There is some odd flickering around 3:50 during the image sequence. I'm not sure what is happening. I rendered the video 3 times and it was there every time. It's the same background used later on so I don't know why it is having trouble there. I decided it wasn't worth trying to figure it out because I think it may just be my GPU sucking.
wow UnWaTcHaBle- unsubscribed, unfollowed...how could you think it was ok to let this in the video- that you made in your spare time, with a ridiculous amount of effort and quality... the nerve on this guy man
Well dang, I have one of these drives and didn't know it supported this bizarre sound card solution. Mine just has the unpopulated slot, though it's nice to know what it can be used with.
It is a really strange and interesting way of doing sound. The copyright date in the sound manual is 1995, so it would have had a very brief period of relevance. I bet they didn't sell many of these or the optional upgrades. It's asking a lot of the parallel port as well. It just occurred to me I should have tried an FMV game to see how well it handled streaming video from the CD and audio back to the card.
Omega LUL Yes but not the opposite, msdos running OS/2 drivers and programs, thats the issue here. And i'm pretty sure that this compatibility in OS/2 only goes to a certain extent, even more, knowing microsoft as they are, and considering the history behind OS/2 vs MsDos. Also probably many of these laptops may not have the OS/2 drivers, and even tho it may run msdos programs, i dont know if it would accept the msdos drivers. But yeah, i dont know if there is much stuff mainly in those 486 laptops that should require a driver for working. But its really good to know that OS/2 runs msdos programs. It would be a interesting video idea. I wonder how the games would react to the soundcard in the paralel port, with different interruptions than usual, etc
Franko Uh.. i guess you didnt read that wall of text, wich tbh, wasnt that big anyway. You probably dont run that in a 486 laptop without a propper isa/pci integrated soundcard. And probably not a random machine but a OS/2 compatible one.
@@eduardoavila646 OS/2 runs like Windows NT, it has no relationship with MS-DOS drivers. However it has ample emulation of standard devices in its Virtual DOS Machine, backed by existing OS/2 devices and drivers. It will also run Windows 3.1 software if the WINOS/2 package (of course a paid option, because it had a Windows license) is installed. Relationship between IBM and Microsoft is neither here nor there. Microsoft didn't make PCs and components. It's usually not that hard to get OS/2 Warp 3 running and feature-complete on era-appropriate hardware, provided you had generous for the time disk space and RAM. There was no such thing as dedicated machines made for OS/2, it just generally ran on most systems, with some driver hunting effort.
It makes perfect sense that they connected the 16bit sound card to the ATA bus, since the AT in ATA is for the AT bus. Nothing more than a couple line drivers and the HDD connected directly to the AT 16bit bus. So the real magic is the parallel to AT bus driver chip!
You are perfectly right. Even more, there is no such thing as an "IDE controller" on the motherboard. A motherboard with IDE/ATA connectors contains just a bridge/host-adapter that does some basic address decoding for the IDE/ATA connectors. The controller resides on the IDE drive itself and is just an ISA device, just like an "MFM controller + MFM drive" combo.
5:38 I mean, it could be worse. Once upon a time, the definition of "portable" was "fits under an airplane seat"... Oh, and you wouldn't actually be stuck with the 2X CD-ROM, as it appears to be an ordinary IDE drive and as such a more modern one should work, too.
The ES1688’s internal FM synthesis (ESFM) is ESS’s OPL3 clone using special patches that combine channels for more complicated instruments at the potential cost of polyphony. Switching it to OPL3 mode would use OPL3-like patches instead, no emulation required. Not a perfect match, but directly compatible. I had an ES1868 in my first PC and vastly preferred how it sounded to traditional OPL for music, not so much for sound effects. That’s where the SBPro2/SB16 compatibility came in.
I found the holy grail Thinkpad, the 755CDV Pentium 75 for a really good price on eBay a while back...CD-ROM, TFT display, Stereo speakers built in, and a P75...this thing rocks for Vintage gaming, and most 486 DOS software runs just fine!!
You might want to look into getting a PCMCIA sound card. There were ones compatible with DOS games (ironically, quite a few of them won't work in Windows though). As for using a DC power supply for the drive - there is nothing to worry about. The AC power almost certainly goes through a full bridge rectifier and later is turned into DC with the help of capacitors. So putting DC wouldn't damage anything.
~Unibrow ON~ *FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER* Tho ye, precisely. You really just need the voltage to be a tiny bit above the AC one (you know, RMS AC voltage vs rectified one being almost peak voltage) and you basically just threw the job done at the parts inside the device. I would bet even some new devices (like PC power supplies, TVs, monitors and such) would work on DC as well, with weird voltages at that even.
*There is one scenario where it wouldn't work tho: if you take the AC and use it to make a positive to ground, and negative to ground DC voltages. If it requires symmetrical voltage then it wouldn't work, which I really doubt is the case here.
Well it does put an extra strain on the diodes, as two diodes are no longer in use and two must pass all the current. But usually you can just glance at that specs or feel the temperature and ascertain yourself that there's nothing to worry about.
Nice video, but you may want to check multiple facts: - The Sound Blaster 16 was NOT always the SB to get, especially when you want to play Stereo SB Pro games - the SB 16 is not compatible and plays this mono - You can put almost ANY sound blaster in an 8 bits ISA slot, even if it looks to be a 16 bits card; for the 16 Bits models, only set the high dma to something that a bits works with; Only the IDE controller will not work - IDE is in fact an extension of the ISA bus, so it's not that weird to attach a sound card to it; Considering the layout, the GAL chip seems to translate some missing logic - The ESS audiodrive chip installed is highly integrated and incorporates the AdLib part - though you're right, it emulates it with its own synthesis (but in fact, lots of newer ISA sound cards incorporated the OPL2, for example later sound blasters (before Vibra)) While this is a nicely produced video, background fact checks are essential to a good production!
There is a lot of stuff to research when doing a video like this. If there any mistakes or omitted information, it wasn't for a lack of trying. There are some things that a reasonable amount of research will not tell you. - SB Pro stereo is somewhat of an edge case. While I did not know that, I don't see how I would have come across that in the research for this video. If I could only have one card on a laptop/desktop, I would still rather have the SB 16 for the better compatibility with more/newer games. I suspect most people would as well. - Nowhere on the Wikipedia page for the SB 16 does it mention that it is backwards compatible with 8 bit slots or XT class machines. So I had no idea about that. Why hasn't someone made a LPT variant of that then? - If you look up "Sound card on IDE" in google you get nothing but results for IDE connections on sound cards. So looking that up is useless. Underneath the sound card in the drive is a custom MicroSolutions IC. So I didn't know if it was making the IDE cable do unusual things. ISA over IDE isn't something I would have logically leapt to since there aren't many devices that take advantage of it. But that does explain how PCMCIA to IDE adapters work. There was a lot of other stuff I researched. The history of the OPL2LPT adapter and how it works, the optional sound upgrade for drives that didn't include it, what the ESS chip was and what it was compatible with, general information about laptops for DOS games, etc. There are bound to be some things I could miss, there just has to be a reasonable balance of how much time I spend on one video. I'm not trying to be defensive, I just wanted to give my perspective and how it is possible to not know those things and have done research.
HA i totally forgot about this, I also had some ISA card with the last pins in mid air back then. A lot of card order swapping to get them working simultaneously resulted in this solution by accident :) For the research part, you cannot know or find everything, that's why these youtube comments are so valuable.. (sometimes though) Keep up the good work!
Considering that the original Parallel ATA/IDE bus was essentially just ISA run over a ribbon cable it actually makes a lot of sense that they would be able to hack a sound card into running off of it with just a bit of hardware glue logic and probably plenty of magic in the audio drivers (hence the incompatibility with DOS games which expect to be talking to a sound device connected directly to the actual system ISA bus, not one simulated by a parallel port bridge chip).
Actually, the magic might be pretty light (at least for 2-way parallel ports, not so much the 1-way + status ones). It's very possible that the GAL just provides some buffering, with the driver just sending the address in front of the data.
That Thinkpad is an obvious choice ( the only problem is price but i manage to find one for 30$ ) I really cannot imagine playing anything on that Gateway without sound and with that godawful passive matrix display
If you have a look at Patent 5335338, it details how the parallel port chip works and gives sample schematics of how they would implement the chip in the patented embodiment. In short, the schematic shows them replicating the ISA bus via some fixed address pins.
I would definitely NOT recommend a laptop for old school gaming. It's almost impossible to find a laptop with a 640x480 active matrix screen (and seven if you do, a CRT screen is much better), and a decent sound support in DOS. Also, the old laptops are thick, so the keyboard sits so high that it's very uncomfortable. Of course if you don't have room, then it's better than nothing. I gamed with a '93 486SX Canon laptop in the early 2000's, with just PC speaker and a horrible laggy screen, but it was still fun.
The newer PIII laptops also are good for gaming. I have old Vaio F series that is perfect for that. Has a 3D accelerator card (ATi Rage Mobility m1). Also came with an OPL3 FM synthesizer with Sound Blaster Pro emulation. It also had a 4:3 display.
ESFM under Windows usually runs their custom 4-op patches on all channels, because it has the extra power. When you choose OPL3, i bet the Windows patchset is simply reloaded with the default Windows 2-op one. Of course the synthesis is still performed using ESFM algorithm rather than a native OPL3, but it's reasonably close, it's not broken. IDE and ISA are the same bus essentially, only IDE has a limited preselected range of addresses to... well almost nothing, so that's how they run them off the same wire harness.
I appreciate the time effort and money put into your videos thank you for closely documenting all these cool interesting programs and hardware for the future I appreciate your hard work
I don’t have a lot to say about this drive, not being that knowledgeable on the subject, but I did want to say that the production on this video is fantastic.
imagine being the guy back in the day who bought this same product for this exact reason. a grin from ear to ear i bet. hearing the windows startup chime would have started a whole new world of games for the dude. thanks for the video AK, reminding me of when we got our CD Blaster kit installed in our 486 :) on the off chance of someone out there with a similar story, what were the games in that kit!?! i've been scouring the internet for months and the best i came up with was a cd that had ultima 8, space hulk and i think syndicate on it.
two points, you could swap out the 2x drive with a 52x or 72x since its a standard ide, that would speed up loading connecting cd audio inside the backpack is trivial. also i have seen one of those backpacks connected to a hifi amp for cd playback, those early 2x drives were slow for data but cd audio was excellent and they were very well made.
I used to have an IBM ThinkPad 360 PE... with pen... external cd drive, win 95, additional ram card installed, and so much more. All got left behind in a bad situation some many years back... was my very first laptop, and I would even use that with a PCMCIA modem during dial up days to go on to Aol Instant Messenger, as well as to do all typical web browsing back then. Which in that era, was not a very intensive process. Such regret leaving that gem go, and such longing for those days.
I found a very similar device and found it only works with Windows 3.1 but DOS games through 3.1 works just fine including Doom. Wonder if 95 handles it a bit differently.
Here's a fun fact about that "OPL3 emulation": it's not actually emulation at all, ESS has their own clone of the OPL3 integrated as a part of the AudioDrive chips themselves! (if Wikipedia is correct that is, seems to be true from experience though as I have quite a few systems with AudioDrive either integrated as part of the motherboard or as a ISA card and they work perfectly under DOS)
There are two distinct modes of the ESS embedded FM synthesizer though, the 72-operator ESFM mode and 36-operator OPL3 compatible fallback. Default OPL3 driver on Windows has 18-voice polyphony with 2-op patches. DOS games can utilise some 4-op patches on OPL3, at the cost of limited polyphony. ESFM Windows driver runs as standard in 18-voice 4-op mode with 4-op patches authored by ESS, and i have never seen the ability to switch it, but here they apparently implemented a 2-op mode with Windows standard patches.
Thank you for the lead on the slim drive, i got a 1993/1994ish Dolch PAC60 that needs a CD-ROM, i plan to multi-boot via a CF to IDE adapter bracket, and one limitation was no optical drive, now i will have one, 95C with fat32 will now be an option as will OS/2 Warp 4.
The Thinkpad 755 series were 486 units that had built in sound. Those of us who couldn't afford that had the option of a PCMCIA sound card like the Fujitsu/Eigermedia, or the Panasonic KXL-D745 external CD-ROM with built in sound that used a PCMCIA interface as well.
Most laptops were never as 100% PC compatible as desktop hardware. I can remember running into compatibility issues on a few occasions back in the day. But I guess it's better than nothing if someone wants to play something on a classic machine.
This actually makes enough sense, since the IDE bus was not much different than a 16-bit ISA bus to begin with. So even though it was only used to connect drives, you could use it to connect almost anything that was ISA-based. Case in point: PCMCIA-to-laptop-IDE-to-CompactFlash adapters which were almost 100% passive, and PCMCIA is a miniaturized version of ISA.
There is a parallel port device with Sound Blaster/Adlib DOS-compatible 16-bit sound -- the Portable Sound Plus: th-cam.com/video/t7VxWbCgWHk/w-d-xo.html
Well yeah, I'd only expect adlib level compatibility so no digitized sound but at least it would be better than nothing if it were possible, it might not do anything do to the difference in implementation anyways.
Not without further very extensive modification of the driver. There's a bit of logic on the LPT-IDE adapter board to drive address selection and to stick 2 8-bit transmissions into a single 16-bit and vice versa, and you basically have to work around that in the driver. I don't think it's possible really, all you need to do for OPLxLPT is hotpatch the address of the interface in the memory image of the program, which you'll easily figure out for like 80% of software by analysing a few programs, but for such an interface you'd need to essentially transform the writes too.
@@SianaGearz : A bit late, but to the best of my memory the IDE bus is basically a cut-down ISA bus with a few custom lines tacked on. If someone got one of these into the hands of whoever builds the LPT2OPL, they could probably add support to their driver in pretty short order.
@@absalomdraconis IDE and ISA are vaguely similar (which is how this device is possible and low-complexity) but here the hardware adds many levels of indirection. In order to fit the majority of feature set of the underlying soundcard or the disk drive into the very constrained parallel port, the resulting software interface is nothing like ISA/IDE. You can always ask the author, that would be 'pdewacht' on Github. The project containing both implementations of the driver is called 'adlipt', and i took a deeper look at it now. This is an open source project so you're not strictly reliant on original developer. The magic of adlib is that it uses just 2 IO ports, no interrupts, no DMA no advanced features whatsoever, and while reading back the adlib registers is possible to software, it is largely unnecessary. So when the OPL is transplanted over to the parallel port, if you squint hard enough, it looks kinda like the corresponding ISA card, which is not the case with anything mildly more complex. Glancing quickly over the driver, there are two implementations. One is a TSR which piggybacks on the memory manager and actually does full port trapping, and potentially it could pretend to be a real adlib even if the hardware is hidden behind an arbitrarily complex adapter. Unfortunately the mechanism only runs in Virtual 8086 mode, so basically a bunch of 286 games will work, the 386 ones that ship with DOS4GW or similar extender won't. The second implementation, which both dispenses with memory manager and TSR overhead and possible to make work with any game, is just patching the game executable on disk, by having someone reverse engineer the game. Fortunately one patch will usually serve several games, so it's not an insurmountable amount of work, as sound code tends to be reused verbatim a lot. First all the read-dependent code such as detection routine is patched out, this is universal for any possible replacement hardware. Then the output routine is not merely modified, which is contrary to what i anticipated, but replaced outright. Since the replacement is templated, it's actually easy to adapt to somewhat different hardware, but the problem is, the hardware shouldn't be too complex, as the routine needs to fit within the foreseen space of the original sound code in the executable. If one were to do something more complex, finding new space would be necessary, and i don't really have a solid idea on how to accomplish that.
Did not know those Backpacks could support a full sound card, that's super cool! May not be useful for DOS, but hey, sound in Windows is definitely quite the upgrade from just a PC speaker!
I have PCMCIA sound card for my 486. Because PCMCIA doesn't have ISA DMA, it's limited to AdLib sound and some limited DMA-less sound blaster compatibility. In Windows 3.x and 95 it can use Windows Sound System compatibility for full 16 bit audio. In theory you can use emulated sound blaster DMA under Windows 95, but Windows 95 doesn't run well on my 486 and I've never gotten it to work. It was also dificult to get the card working initially with the MS-DOS PCMCIA enabler, but after creating my own (undocumented) enabler configuration file that puts the ports at the right address for AdLib I did get it working.
For sound expansion back in the dark days I used to have an Altec Lansing AMC2000 PCMCIA CD-ROM and audio unit with a Thinkpad 360CE. It was decidedly not portable, but made decent sound and because the PCMCIA interface it worked on DOS and Windows 3.1.
You can definitely hook up anything from about 18-22VDC up to this without causing any issues and polarity doesn't matter. The reason why is that the first thing a device that takes AC natively is converts it to DC with a diode rectifier bridge i.e. a circuit that only lets current flow in one direction, which is what makes AC into DC. If you plug in DC, its simply already only going in one direction and the internal power supply handles it just fine. The reverse is not true - a device expecting DC will either not work, be permanently damaged, or at least blow a fuse if you try to hook AC up to it.
I've got an Altec Lansing PCMCIA CDROM + ESS audiodrive device at home. It was once paired with a Compaq Contura 486 laptop I had many years ago. Works extremely well, has a Joystick port too. Oh and DOS, Win3.1 and Win95 are supported!
On the topic of the 18v A/C input being compatible with 18v DC. You can definitely do that if you know for sure that none of the electronics inside actually need an A/C source. Basically if it's all digital inside, the A/C is going to be rectified to DC right on the other side of the power connector inside. That's done by passing the A/C signal through a bridge rectifier (diodes). So the DC would just pass right through the two diodes that are forward biased and be on it's way to the regulator chips (likely the two TO-220 devices you commented on). The great thing about that is that if you do power it with DC, you can't possibly connect it backwards due to the bridge rectifier. Hope that clears things up. Cheers!
@@Mr1X Many small amps use a single-ended op-amp, the negative reference is just grounded. I'm not saying this is the case here, I was just describing why someone may have told him a dc supply could be used. Just understand not all amplifiers need a negative supply, otherwise your walkman would have a hard time running on batteries :)
I haven't finished the video yet, so I don't know if AkbKukU made specific recommendations on laptops but I HIGHLY recommend Toshiba's Satellite line, specifically I have the Satellite 460. I run MS-DOS 7 on it and with very little effort have every single part of the laptop that is important to me functional: audio, all external connection ports, etc. Not only is the laptop affordable (I got mine around the $60 dollar range on eBay if I remember correctly) but it has high compatibility with DOS games and it has an authentic OPL 3 compatible sound card. The keyboard and mouse nub are not the most impressive, but when hooked to a 4:3 LCD or CRT with external mouse and keyboard it is a DOS dream.
When I was a kid, my dads laptop had a backpack set up. The backpack had it's own carrying case. And he would lug that thing all over. That was 1992 through 1995ish.
Sorry for my late comment 2 years after the release of the video but after your installation of the drivers do you tested the "SET BLASTER=..." option in autoexec.bat? Maybe with that configuration the soundcard of the drive works in DOS? On an old DOS PC with a Soundblaster card you doesn't need drivers. The "SET BLASTER" command in the autoexec.bat is enough, I think....
I wonder if the thicker unit's CD drive could be upgraded to a faster one. It is an IDE device after all. I may look for a parallel port CD drive for some FreeDos P1 systems I have. I like having the option of real machines for DOS hacking. My tower can use a PCI USB 2 card. but my laptop is just USB 1 at best. If anyone is having trouble installing FreeDos on hardware, there is a very good TH-cam video with a solution. Great work Guy! I look forward to more videos on these Digital Dinosaurs.
Hey AkBKukU, Nice vid. I was wondering why not just use one of those docking stations for the older ThinkPads or something with a add in ISA slot or something. Wouldn't that work just as well with a desktop sound card?
@@NaokisRC The Dock I had a carrying handle, it was the one that was made to be portable. It was even made with the idea of having a sound card built into it since it has instructions in the manual about neatly routing an audio cable out the side of the single ISA slot and to the audio-in on the back, and had a CD-ROM bay.
Surely there must be a way to configure DOS games to see this thing. The Backpack control panel did seem to give a couple clues of what values to try. Some of the options were set to Auto but maybe you can set those or see what settings are available to try in DOS. I've heard of patches being released for DOS games to run with weird sound cards. I'd also be curious if the installed dumped some DOS files about--when I recently installed the ESS sound card for my PIII laptop it did that, though the driver isn't fully working right now.
about the "opl emulation": this sounds like an opl that is just driven by midi commands. you can clearly hear it on the bass notes. a real OPL would sound pretty similar to what i just heard when driven by general midi instead of true adlib commands. i noticed this difference on my own retro system recently - when a sound blaster vibra or 16 is used with windows ME there is a WDM driver installed by default that somehow did not work with the "adlib" setting in doom setup but will work with the "general midi" option wich is passing midi commands thru to windows ME's default midi device wich is either ME's built in software wavetable (using roland samples) or whatever your soundcard has to offer - in this case the sound blasters OPL FM synth. however ... once the original soundblaster 16 VXD drivers are installed, dooms "adlib" setting starts working and it sounds noticeably different.
Years ago there used to be software to make the ESS Audiodrive function in DOS 6. The problem is the fact that the ESS Audiodrive is a PNP chip, and therefore requires the PC to be able to configure it to work properly within DOS, which I don't see happening with that functioning through the parallel port. This is a pretty cool piece of retro tech though. Since the CD-ROM drive is a simple IDE drive, you could upgrade the drive in the backpack case to a faster drive, but you will only get so much throughput through that, but you could realistically get a 56x drive, but it will only function at a slower speed.
I can attest to the fact that the optical drive can be replaced. I have 2 of the "desktop style" drives (no sound cards in either), mine were a little bit later revisions and were 4x drives. Both went bad over the years and I had replaced at least one of them with a 24X drive. Throughput is limited to what the parallel port can provide, but it sure spun that disc up nice and fast!
Try this with it: sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/ IIRC this will allow you to run DOS games, from within Windows and it will route the sound to the default Windows sound device. It emulated both Adlib and Sound Blaster for the DOS games. More info here: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=2389
That does sound like a really good solution. I wonder if it will it work with games that reboot back to DOS mode by keeping them in Windows. I'm probably going to do a follow up where I see what can be done with the O/S 2 drivers in a DOS environment. I'll add this to the list of stuff to check out.
did you find the 2.11 software? Its nowhere to be found and a mystery as to what the chip might be. Have you looked into the external Serdaco solutions? You can get the GM card, or OPL2, OPL3 on parallel cards.
I just got one of these while thrifting today. I didn't know about the sound part of it. Any idea where I can get one? I tried eBay but not really sure what to look for. Either way, I think it's so cool. I got it for my Windows 95 Desktop :p
I have a 486 laptop with no sound or CD too. I actually found a backpack external CD ROM but not a sound version. I didn't know these ones existed. I was thinking my only option was the op3lpt device but I've held off due the high price to send to Australia. I end up using my Toshiba Pentium laptop to play games with sound.
I actually own the 24x slim drive with sound. I bought mine on eBay in Jan. 2023 and it works fine in Windows! But alas not in DOS... I feel there was enough demand in Japan for PCMCIA sound cards that work in a DOS environment that nearly a dozen products were offered, but my God, it's really hard to find them these days on Yahoo Auctions or anywhere...
If you find that the AC input is directly getting into a Bridge rectifier package or four diodes, you can surely put DC in, although you might need to compensate for the diode voltage drop which is for bridge rectification around 1.2V or thereabout(0.6V*2)
My ‘Bantam’ drive has ‘LINE OUT’ and ‘HEADPHONE’ but does not have the other 2 ports. But it does not say ‘Bantam.’ However, it is of no use to me; I’m about to upgrade to Windows 95 and it only supports 98, NT4, and 2000. So how much is mine worth? It’s loose but in VERY good condition, and, as I previously stated, I can’t use it. It’s also a DVD rom and I don’t need it.
I had a driver hack to make my pc speaker work like a really bad sound blaster before i got a sound card. One of the big problems i had with sound card/modem or sound/cdrom combos was port routing. Some games would not let me set the proper irq port and i would have to go in with a hex editor to give it the proper values.
Stats for Nerds: content loudness -7.1dB You might want to look into that. Wow, so this is an IDE sound card plugged into LPT bridge (other way around from what you said in the vid), wonder if it would work in the desktop on ordinary IDE controller :o) depends on how they wrote their drivers ... 15:30 answers this, looks like its hardcoded to LPT port, and IDE part (GAL chip) translates addresses. You could probably patch support for FM portion of this into ADLIPT, SB would be difficult due to DMA.
Some 486 laptops also support Sound Blaster emulation like my T4850CT. This also does not work directly in DOS though. But if you launch a DOS prompt in windows 95 and launch DOOM there. IT SOUNDS AWESOME.
I went with a Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CDT for my main DOS laptop. It's probably the best 'compromise' system, in my opinion, having a 75 MHz Pentium, built-in sound card, and a 640x480 active-matrix display.
Doing a Asus K8V-MX Socket 754 win 9X build and 2 nights ago i'm wondering "We are going to run out of CD-ROM Drives with CD-IN connectors before another of these parts for games on CD with sound tracks". Yeah there's moving the disk to the hard drive but it's not the same. Something like a USB-Floppy will probably come out somewhere if it's not already out.
I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro P133 for my DOS-era machine and it does pretty well, it was very very cheap too. The inbuilt sound is precisely why I went for Pentium over a 486. I'm struggling to find a floppy drive for it though, it has a swappable floppy disk/CD-ROM bay and I don't have the floppy drive
To answer your question @ 12:30 in the video. The reason they use an AC adapter with an AC output instead of DC output is so they can generate a dual DC power supply with both a positive and negative voltage rails. The op-amps that drive the audio outputs need a dual rail power supply and if you use an adapter with a DC output. It will only supply power for the positive rail and you will get distorted audio output. Don't worry. Doing this won't cause any damage to the unit.
What about the mediavision audioport? Thats basically a full soundblaster clone on a LPT card. Sure ... still 8bit, but technically so is this solution (i guess it's multiplexed or the 16bit audio limited to redbook cd audio).
Wouldn't VDMSound solve all your DOS sound issues? There is a Windows 95/98 port of it. It emulates a DOS soundcard (AdLib, SB standard, pro, or 16) and uses the Windows audio as output. Since you've got working Windows audio, that should be problem solved.
How is a Toshiba Satellite 330 cds for DOS gaming. Its my oldest laptop I have in my PC collection with a 266 mhz Pentium cpu, I guess the fastest Pentium that Intel made in laptops before moving on to the Pentium IIs, 96 mb ram, 4 gb hard drive, and also has sound built in that seems to work in DOS games like Shamus, Gobman, and I have it running Windows 98se, basically the latest OS with full DOS compatibility, and also has 3.5" floppy and CD-Rom built in, so didn't have to hunt up any external drives.
I didn't know ESS made such a chip. I thought they just made custom dacs for high-end audio devices. My LG v20 has a built-in ESS SABRE 90218 quad dac for the 3.5mm headphone jack.
I would guess that, since the CD-ROM drive is itself IDE, upgrading from double speed to something much faster ought to be easy enough. Little consolation from the sound support disappointment, I know, but it's something.
It must be possible to have a TSR that would forward the memory writes to Sound Blaster locations forward through Window’s sound backend. In fact, there’s something called VDMSound that’s interesting: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDMSound
I was given a Gateway Solo Pro 9300 the other day, but I don't have the floppy drive..... and that seems to be unobtainium as well, unless I buy another laptop just like it WITH one
Just watching this and recognised the Backpack drive. Got the big one but without the sound option. My father used it with his 486 Thinkpad which he gave to me, sadly it's a bit messy due to the battery leaking :(
The 8 Bit Guy has a good video on this: th-cam.com/video/k2v7k-wAm2E/w-d-xo.html . I don't agree that you need to get necessarily the exact same model he got, but it let's you know what some of the key things to look for are. If you're not interested in early DOS games though, you will be much better off with a good Pentium laptop.
There is some odd flickering around 3:50 during the image sequence. I'm not sure what is happening. I rendered the video 3 times and it was there every time. It's the same background used later on so I don't know why it is having trouble there. I decided it wasn't worth trying to figure it out because I think it may just be my GPU sucking.
What video editor did you use?
@@JimLeonard he uses blender on linux
@@vapour_cs658 Actually no, hes using DaVinci Resolve on Linux now
@@LucaRyroMiles ah, ive been out of the loop for a while then... my bad lol
wow UnWaTcHaBle- unsubscribed, unfollowed...how could you think it was ok to let this in the video- that you made in your spare time, with a ridiculous amount of effort and quality... the nerve on this guy man
Well dang, I have one of these drives and didn't know it supported this bizarre sound card solution. Mine just has the unpopulated slot, though it's nice to know what it can be used with.
It is a really strange and interesting way of doing sound. The copyright date in the sound manual is 1995, so it would have had a very brief period of relevance. I bet they didn't sell many of these or the optional upgrades.
It's asking a lot of the parallel port as well. It just occurred to me I should have tried an FMV game to see how well it handled streaming video from the CD and audio back to the card.
Hey Clint! Just wanting to let you know awesome retrospect video about Half-Life there!
make it into an external drive!
Which means, I assume, that they ALL have those audio ports, which presumably just pass out CD-ROM audio if there's no sound card?
uwu
Ironically those OS/2 drivers would let you run DOS games with sound.
That's hilarious. He should do a video on that.
How? Ms-Dos isnt OS/2 compatible, is it?
Omega LUL Yes but not the opposite, msdos running OS/2 drivers and programs, thats the issue here. And i'm pretty sure that this compatibility in OS/2 only goes to a certain extent, even more, knowing microsoft as they are, and considering the history behind OS/2 vs MsDos.
Also probably many of these laptops may not have the OS/2 drivers, and even tho it may run msdos programs, i dont know if it would accept the msdos drivers. But yeah, i dont know if there is much stuff mainly in those 486 laptops that should require a driver for working.
But its really good to know that OS/2 runs msdos programs. It would be a interesting video idea.
I wonder how the games would react to the soundcard in the paralel port, with different interruptions than usual, etc
Franko Uh.. i guess you didnt read that wall of text, wich tbh, wasnt that big anyway.
You probably dont run that in a 486 laptop without a propper isa/pci integrated soundcard. And probably not a random machine but a OS/2 compatible one.
@@eduardoavila646 OS/2 runs like Windows NT, it has no relationship with MS-DOS drivers. However it has ample emulation of standard devices in its Virtual DOS Machine, backed by existing OS/2 devices and drivers. It will also run Windows 3.1 software if the WINOS/2 package (of course a paid option, because it had a Windows license) is installed.
Relationship between IBM and Microsoft is neither here nor there. Microsoft didn't make PCs and components. It's usually not that hard to get OS/2 Warp 3 running and feature-complete on era-appropriate hardware, provided you had generous for the time disk space and RAM. There was no such thing as dedicated machines made for OS/2, it just generally ran on most systems, with some driver hunting effort.
It makes perfect sense that they connected the 16bit sound card to the ATA bus, since the AT in ATA is for the AT bus. Nothing more than a couple line drivers and the HDD connected directly to the AT 16bit bus. So the real magic is the parallel to AT bus driver chip!
You are perfectly right.
Even more, there is no such thing as an "IDE controller" on the motherboard. A motherboard with IDE/ATA connectors contains just a bridge/host-adapter that does some basic address decoding for the IDE/ATA connectors. The controller resides on the IDE drive itself and is just an ISA device, just like an "MFM controller + MFM drive" combo.
Ahh, the good old days of computing, where minimum requirements just meant somewhat compatible.
Come to think of it...things haven't changed much.
5:38 I mean, it could be worse. Once upon a time, the definition of "portable" was "fits under an airplane seat"...
Oh, and you wouldn't actually be stuck with the 2X CD-ROM, as it appears to be an ordinary IDE drive and as such a more modern one should work, too.
The ES1688’s internal FM synthesis (ESFM) is ESS’s OPL3 clone using special patches that combine channels for more complicated instruments at the potential cost of polyphony. Switching it to OPL3 mode would use OPL3-like patches instead, no emulation required. Not a perfect match, but directly compatible.
I had an ES1868 in my first PC and vastly preferred how it sounded to traditional OPL for music, not so much for sound effects. That’s where the SBPro2/SB16 compatibility came in.
I found the holy grail Thinkpad, the 755CDV Pentium 75 for a really good price on eBay a while back...CD-ROM, TFT display, Stereo speakers built in, and a P75...this thing rocks for Vintage gaming, and most 486 DOS software runs just fine!!
You might want to look into getting a PCMCIA sound card. There were ones compatible with DOS games (ironically, quite a few of them won't work in Windows though).
As for using a DC power supply for the drive - there is nothing to worry about. The AC power almost certainly goes through a full bridge rectifier and later is turned into DC with the help of capacitors. So putting DC wouldn't damage anything.
~Unibrow ON~
*FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER*
Tho ye, precisely. You really just need the voltage to be a tiny bit above the AC one (you know, RMS AC voltage vs rectified one being almost peak voltage) and you basically just threw the job done at the parts inside the device.
I would bet even some new devices (like PC power supplies, TVs, monitors and such) would work on DC as well, with weird voltages at that even.
*There is one scenario where it wouldn't work tho: if you take the AC and use it to make a positive to ground, and negative to ground DC voltages. If it requires symmetrical voltage then it wouldn't work, which I really doubt is the case here.
Well it does put an extra strain on the diodes, as two diodes are no longer in use and two must pass all the current. But usually you can just glance at that specs or feel the temperature and ascertain yourself that there's nothing to worry about.
I've been looking for one here in Australia - last one went on eBay for over $200!!
Hey do you know a model of these PCMCIA soundcards wich arent hard to find?
Nice video, but you may want to check multiple facts:
- The Sound Blaster 16 was NOT always the SB to get, especially when you want to play Stereo SB Pro games - the SB 16 is not compatible and plays this mono
- You can put almost ANY sound blaster in an 8 bits ISA slot, even if it looks to be a 16 bits card; for the 16 Bits models, only set the high dma to something that a bits works with; Only the IDE controller will not work
- IDE is in fact an extension of the ISA bus, so it's not that weird to attach a sound card to it; Considering the layout, the GAL chip seems to translate some missing logic
- The ESS audiodrive chip installed is highly integrated and incorporates the AdLib part - though you're right, it emulates it with its own synthesis (but in fact, lots of newer ISA sound cards incorporated the OPL2, for example later sound blasters (before Vibra))
While this is a nicely produced video, background fact checks are essential to a good production!
There is a lot of stuff to research when doing a video like this. If there any mistakes or omitted information, it wasn't for a lack of trying. There are some things that a reasonable amount of research will not tell you.
- SB Pro stereo is somewhat of an edge case. While I did not know that, I don't see how I would have come across that in the research for this video. If I could only have one card on a laptop/desktop, I would still rather have the SB 16 for the better compatibility with more/newer games. I suspect most people would as well.
- Nowhere on the Wikipedia page for the SB 16 does it mention that it is backwards compatible with 8 bit slots or XT class machines. So I had no idea about that. Why hasn't someone made a LPT variant of that then?
- If you look up "Sound card on IDE" in google you get nothing but results for IDE connections on sound cards. So looking that up is useless. Underneath the sound card in the drive is a custom MicroSolutions IC. So I didn't know if it was making the IDE cable do unusual things. ISA over IDE isn't something I would have logically leapt to since there aren't many devices that take advantage of it. But that does explain how PCMCIA to IDE adapters work.
There was a lot of other stuff I researched. The history of the OPL2LPT adapter and how it works, the optional sound upgrade for drives that didn't include it, what the ESS chip was and what it was compatible with, general information about laptops for DOS games, etc. There are bound to be some things I could miss, there just has to be a reasonable balance of how much time I spend on one video. I'm not trying to be defensive, I just wanted to give my perspective and how it is possible to not know those things and have done research.
HA i totally forgot about this, I also had some ISA card with the last pins in mid air back then. A lot of card order swapping to get them working simultaneously resulted in this solution by accident :)
For the research part, you cannot know or find everything, that's why these youtube comments are so valuable.. (sometimes though)
Keep up the good work!
Considering that the original Parallel ATA/IDE bus was essentially just ISA run over a ribbon cable it actually makes a lot of sense that they would be able to hack a sound card into running off of it with just a bit of hardware glue logic and probably plenty of magic in the audio drivers (hence the incompatibility with DOS games which expect to be talking to a sound device connected directly to the actual system ISA bus, not one simulated by a parallel port bridge chip).
Actually, the magic might be pretty light (at least for 2-way parallel ports, not so much the 1-way + status ones). It's very possible that the GAL just provides some buffering, with the driver just sending the address in front of the data.
That Thinkpad is an obvious choice ( the only problem is price but i manage to find one for 30$ ) I really cannot imagine playing anything on that Gateway without sound and with that godawful passive matrix display
If you have a look at Patent 5335338, it details how the parallel port chip works and gives sample schematics of how they would implement the chip in the patented embodiment. In short, the schematic shows them replicating the ISA bus via some fixed address pins.
I would definitely NOT recommend a laptop for old school gaming. It's almost impossible to find a laptop with a 640x480 active matrix screen (and seven if you do, a CRT screen is much better), and a decent sound support in DOS. Also, the old laptops are thick, so the keyboard sits so high that it's very uncomfortable. Of course if you don't have room, then it's better than nothing. I gamed with a '93 486SX Canon laptop in the early 2000's, with just PC speaker and a horrible laggy screen, but it was still fun.
The newer PIII laptops also are good for gaming. I have old Vaio F series that is perfect for that. Has a 3D accelerator card (ATi Rage Mobility m1). Also came with an OPL3 FM synthesizer with Sound Blaster Pro emulation. It also had a 4:3 display.
Just attach a CRT and a PS/2 keyboard (and mouse). Still much smaller than a regular unit, and everything is guaranteed to work together.
ESFM under Windows usually runs their custom 4-op patches on all channels, because it has the extra power. When you choose OPL3, i bet the Windows patchset is simply reloaded with the default Windows 2-op one. Of course the synthesis is still performed using ESFM algorithm rather than a native OPL3, but it's reasonably close, it's not broken.
IDE and ISA are the same bus essentially, only IDE has a limited preselected range of addresses to... well almost nothing, so that's how they run them off the same wire harness.
I appreciate the time effort and money put into your videos thank you for closely documenting all these cool interesting programs and hardware for the future I appreciate your hard work
I don’t have a lot to say about this drive, not being that knowledgeable on the subject, but I did want to say that the production on this video is fantastic.
Thank you! I'm always trying to make my videos better!
dat slow focus melts my brain
imagine being the guy back in the day who bought this same product for this exact reason. a grin from ear to ear i bet. hearing the windows startup chime would have started a whole new world of games for the dude. thanks for the video AK, reminding me of when we got our CD Blaster kit installed in our 486 :)
on the off chance of someone out there with a similar story, what were the games in that kit!?! i've been scouring the internet for months and the best i came up with was a cd that had ultima 8, space hulk and i think syndicate on it.
two points, you could swap out the 2x drive with a 52x or 72x since its a standard ide, that would speed up loading connecting cd audio inside the backpack is trivial.
also i have seen one of those backpacks connected to a hifi amp for cd playback, those early 2x drives were slow for data but cd audio was excellent and they were very well made.
I used to have an IBM ThinkPad 360 PE... with pen... external cd drive, win 95, additional ram card installed, and so much more. All got left behind in a bad situation some many years back... was my very first laptop, and I would even use that with a PCMCIA modem during dial up days to go on to Aol Instant Messenger, as well as to do all typical web browsing back then. Which in that era, was not a very intensive process. Such regret leaving that gem go, and such longing for those days.
I found a very similar device and found it only works with Windows 3.1 but DOS games through 3.1 works just fine including Doom. Wonder if 95 handles it a bit differently.
Here's a fun fact about that "OPL3 emulation": it's not actually emulation at all, ESS has their own clone of the OPL3 integrated as a part of the AudioDrive chips themselves! (if Wikipedia is correct that is, seems to be true from experience though as I have quite a few systems with AudioDrive either integrated as part of the motherboard or as a ISA card and they work perfectly under DOS)
There are two distinct modes of the ESS embedded FM synthesizer though, the 72-operator ESFM mode and 36-operator OPL3 compatible fallback. Default OPL3 driver on Windows has 18-voice polyphony with 2-op patches. DOS games can utilise some 4-op patches on OPL3, at the cost of limited polyphony. ESFM Windows driver runs as standard in 18-voice 4-op mode with 4-op patches authored by ESS, and i have never seen the ability to switch it, but here they apparently implemented a 2-op mode with Windows standard patches.
Thank you for the lead on the slim drive, i got a 1993/1994ish Dolch PAC60 that needs a CD-ROM, i plan to multi-boot via a CF to IDE adapter bracket, and one limitation was no optical drive, now i will have one, 95C with fat32 will now be an option as will OS/2 Warp 4.
The Thinkpad 755 series were 486 units that had built in sound. Those of us who couldn't afford that had the option of a PCMCIA sound card like the Fujitsu/Eigermedia, or the Panasonic KXL-D745 external CD-ROM with built in sound that used a PCMCIA interface as well.
Most laptops were never as 100% PC compatible as desktop hardware. I can remember running into compatibility issues on a few occasions back in the day. But I guess it's better than nothing if someone wants to play something on a classic machine.
This actually makes enough sense, since the IDE bus was not much different than a 16-bit ISA bus to begin with. So even though it was only used to connect drives, you could use it to connect almost anything that was ISA-based.
Case in point: PCMCIA-to-laptop-IDE-to-CompactFlash adapters which were almost 100% passive, and PCMCIA is a miniaturized version of ISA.
15:10 Oh boy, that is stereo sound!!
Yes!! Love that video capture played in the laptop screen like that.
There is a parallel port device with Sound Blaster/Adlib DOS-compatible 16-bit sound -- the Portable Sound Plus: th-cam.com/video/t7VxWbCgWHk/w-d-xo.html
Since the es1688 can do OPL3 emulation is it possible that the tools/drivers for the OPL2LPT/OP3LPT might work with the backpack?
That's what I thought as well. However, DMA PCM playback will probably not work. Hence digitized speech et al will be problematic.
Well yeah, I'd only expect adlib level compatibility so no digitized sound but at least it would be better than nothing if it were possible, it might not do anything do to the difference in implementation anyways.
Not without further very extensive modification of the driver. There's a bit of logic on the LPT-IDE adapter board to drive address selection and to stick 2 8-bit transmissions into a single 16-bit and vice versa, and you basically have to work around that in the driver. I don't think it's possible really, all you need to do for OPLxLPT is hotpatch the address of the interface in the memory image of the program, which you'll easily figure out for like 80% of software by analysing a few programs, but for such an interface you'd need to essentially transform the writes too.
@@SianaGearz : A bit late, but to the best of my memory the IDE bus is basically a cut-down ISA bus with a few custom lines tacked on. If someone got one of these into the hands of whoever builds the LPT2OPL, they could probably add support to their driver in pretty short order.
@@absalomdraconis IDE and ISA are vaguely similar (which is how this device is possible and low-complexity) but here the hardware adds many levels of indirection. In order to fit the majority of feature set of the underlying soundcard or the disk drive into the very constrained parallel port, the resulting software interface is nothing like ISA/IDE. You can always ask the author, that would be 'pdewacht' on Github. The project containing both implementations of the driver is called 'adlipt', and i took a deeper look at it now. This is an open source project so you're not strictly reliant on original developer.
The magic of adlib is that it uses just 2 IO ports, no interrupts, no DMA no advanced features whatsoever, and while reading back the adlib registers is possible to software, it is largely unnecessary. So when the OPL is transplanted over to the parallel port, if you squint hard enough, it looks kinda like the corresponding ISA card, which is not the case with anything mildly more complex.
Glancing quickly over the driver, there are two implementations. One is a TSR which piggybacks on the memory manager and actually does full port trapping, and potentially it could pretend to be a real adlib even if the hardware is hidden behind an arbitrarily complex adapter. Unfortunately the mechanism only runs in Virtual 8086 mode, so basically a bunch of 286 games will work, the 386 ones that ship with DOS4GW or similar extender won't.
The second implementation, which both dispenses with memory manager and TSR overhead and possible to make work with any game, is just patching the game executable on disk, by having someone reverse engineer the game. Fortunately one patch will usually serve several games, so it's not an insurmountable amount of work, as sound code tends to be reused verbatim a lot. First all the read-dependent code such as detection routine is patched out, this is universal for any possible replacement hardware. Then the output routine is not merely modified, which is contrary to what i anticipated, but replaced outright. Since the replacement is templated, it's actually easy to adapt to somewhat different hardware, but the problem is, the hardware shouldn't be too complex, as the routine needs to fit within the foreseen space of the original sound code in the executable. If one were to do something more complex, finding new space would be necessary, and i don't really have a solid idea on how to accomplish that.
druaga voice + proper video with a plan = love
Did not know those Backpacks could support a full sound card, that's super cool!
May not be useful for DOS, but hey, sound in Windows is definitely quite the upgrade from just a PC speaker!
I have PCMCIA sound card for my 486. Because PCMCIA doesn't have ISA DMA, it's limited to AdLib sound and some limited DMA-less sound blaster compatibility. In Windows 3.x and 95 it can use Windows Sound System compatibility for full 16 bit audio. In theory you can use emulated sound blaster DMA under Windows 95, but Windows 95 doesn't run well on my 486 and I've never gotten it to work. It was also dificult to get the card working initially with the MS-DOS PCMCIA enabler, but after creating my own (undocumented) enabler configuration file that puts the ports at the right address for AdLib I did get it working.
Next video for AkBKukU to make:
"Make my own laptop from scratch with an onboard SB16"
Microchip offer a LPGA chip that provides a lot of the standard peripherals, you might be able to do it with less than 10 modern parts...
For sound expansion back in the dark days I used to have an Altec Lansing AMC2000 PCMCIA CD-ROM and audio unit with a Thinkpad 360CE. It was decidedly not portable, but made decent sound and because the PCMCIA interface it worked on DOS and Windows 3.1.
You can definitely hook up anything from about 18-22VDC up to this without causing any issues and polarity doesn't matter. The reason why is that the first thing a device that takes AC natively is converts it to DC with a diode rectifier bridge i.e. a circuit that only lets current flow in one direction, which is what makes AC into DC. If you plug in DC, its simply already only going in one direction and the internal power supply handles it just fine.
The reverse is not true - a device expecting DC will either not work, be permanently damaged, or at least blow a fuse if you try to hook AC up to it.
I've got an Altec Lansing PCMCIA CDROM + ESS audiodrive device at home. It was once paired with a Compaq Contura 486 laptop I had many years ago. Works extremely well, has a Joystick port too. Oh and DOS, Win3.1 and Win95 are supported!
On the topic of the 18v A/C input being compatible with 18v DC. You can definitely do that if you know for sure that none of the electronics inside actually need an A/C source. Basically if it's all digital inside, the A/C is going to be rectified to DC right on the other side of the power connector inside. That's done by passing the A/C signal through a bridge rectifier (diodes). So the DC would just pass right through the two diodes that are forward biased and be on it's way to the regulator chips (likely the two TO-220 devices you commented on). The great thing about that is that if you do power it with DC, you can't possibly connect it backwards due to the bridge rectifier. Hope that clears things up. Cheers!
Out of AC you can make + 12 and - 12 V - so operational amplifiers can use a symmetric input.
@@Mr1X that's why I said "If it's all digital inside".
@@BEdmonson85 but just thing about the power amp - this is analogue
@@Mr1X Many small amps use a single-ended op-amp, the negative reference is just grounded. I'm not saying this is the case here, I was just describing why someone may have told him a dc supply could be used. Just understand not all amplifiers need a negative supply, otherwise your walkman would have a hard time running on batteries :)
I haven't finished the video yet, so I don't know if AkbKukU made specific recommendations on laptops but I HIGHLY recommend Toshiba's Satellite line, specifically I have the Satellite 460. I run MS-DOS 7 on it and with very little effort have every single part of the laptop that is important to me functional: audio, all external connection ports, etc. Not only is the laptop affordable (I got mine around the $60 dollar range on eBay if I remember correctly) but it has high compatibility with DOS games and it has an authentic OPL 3 compatible sound card. The keyboard and mouse nub are not the most impressive, but when hooked to a 4:3 LCD or CRT with external mouse and keyboard it is a DOS dream.
When I was a kid, my dads laptop had a backpack set up. The backpack had it's own carrying case. And he would lug that thing all over. That was 1992 through 1995ish.
Oh wow! The 8bitguy needs this for his 486 laptop!
Sorry for my late comment 2 years after the release of the video but after your installation of the drivers do you tested the "SET BLASTER=..." option in autoexec.bat?
Maybe with that configuration the soundcard of the drive works in DOS?
On an old DOS PC with a Soundblaster card you doesn't need drivers. The "SET BLASTER" command in the autoexec.bat is enough, I think....
Well, Your Windows 98 PC is still the most famous thing in your channel :))
Love these types of videos
I wonder if the thicker unit's CD drive could be upgraded to a faster one. It is an IDE device after all. I may look for a parallel port CD drive for some FreeDos P1 systems I have. I like having the option of real machines for DOS hacking. My tower can use a PCI USB 2 card. but my laptop is just USB 1 at best. If anyone is having trouble installing FreeDos on hardware, there is a very good TH-cam video with a solution. Great work Guy! I look forward to more videos on these Digital Dinosaurs.
Hey AkBKukU, Nice vid. I was wondering why not just use one of those docking stations for the older ThinkPads or something with a add in ISA slot or something. Wouldn't that work just as well with a desktop sound card?
Then it's not nearly as portable
@@NaokisRC The Dock I had a carrying handle, it was the one that was made to be portable. It was even made with the idea of having a sound card built into it since it has instructions in the manual about neatly routing an audio cable out the side of the single ISA slot and to the audio-in on the back, and had a CD-ROM bay.
If only it worked with DOS. It would be amazing, especially with the OPL3 and MIDI support.
Surely there must be a way to configure DOS games to see this thing. The Backpack control panel did seem to give a couple clues of what values to try. Some of the options were set to Auto but maybe you can set those or see what settings are available to try in DOS. I've heard of patches being released for DOS games to run with weird sound cards. I'd also be curious if the installed dumped some DOS files about--when I recently installed the ESS sound card for my PIII laptop it did that, though the driver isn't fully working right now.
8:09 Manly tears were shed.
Love your content my dude :D
One of the slim drives with the sound option was up on Ebay and I managed to snag it.
about the "opl emulation": this sounds like an opl that is just driven by midi commands. you can clearly hear it on the bass notes. a real OPL would sound pretty similar to what i just heard when driven by general midi instead of true adlib commands.
i noticed this difference on my own retro system recently - when a sound blaster vibra or 16 is used with windows ME there is a WDM driver installed by default that somehow did not work with the "adlib" setting in doom setup but will work with the "general midi" option wich is passing midi commands thru to windows ME's default midi device wich is either ME's built in software wavetable (using roland samples) or whatever your soundcard has to offer - in this case the sound blasters OPL FM synth.
however ... once the original soundblaster 16 VXD drivers are installed, dooms "adlib" setting starts working and it sounds noticeably different.
thinkpad 755CD is a 486 laptop with full sound, and i think some of the 760s had 486s
Years ago there used to be software to make the ESS Audiodrive function in DOS 6. The problem is the fact that the ESS Audiodrive is a PNP chip, and therefore requires the PC to be able to configure it to work properly within DOS, which I don't see happening with that functioning through the parallel port. This is a pretty cool piece of retro tech though. Since the CD-ROM drive is a simple IDE drive, you could upgrade the drive in the backpack case to a faster drive, but you will only get so much throughput through that, but you could realistically get a 56x drive, but it will only function at a slower speed.
I can attest to the fact that the optical drive can be replaced. I have 2 of the "desktop style" drives (no sound cards in either), mine were a little bit later revisions and were 4x drives. Both went bad over the years and I had replaced at least one of them with a 24X drive. Throughput is limited to what the parallel port can provide, but it sure spun that disc up nice and fast!
How does the New updated version of the pararel port sound card the OPLT3 sound?
Try this with it: sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/
IIRC this will allow you to run DOS games, from within Windows and it will route the sound to the default Windows sound device. It emulated both Adlib and Sound Blaster for the DOS games.
More info here: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=2389
That does sound like a really good solution. I wonder if it will it work with games that reboot back to DOS mode by keeping them in Windows.
I'm probably going to do a follow up where I see what can be done with the O/S 2 drivers in a DOS environment. I'll add this to the list of stuff to check out.
did you find the 2.11 software? Its nowhere to be found and a mystery as to what the chip might be. Have you looked into the external Serdaco solutions? You can get the GM card, or OPL2, OPL3 on parallel cards.
I just got one of these while thrifting today. I didn't know about the sound part of it. Any idea where I can get one? I tried eBay but not really sure what to look for. Either way, I think it's so cool. I got it for my Windows 95 Desktop :p
I have a 486 laptop with no sound or CD too. I actually found a backpack external CD ROM but not a sound version. I didn't know these ones existed. I was thinking my only option was the op3lpt device but I've held off due the high price to send to Australia. I end up using my Toshiba Pentium laptop to play games with sound.
I actually have the 164700 model with this card inside. If you have the W95 sound driver, could you please upload it somewhere? Thanks!
Also, OPL3 is there because ESS' chips had OPL emulation on hardware, it was kinda ass but it was for compatibility with SB audio
I actually own the 24x slim drive with sound. I bought mine on eBay in Jan. 2023 and it works fine in Windows! But alas not in DOS...
I feel there was enough demand in Japan for PCMCIA sound cards that work in a DOS environment that nearly a dozen products were offered, but my God, it's really hard to find them these days on Yahoo Auctions or anywhere...
If you find that the AC input is directly getting into a Bridge rectifier package or four diodes, you can surely put DC in, although you might need to compensate for the diode voltage drop which is for bridge rectification around 1.2V or thereabout(0.6V*2)
18vac is (no load) rectified and yields 24 to 25vdc (AC voltage times sqrt of 2), then you have to subtract the 1.2v
My ‘Bantam’ drive has ‘LINE OUT’ and ‘HEADPHONE’ but does not have the other 2 ports. But it does not say ‘Bantam.’ However, it is of no use to me; I’m about to upgrade to Windows 95 and it only supports 98, NT4, and 2000. So how much is mine worth? It’s loose but in VERY good condition, and, as I previously stated, I can’t use it. It’s also a DVD rom and I don’t need it.
It's the ESS AudioDrive. Those things were more common than the real thing.
I'd love to see that sound board connected internally, to a "normal" PATA controller, to see if it works :P
I had a driver hack to make my pc speaker work like a really bad sound blaster before i got a sound card. One of the big problems i had with sound card/modem or sound/cdrom combos was port routing. Some games would not let me set the proper irq port and i would have to go in with a hex editor to give it the proper values.
I remember my first Creative Sound Card! :)
that moment you just want to see Windows XP on any damn old laptop. GAH I WANT TO SEE WINXP ON THE GATEWAY LIBERTY.
I had one of these soundcards for my laptop. Cdrom was really slow.
Very interesting video :) What a strange sound,,,thing.
I wonder what would happen if you took the soundcard out and plugged it straight into the IDE port on a desktop pc.
Hey akbkuku, do you have a site for manuals and drivers for old os's like win 3.11? I've been in need of some drivers and have been struggling to find
Stats for Nerds: content loudness -7.1dB
You might want to look into that.
Wow, so this is an IDE sound card plugged into LPT bridge (other way around from what you said in the vid), wonder if it would work in the desktop on ordinary IDE controller :o) depends on how they wrote their drivers ... 15:30 answers this, looks like its hardcoded to LPT port, and IDE part (GAL chip) translates addresses.
You could probably patch support for FM portion of this into ADLIPT, SB would be difficult due to DMA.
OMG I want...no I NEED this for my retro laptops.
Some 486 laptops also support Sound Blaster emulation like my T4850CT. This also does not work directly in DOS though. But if you launch a DOS prompt in windows 95 and launch DOOM there. IT SOUNDS AWESOME.
I went with a Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CDT for my main DOS laptop. It's probably the best 'compromise' system, in my opinion, having a 75 MHz Pentium, built-in sound card, and a 640x480 active-matrix display.
Doing a
Asus K8V-MX Socket 754 win 9X build and 2 nights ago i'm wondering "We are going to run out of CD-ROM Drives with CD-IN connectors before another of these parts for games on CD with sound tracks". Yeah there's moving the disk to the hard drive but it's not the same.
Something like a USB-Floppy will probably come out somewhere if it's not already out.
the ESS chip may have an FM synth chip in it for opl3, but usually its external from what i remember.
I think you can now get a sound blaster version that hooks directly into the parellel
I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro P133 for my DOS-era machine and it does pretty well, it was very very cheap too. The inbuilt sound is precisely why I went for Pentium over a 486. I'm struggling to find a floppy drive for it though, it has a swappable floppy disk/CD-ROM bay and I don't have the floppy drive
To answer your question @ 12:30 in the video. The reason they use an AC adapter with an AC output instead of DC output is so they can generate a dual DC power supply with both a positive and negative voltage rails. The op-amps that drive the audio outputs need a dual rail power supply and if you use an adapter with a DC output. It will only supply power for the positive rail and you will get distorted audio output. Don't worry. Doing this won't cause any damage to the unit.
What about the mediavision audioport? Thats basically a full soundblaster clone on a LPT card. Sure ... still 8bit, but technically so is this solution (i guess it's multiplexed or the 16bit audio limited to redbook cd audio).
yeah the high prices for old tech people have banged their heads what do they want the same price for items what they payed for it
Wouldn't VDMSound solve all your DOS sound issues? There is a Windows 95/98 port of it. It emulates a DOS soundcard (AdLib, SB standard, pro, or 16) and uses the Windows audio as output. Since you've got working Windows audio, that should be problem solved.
How is a Toshiba Satellite 330 cds for DOS gaming. Its my oldest laptop I have in my PC collection with a 266 mhz Pentium cpu, I guess the fastest Pentium that Intel made in laptops before moving on to the Pentium IIs, 96 mb ram, 4 gb hard drive, and also has sound built in that seems to work in DOS games like Shamus, Gobman, and I have it running Windows 98se, basically the latest OS with full DOS compatibility, and also has 3.5" floppy and CD-Rom built in, so didn't have to hunt up any external drives.
I didn't know ESS made such a chip. I thought they just made custom dacs for high-end audio devices.
My LG v20 has a built-in ESS SABRE 90218 quad dac for the 3.5mm headphone jack.
Was the Thinkpad that you showed running Turok(?) a T40 series?
If the soundcard portion just hooks up to an internal IDE interface in the drive, can you hook it up to an IDE interface on a motherboard?
Hey, what would be the absolute best possible configuration to run Mechwarrior 2 and 3, and other games in that era?
I would guess that, since the CD-ROM drive is itself IDE, upgrading from double speed to something much faster ought to be easy enough. Little consolation from the sound support disappointment, I know, but it's something.
It must be possible to have a TSR that would forward the memory writes to Sound Blaster locations forward through Window’s sound backend. In fact, there’s something called VDMSound that’s interesting:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDMSound
I was given a Gateway Solo Pro 9300 the other day, but I don't have the floppy drive..... and that seems to be unobtainium as well, unless I buy another laptop just like it WITH one
its not doing OPL emulation that ESS chip has an OPL clone built in... many ESS chips do...
the thinkpads seem to be very compatible with DOS. I've got a 600X that will run dos and 3.1 no problem, full driver support, on a P3.
It’s OPL2LPT, not OPL2 to LPT or OPL to LPT. OPL2 is not a port, but a sound chip. LPT refers to the Local Print Terminal.
That ES1688 is actually OPL3 compatible, unlike older ES synthesizers. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaha_YMF262#ESS_ESFM.
Just watching this and recognised the Backpack drive. Got the big one but without the sound option. My father used it with his 486 Thinkpad which he gave to me, sadly it's a bit messy due to the battery leaking :(
Okay, so if i'm poor and dumb, what's a good 486 laptop to get? I don't know what spects to buy man all these old shits
The 8 Bit Guy has a good video on this: th-cam.com/video/k2v7k-wAm2E/w-d-xo.html . I don't agree that you need to get necessarily the exact same model he got, but it let's you know what some of the key things to look for are. If you're not interested in early DOS games though, you will be much better off with a good Pentium laptop.