The AdLib Gold clone! Testing the GoldLib sound card

[@destineerrush2632]

For anyone interested, the "Surround Module" is a Yamaha YM7128B. Even the official datasheet calls it a "surround processor" so that's probably why AdLib did also. It's actually a fairly simple chip. it has 16 audio taps (8 each for L/R channels), with customizable gain and delay times. It also only has a single feedback tap, which is why the "reverb" sounds so fluttery/echo-y. The reverb effect on an AWE32 or similar card is actually much better, but for 1992, this would have been the only game in town short of an expensive external midi module.

[@ThoughTMusic]

I was interested, thank you for the further details.

[@Caluma122]

I think everyone is interested 😂

[@georgen9838]

I wonder what else was on that surround board. Most of the chips on the AdLib Gold itself may be unobtainium, but the YM7128B definitely isn't... be pretty sweet to have a repro of even just that surround board still available.

[@bituniverse8677]

I loved this. Just the 20 minutes of just about nothing but MIDI goodness.

[@Dark.Shingo]

I've been hooked listening to this on my speakers, it's just delightful!

[@paperpanak]

next time I'll hear canyon.mid my speakers gonna learn to fly, damn i HATE midi :)

[@Ikkepop]

@@paperpanak midi is awesome dude

[@nednettapp]

It's not MIDI, it's FM synth.

[@paperpanak]

@@Ikkepop depends ... i was listening to this kind of music on daily basis for half of 90's, because my brother loved it. It is burned in my memory, i cannot change it ;)

[@MathiasShaw637]

I just love how the community keeps the support going for these old machines. ^_^

[@stephenthomas1492]

It makes me feel like I was around for a special time in the history of computing. Back in the days where it was just us nerds and gamers into these machines.

[@zxcvb_bvcxz]

Until the rare chips are all gone. Hope someone decapped a couple.

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

@@stephenthomas1492 It was better that way

[@kairon156]

My ears and Philips headphones thank you.
These sounded amazing. the 2nd last one gave me a vague memory of a game called Afterlife but only a few notes of it.
Now I miss 80's to 90's PC music.
As a fan of old school point and click games I had no idea Dune had one as well. Though it's a much older era than what I enjoy. That flight takeoff is super cool.

[@K-o-R]

Funny how musical pieces that were probably designed to show off the capabilities of the sound card tend to be real bangers.

[@freeculture]

The video of the guy who ported this music is somewhere in youtube. He ported actual cd audio music into fm synth, its just amazing what he did. They had one of the rare boards sent to developers which is why they had this for Dune and some other game.

[@AlyxxTheRat]

Very glad I listened to this in headphones. Those effects sound really good to me. The Stadium effect almost gave it a SNES vibe.
Also this card would've been perfect to play Blake Stone Aliens of Gold with lmao

[@henryokeeffe5835]

I love that that Altera (Intel) FPGA could probably hardware emulate an entire PC from that era

[@proCaylak]

FPGA is the present and the future of emulation. the real hardware is getting rarer and less approachable :(

[@alphaLONE]

that's just a little 1270 LE CPLD. Doubt you could do anything this grand with it, like fitting a soft 8086 in it. Wouldn't be surprised if some wizard managed to, but I don't expect much from this one.

[@nalinux]

I just noticed Altera was bought by Intel in 2015 ...

[@medes5597]

I don't think this kind of thing is that impressive anymore. A few years ago it was kind of an amazing fun fact. But at this point its true of like 95% of modern day retro cards, upgrades, remakes etc and has been for a few years. We're basically at the point where its more notable when they use something less powerful.

[@rommix0]

@@nalinux and Xilinx (another well known FPGA maker) was bought out by AMD.

[@Ve55el]

Could you record a playlist before sending it back? The Win midis and a few games? This really sounds cool...like nostalgia dipped in chocolate!

[@YzsForLife]

this would be awesome

[@PXAbstraction]

Doing a replay of DUNE is on my to-do list for my live streams. This game was so overshadowed at the time by DUNE II, but it was a really interesting management adventure game and yeah, that soundtrack is absolutely stellar.

[@freeculture]

Those were different types of games, the second most famously introduced the RTS genre, but this plays more like a simple adventure game. As a game itself is super easy, too easy in fact. Its almost like watching some movie i guess. What is impressive is how cool the music was ported to the Gold FM synth, because believe it or not, a real audio CD exists of this Dune music.

[@TheRealLetharos]

So the surround worked on my home theater system. The songs were coming through all sides on surround. When dropped to mono it only came out the center.
Neat stuff. Great tunes! It's like Carpenter Brut.

[@spawnkano316]

Yea same here with mine, it sounded so cool as the settings were being changed😊

[@KarlHamilton]

Spunds like it must be Prologic encoded then.

[@Ikkepop]

God I love that OPL sound, it reminds of me a child playing the Sega Genesis and PC DOS Games, it has this gritty, dirty quality to it, and it doesn't feel like it aged at all, as opposite to something like the SNES (or many other wavetable based synth systems from the period) which has low bitrate samples as basis for it's instruments, they sounded impressive at the time bud aged so badly. No reverb will ever save a low bitrate sample, it will always just sound like its playing from under a blanket.

[@DeinonychusCowboy]

I don't even know much about retro audio or audio in general and I still went "oh dang that sounds amazing" as soon as it started playing

[@CaveyMoth]

Psh..screw the RTX 4060ti. We've got a new AdLib clone!
Holy crap, Dune sounds a lot like it does on SEGA CD. And that's how I like it best.

[@proCaylak]

rtx 4060 ti... for a card of that size, screwing is optional. but getting screwed is not.

[@slightlyevolved]

I think Adlib's marketing team really did a disservice to this by just calling it a "surround" module instead of really pushing the DSP functionality. If theyd made it clearer how much it actually did, it might have sold better back in the olden times

[@jamesrowden303]

Yeah, Creative were much more into promoting that side of their products.

[@AlexCBrandon]

They didn't do much to sell the card period unfortunately. As mentioned Creative was the Microsoft / 800 pound gorilla they were up against. Sad really since one would figure the success of the first card could be dumped into more marketing. But eh...

[@Njuregen]

Quality means little if you not have promotion, many companies went under with better quality things over the lesser qualified but better promoted ones.

[@BanazirGalpsi1968]

Great for music soundtrack and soundscapes

[@rich1051414]

I mean, we still call this "virtual surround" do this day.

[@christophero1969]

Great sound from the 486 era. I wish IBM or Microsoft would come out with an updated DOS 9.0, just for 386 and up machines and adding USB 3.2 driver support.

[@themaritimegirl]

FreeDOS with the USBDOS package more or less provides this.

[@christophero1969]

@@themaritimegirl Not really, but good suggestion.

[@absalomdraconis]

​@@christophero1969 : Honestly, at this point wanting a new DOS from IBM or Microsoft is just unreasonable. Looking to things like FreeDOS is the right choice.

[@christophero1969]

@@absalomdraconis No... IBM ALREADY HAS THE CODE for 2003 servers. IBM would just have to recompile the code for 32-bit architecture and add modern USB and LARGE DISK SUPPORT. I have used FreeDOS, and NOPE, JUST Nope.

[@aner_bda]

I miss the days when good soundcards were something sought after as much as graphics cards. Nowadays, most people, at best, just plug headphones into a cheap USB DAC and call it a day when gaming. I miss the good ole days sometimes.

[@mysteryboyee]

Because the sound chip built into motherboards these days are good already, unless you need special ports or specific functionality or something, theres just really no reason to get a sound card in a modern pc (especially for gaming, as for some reason motherboard manufacturers seem to have developed an aversion to putting more then 1 pcie slot)

[@DS08]

What kind of sorcery is this? My 5.1 surround sound was playing things in ways I've never heard, I didn't even think TH-cam supported that.

[@RickBaconsAdventures]

most surround sound units decode the channels just from the channel mixing on a stereo source since 5.1 content is rare

[@BlackDragon-xn2ww]

I really noticed the effects on my kenwood and pioneer speakers and receiver hardware really brings out the sound even have push buttons to bring effects as well no need for a card for that but the cards filled a void back in those days

[@GL1zdA]

I've managed to pass all tests on a Pentium 75. The surround module is the most speed sensitive, without it would work with something like VIA C3 downclocked to around 300 MHz.

[@IRWPD]

That card looks like a piece of art.

[@rudodejong]

The Dune soundtrack sounds amazing on this card!

[@visualdarkness]

It's incredible how great MiDi like this can sound. It's so darn clean and dynamic.

[@Njuregen]

Back in the day I'd have long lists of midi songs on drive to listen to from games in the late 90's, early 00's even.

[@mrb5217]

Adlib music isn't really MIDI. It's music directly programmed for the OPL.

[@wizard-pirate]

@@mrb5217 he's surprised it sounds 'like' midi.

[@freeculture]

@@Njuregen I still do. There is this thing called fluidsynth which can take any .sf2 files for midi samples so its nearly the same as having a midi module back, as long as the midis don't use SysEx which they rarely do, sound identical. For Example Doom music composed for the SC-55 sounds the same with a certain file called Scc1t2.sf2. Older windows used to provide a soft midi "device" with a subset of these very same samples, so its a very familiar sound for the old games. I believe there are ways for ScummVM and dosbox to use fluidsynth or similar one way or another. There are a bunch of Sierra/Lucas/etc midis out there, with like the whole score of the game in a single midi, you can play that and get half hour orchestral music in a minuscule 200k .mid file.

[@freeculture]

@@mrb5217 Yeah that's how it should have been, and actually was. Then came the cheaters who uses pre-programmed "instrument sets" for "midi like" use. Eww. Even Sierra, Lucas and others went this route, compose for like Sound Canvas and the rest whatever degraded result can get. Kinda like designing for VGA and let the lower cards display what they can which resulted in awful results compared to the "properly designed for" for the lesser types but less dev time i guess. Microsoft didn't help either by treating synth devices like midi doing the same.

[@antoinegx]

Dune ❤ Stephane Picq is a musical genius🥇Rémi Herbulot is the other genius behind the curtain of this epic cinematic game

[@joe--cool]

Last I heard was him working to get the rights back to release the Soundtrack again. There is a CD but it's not on Spotify afaik.

[@freeculture]

@@joe--cool Yup and its totally not in youtube, nope, don't search it, move along 🙂

[@Dodo-bf3dm]

These sounds are so nostalgic! So many games from the day used the Adlib features of the SB, that I can't hear the adlib without remembering so fondly every PC game from that era!

[@BocaRetroGames]

Damn this fm music is from heaven

[@btizef2008]

Always loved the amiga soundtrack to dune but that adlib did a much better job than I thought possible!

[@RetroGamingWithEdgarRivera]

Oh my goodness a brand new pristine and gorgeous looking Ad Lib Gold Clone and I freaking love it and it's about time that someone make a Ad Lib Gold Clone since the Original Genuine Ones are hideously expensive. So yeah I'm super excited to see a clone of one of the most Super Rare Soundcard of the 90's which is of course the Ad Lib Gold.

[@KzintiCV]

The music playing through that card is probably the best Dune-related thing I've ever encountered.

[@adammedbery4454]

I watch TH-cam vids in my living room with my home theater. The dune stuff was very. very enjoyable. Thank you for the demo!

[@BrassicGamer]

It does indeed sound very cool! Thanks for sharing.

[@UncleAwesomeRetro]

That surround module makes a HUGE difference! Dune sounds great :)

[@phill80]

Owning the CD Version of Dune for DOS, i can agree, this is amazing and sounds very authentic. Good choice of game to demo the card on LGR.

[@GadgetUK164]

Loved this! Added to my list of things that aren't available to buy lol - fully expect the 2nd hand value of these to exceed the OG Adlib Gold too!

[@MichaelEilers]

Hey Clint, make a music-only, ad-free version of this for Patrons!

[@summer_xo]

That is the best ive ever heard adlib sound, excellent sound card, direct capture and upload quality. If you were inclined to rip and upload the adlib test tracks and Dune before you sent it back, we would be forever in your debt.

[@OmegaPrecept]

ohh man talk about memories, geez... Brings me back.

[@fmsyntheses]

Wonderful video. Thanks again for doing what you do.

[@mayw6571]

Glorious. I wonder if by 'surround' they meant 'surroundings' as in where its trying to simulate. Either way, it's a weirdly named feature.

[@notthatfatboy6519]

11:06 gave me Sega Road Rash vibes. For a clone, this thing is amazing. Good video as always Jeremy!

[@andre060]

Wow, Dune sounds amazing on this! Great stuff.

[@whosonedphone]

I can tell through TH-cam that that is the best sounding card Ive heard. The FM tones have such shape and each tonne exist in its own space. I personally do not care for the surround module. It's a funtouch though. I'm very upset I missed out on this.

[@Lachlant1984]

Wow, this card does sound good, even without all the surround sound/sound enhancement effects.

[@abx42]

That looks and sounds freaking fantastic. I just wish I found out about it before it went the way of the dodo bird
🤣🤣🤣🤣

[@Psyden5757]

It would be awesome to have one of these to record all the sample tracks in FLAC as cleanly as possible
Or if someone could do that and upload the flacs....

[@mousex8767]

I use a Creative card for Adlib sounds in music production and sound design. The surround sound is so good. This is so unique.

[@thebluemarauder]

Part of me wants to call this thing the Adlib Pyrite. Not as catchy as GoldLib, but very thematically appropriate since Iron Pyrite is Fool’s Gold and this is a clone (ie fake) Adlib Gold.

[@JustinEmlay]

Wow, I just want to get that card so I can frame it! AdLib was my first hardware purchase and I never regretted a single penny!

[@TheRealMespotine]

I wished you had played the Dune Soundtrack in its entirety. It sounds so awesome on this card! ❤

[@Not-Great-at-Gaming]

Glad they didn't outsource the manufacturing to Mars or Venus.

[@johnsimon8457]

Homebrew hardware gives me the warm and fuzzies, especially with a non-standard pcb color.

[@skuzzbunny]

yeah, that pseudo-"surround" effect was a bit of a thing for a while well before real surround stuff was more widely practical, I believe Impulse Tracker contained a similar effect, i think it is just some kind of stereo-"phased" reverb, but can def sound fairly uniquely interesting.....)

[@jayperez3431]

lol listening to this on a evga nu audio and its like a blast from the past. sound cards are not dead. it sounds 10,000% better than my onboard, so much more fidelity and clarity.

[@michaelturner4457]

I'd never heard of this Adlib Gold. But then I'm not in America. I did like the "pseudo" mode, that sounded really wide on my MacBook Pro speakers.

[@colinwatt9387]

No. Mr Clint, I expect you to Blerb!

[@Dallen9]

Really takes me back to the days I was a kid. All this was New and everything was looking up and up. Now I just get depressed cause everything is moving towards an I am Ran and 1984 dystopian derp. The Days when Disk space was sparse and everyone was trying to cram everything on floppys when Midi was king.

[@FrontSideBus]

Listening this on a pair of Proac D2R's being driven by a Chord SPM 1050 and a Parasound P6.... the effects sound pretty good!

[@Carstuff111]

Oh man...that thing's ability to produce deep bass! Wow! The soundtrack for Dune is glorious on these cards! I so want that music uploaded from one of these cards!

[@PimpinBassie2]

Still waiting for a FPGA based ISA sound card that emulates all major card types (SB, GUS etc). Do not want to dole out $$ for a one game card.

[@_JPlays_]

Would have loved to hear how Ultima 8 sounded (as you had it in your games folder). That is one game you never hear about anymore.

[@MacMelmac]

Wow! Black and orange looks som good together! Yeah and gold as well of course.

[@branhicks]

The surround function definitely enables and disables music coming from the rear speakers af my Dolby pro logic receiver. Mono only comes out of my center channel.

[@kaitlyn__L]

That’s fun. Pro Logic is an interesting way of encoding it into stereo. It makes sense they’d do that on a high end sound card. (Pro Logic predates the Gold right? I’m pretty sure it does but I cba checking.)

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@initial_kd I’m aware of the evolution, just don’t have the dates memorised! I was thinking they must’ve been expecting the sound card to be plugged into your receiver. 1987 predates the Gold so it must be deliberate rather than an accident of a phasing effect.

[@raptorchow329]

I like the Dune music, very nice!

[@Kniffel101]

No matter how much or little use most people will get out of it, this card is BEAUTIFUL! =O

[@AdamsOlympia]

Sounds incredible on my Adam A7X monitors. Would love to record some music with this bad boy!

[@AndrewFremantle]

I recognize Highway2! An evolution of Highway from the old Adlib Jukebox program from the early/mid-80s.
I gotta say though, compared to other options contemporaneous with this thing, adding all this post-processing to OPL is kinda like putting lipstick on a pig....

[@adultkarate1820]

Well, the “surround” effects certainly fooled my cat, one of those midi tom rolls made her jump (I have wide stereo separation here) 😄

[@christiand.7930]

We had an Adlib Gold back in 93 in our first PC, an AMD 386 DX40. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered the decent support for it in Dune 2 including voice samples, but always wanted a soundblaster due to better game support. The card went who knows where when we updated to a Pentium 100, possibly got scrapped some time after 😔

[@faenethlorhalien]

Ah, the Adlib Gold... back in the day it solved a problem no one needed solved. By the time Creative had the sound blaster cards out with proper pcm as well as fm synth, Adlib had lost the war. The name Adlib was already too closely tied to "it has music, but not sound samples" for games, and most people wouldn't understand what this card brought to the table at the ridiculous price it costed.

[@Heike--]

Adlib Gold was gold-plated Monster cables before audiophiles were really a thing.

[@freeculture]

Are you kidding? This was done before the SB16, but Creative played dirty with Yamaha and starved Adlib of the chips until their product was out in large quantities first. There was also the Gravis Ultrasound, a completely different approach, its a PCM multichannel board, tracker music style which is the same thing the SNES did but with better quality of course. That made much more sense than "SoundFonts" in midi, but eventually CPUs were strong enough to do everything in software with a regular pcm stereo output. Before the SB Live! there was a much superior product from another rival that Creative bought into oblivion, this was a 4 channel with real samplerate oscillation change, not do all at 48khz and resample the rest realtime like they did with their inferior but better marketed product SBLive. It was the Ensoniq AudioPCI. Heck, even Roland put out a midi board with pcm, the RAP-10. You would normally just use Sound Blaster + Sound Canvas, but alas, that didn't took off and it was a dead end as well (the Sound Canvas was simply a read only sample library for midis). Finally AC97 and their current modern equivalent finished Creative for good, nobody needs them anymore. Only a few discrete sounds boards exist for professional multichannel use, with chips from VIA, etc, but Creative is just gone.

[@MH-ht2rw]

Such a lovely episode.

[@YzsForLife]

this is awesome love this vintage community

[@Jef_Vermassen]

Mmm, that is some good ol Dune tunes. Even better with the 'surround'.

[@grimmpickins2559]

That is one cool soundcard, shame it doesn't exist... anymore...
I don't even run early era 486 type stuff... (my 90s stuff is Mac, I kinda dig AGP across the board, my pile gets more PCs after 2002-3...)
I keep thinking about DOS gaming - as I emulate it across platforms, but I've never had a native one.
And, this card made me consider it more seriously.
Even if I can't have it.
Sigh.

[@BertGrink]

Holy moly that music from Dune was just so beautiful!

[@--Zook--]

The dune music sounded awesome on my old Logitech X530 5.1 system with a modern Audigy sound card in my gaming pc.

[@ronpopeil6346]

Dune sounds amazing. Thanks for this.

[@megamanfan3]

Every time I hear an OPL chip in action, I am reminded of the Sega Genesis.

[@arlandi]

this card is just beautiful.

[@johnsouthern6089]

Great tech that could've really took off if it had some of what SB Pro had going for it.

[@arcadeages3917]

It’s the NEC SuperGrafx of sound cards

[@eduardocarrasco8830]

Just heard this with my headphone while I was working and just wooooow that adlib is amazing !!!!

[@weepingscorpion8739]

Sounds and looks really cool this card... but now I'm really wondering if I should get the Orpheus-II card... it's a bit expensive too but damn, it's so tempting

[@Khan613]

I would love to have a system with this card and to play Legend of Kyrandia again. Dune was a good choice though.

[@AndrewAHayes]

I have used computers in music production for many many years starting out with the Amiga 1000 and the Atari Falcon and then on to PC, one of the great things about the sound card era was that you could get Pro Audio cards intended for music production with excellent quality DAC's and DSP chips although I used my outboard effects rack more than the DSP ones, the card I used was an M Audio DMP2 with an Omnia I/O expansion card which provided lots more stereo audio channels but now we have to buy outboard units that are much more expensive even accounting for inflation over the years, thats progress for you!
For my gaming I had a little rompler type GM synth (outboard) unit who's name I cant recall for the life of me, it was quite popular for gaming at the time if my memory serves me well, if anyone can remember the name of this unit then please reply.

[@freeculture]

If you mean the daughter-boards for like the Sb16/32, Roland made SCB-7 (GM) SCB-15 (GS). Basically the SC-55 module in a board. Yamaha did some XG too. Creative had their own later integrated to their boards with fancy names like awe32/64 and things like that.

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

Wow it uses a fpga, I wonder what would it take for making something compatible that is not that expensive. It's like the vampire cards for the amiga or the raspberry pi replacements that are more powerful than the actual pc.

[@comicsgrinder]

Quite the gold theme indeed!

[@JeordieEH]

While I love this old hardware and adlib was cool in a lot of ways. In no way would I go out of my way buying one of these. It is pretty neat, but thanks for sharing the awesomeness of the card. It does look pretty cool, but I would never be able to put it to good use. I mean it was videos like these that made me appreciate good opl3 playback. I was never that big of a fan back in the day of midi, but I occasionally would have friends who would find midi music and we'd share them and listen to them. I mean I love a good sound card, but i'm glad there are collectors out there who let us see this stuff with out having to waste hundreds or thousands on something obsolete.

[@SlavicCelery]

Give the AdLib Gold clones a few years and they're going to be worth $2k soon enough. They'll not get all the way up to a real deal ALG card, but they're going to get close in price. Impressive little piece of kit. I love watching these videos. As a kid playing on a 486, I remember wondering what some of the settings would be like. Hercules cards were a bit of a disappointment to see IRL.

[@charlesswansonii9319]

Absolutely beautiful.

[@PCUSER486]

Wish I could find one of those!

[@Zerbey]

I forgot how good the AdLib Gold sounded compared to the original, wish I could find one that wasn't hideously expensive.

[@daPabOu]

That Dune soundtrack 🥰

[@Zwank36]

you could eat off that PCB.

[@keithmichael112]

It is sharp

[@frankwhite2072]

Sounds really good.

[@jamesburke2759]

I found my new favourite sound card the other day. Diamond Monster Sound MX300 its amazing and yo notice the difference when you boot into windows 98.

[@Belznis]

I actually clearly heard the changes on 5.1 speakers. With the surround turned on you do hear small changes, but really not that noticeable. The effects were much more clearer, but not all of them had a big difference. A nice little effect for some game. The first midi track was really awesome. And also awesome that all the channels in this video work, mono switches to mono, spatial made 5.1 come out of all speakers, sadly you do not get this in every youtube videos.

[@aserta]

"Hell, it's about time!" Heh, didn't expect that quote.

[@theconfusingwords]

Man, that things sounds amazing!

[@Stephen-OldBadGamer]

Dune looks and sounds stunning.

[@jonothanthrace1530]

This is definitely the bassiest video I've ever heard on TH-cam!

[@RRRRRRP]

❤ Dune music is so nostalgic, spent so many hours playing Dune 2 😂