the company, and some puzzle pieces are starting to fit together.
Yeah, though what I find intriguing is that "Made in Canada". I'm asking if it still was designed by the same people. May be only the name traveled through the world, but not the team of engineers. At least this cards were obviously very well done, so the thought is may be not that wrong....
@@necro_ware Haha.. I have my doubts about the legitimacy of that claim. ;-) But yeah, once those drop-in codecs showed up, it was pretty easy to manufacture a decent sound card.
Creative gets a lot of hate - and a lot of it is well deserved. But the initial SB DAC, as janky as it is, sits neatly in the "cheap and cheerful" category for me. Essentially bit-banging audio samples to make a device that could be manufactured easily and relatively inexpensively... It's a total hack, but an effective one, and it got digitized sound into the hands of a whole era of PC users. Can't be too mad about that.
@@necro_ware As mentioned by Francois Menard in several old USENET posts, the engineering group responsible for the design of the Ad Lib Gold was hired by Mediatrix after Ad Lib's bankruptcy/acquisition, making the Audiotrix Pro and Audiotrix 3D-XG something of spiritual successors. I don't know that I've ever seen any reference to who may have engineered the later cards that were released under the Ad Lib Multimedia moniker, but do recall at one reference mentioning that the ASB 32/64 was the only member of that group designed "in house."
@Nick Wallette Despite how much disagreed I am with the former behavior of Creative. I'd never say, that they don't deserve a place in the history. They made many interesting solutions, it's just that if Creative wouldn't make that game, we'd probably have even better solutions back in the days. MediaVision showed for example, how it works.
And in regards of "Made in Canada" it's not that wrong to think that way. For example Nokia was sold years ago to China, but the most design and management work is still done in Finnland until today. I have a phone by HMD/Nokia and it is a really good product in my opinion.
just a jumper to enable music. simply: wow
Yes, I'm very glad it was just that and nothing worse.
@@necro_ware You should also replace the LF347M op-amps with LMV324M or something similar to get rid of the ugly FM-synth distortion. The 5V power supply is not enough for them as they require 7V or more, according to the datasheet.
@@radovanm.2392 Thanks for the advise! However, this card was just borrowed...
I need me an 8bit card for my 8088 "laptop"
Nice video. I actually kind of detest creative labs for their garbage products and business practices. I owned at least 70% of the Sound Blaster cards they made over the years and was never really happy with any of them. I did love my PAS16 and Vortex 2 based cards from Turtle Beach. Also had a TB Maui that was interesting.
Funny enough Vortex was made by the same people as PAS. So you were loyal to the MediaVision from the beginning :D
@@necro_ware I can recall playing Unreal Tournament on a Vortex 2 card with headphones and actually being able to hear other players above and below me. Creative never had anything that compares.
Aureal A3D is still unmatched for 3D positional audio. It is in a way slightly cartoony/exaggerated but there is no 3D positional audio (software or hardware) that allows you to pinpoint sounds better; especially above and below.
In all other respects the card is very outdated.
@@soylentgreenb Next to nobody runs a soundcard in a PC these days for good reason. I've got at least 4 Creative SB PCIe cards and they are all still shit. I'm much happier with a high end motherboard based audio solution. Running an Aurus x570 master at the moment with a 3950X. The A3D cards were just so much fun to play with.
You’ve lost 10^9000l0 social credit
in the late 90's I was a computer tech in Quebec, Canada and these crystal cards were in 75% of "clone" pc's. They were around 12$ brand new (distributor price). Quebec is a communist place so people usually buy base models of everything so Sound Blasters were very rare.
If only we could get a clone of this card made instead of the overhyped Sound Blasters...
It's a simple task to make it. As far as I know, all the chips are still easily available.
Hah.. yeah, ironically, this would be the easier one. Although, frankly, if your "clone" of the Sound Blaster was less concerned about authenticity, and more concerned with having the most effective, compatible card you could make, then there wouldn't be a great deal of difference. There are plenty of all-in-one codecs, like this Crystal chip, that can give you a good DAC with SB/P/16 compatibility. And they're so tightly integrated, that it's kind of hard to screw it up. Do a half-decent job laying out the PCB and you're golden.
@@nickwallette6201 Couldn't agree more.
I use opti931 on my xt
15:30 what is that game and what are you even supposed to do? XDD
Lemmings, that is one of the most famous games for all platforms of that time :D Just google for it.
👍
That nightmarish title grammar, dear god.
Improvement proposals are are always welcome. If you take your time to criticize something, please consider to take another minute to help.
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scams scam scammers AdLib yamaha sound opl midi