A Sound Card Before Its Time

Yes, I built a parallel port resistor ladder DAC.

It wasn't used with the PC Speaker driver though - it was the same as a Covox Speech Thing (mentioned in the original article here too).

I adapted 12-bit ADC and DAC to a PC parallel port of an 8088 PC running MS-DOS for my thesis project, and programmed it in Turbo Pascal. Already by that point MS-DOS was obsolete, but I decided that finishing grad school (in 1993) was more important than learning a new platform. Lack of the ability to run multiple processes in parallel was solved by running multiple PC's.

According to the list, AdLib is the only one that’s no longer manufactured.

At some point in the 90s a re-make of Zork (with graphics and sound) came out for PC (I think this was DOS era). However, most PCs didn't have sound cards, and it would be a hard sell to require customers to buy one (I think they were upwards of $100 back then?) on top of the cost of the game, so there was an option to purchase a parallel port sound adapter (basically a DAC) for about $20 (these are 90s prices) from the game company. We got one, but never could get it working, neither could some relatives.

My friend's dad built one for him, for DOS/windows though. Must have been around -89 when we were 12.

I think Scream Tracker had the schematic bundled with it as an ASCII drawing. We were taught how to solder in primary school, but I remember the schematics being way too advanced for us. Looking at it now it's just a simple resistor ladder tree

I think it was roughly the same as Covox, someone had written a sound blaster emulator for it, and it worked pretty well on games, scream tracker/fast tracker and demoscene demos - for the price of a parallel port connector and a few resistors, pretty cool.

Not a DAC, but plugging a "high speed" ADC (first it was an ADC0804, 1kHz, then after that some other faster models) was a good experiment

The trick was enabling the 3state inputs in the parallel port, which was only available on EPP ports I think

I had a similar device branded as a "Disney Sound Source"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing

Never did that but i know what it's like to shell out for a sound card. I had painted myself into a corner with an actual PS/2 with work discounts for OS/2 dev. I could dual boot to DOS but games suck without sound. After years of looking finally found a microchannel soundblaster compatible card by Piper Research (or something like that). Paid whatever was asked. Worked as advertized. Money did by happiness in this case.

Could that do the voice recognition functions? The Apple-CAT II sounds like a conventional modem.

I think the unique thing about this IBM sound cards is that it had a programmable DSP which made it much more flexible.

Around 1975/76 Byte magazine had a couple of very good articles about building a speech synthesizer for S-100 bus computers.

Since it was still the very early days of personal computing, it was very ELI5, so still very useful.

It's amazing how little data is needed to generate useable speech. If I ever get some free time, I want to see if I can use their schematic to make it work on RS-232.

Superior Software’s SPEECH! for the BBC Micro: software speech synthesis on a machine with relatively anaemic sound hardware. It was so cool back in the 1980s :-)

http://www.triumphoverchallenges.com/working-at-superior-sof...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1hC7Vjl_EWY

Someone patched Wolf3d to work with the Ultrasound. It was amazing...

The SoundBlaster 2.0 was in the $200 ballpark when it came out, not $20.

> But things were going so fast that maybe one/two years later the Soundblaster 2 came on the market.

I was profoundly disappointed to have to deal with this sort of nonsense when we "upgraded" from our Amiga 500.

The GUS Max came out in 1994, the SoundBlaster 2.0 came out in 1991 and was a significantly more limited card than the GUS (no wave table synthesis, no 16-bit audio or stereo)

In 1994 the state-of-the-art SoundBlaster would have been the AWE32 and it was $399. You must be misremembering :)

Sound cards did not drop to anywhere near $20 until the very late 90's or early 00's and those $20 cards were bottom barrel stuff that would have been less advanced in many ways than the GUS Max even then.

Yeah! I still have my Gravis Ultrasound in a box somewhere.. The red PCB was so cool (16-year-old me thought) and I also remember having to modify my case to make it fit.

That card was so good for demoscene stuff..

I was also proud that it was Canadian-made (it sat alongside my Matrox video card)

you need a proxy, blog author manually cuts out ISPs after encountering spam/heavy traffic

So you're directly installing DOS on the device and not using emulation?

There were lots of speech synthesizer cards for 8 bit machines. What they had in common was the SP0256 chip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Instrument_SP0256) which could synthesize speech by chaining together a series of phonemes. Or you could use the phonemes to create "pew-pew"-type special effects for games as I did ...

I didn't have the 99/4A, but my neighbor did, and had the speech synthesizer. I remember Parsec quite well.

I had a C-64, and had both the Covox Voice Master (...ter ...ter ...ter), and Commodore's Magic Voice.

Interesting that the Commodore box had to go into the cartridge port and the monitor port just for voice output, but the Covox could do both in and out from the joystick port.

A big maybe. While 20MHz TMS32010 DSP in 1985 was around 386DX 33MHz horsepower wise, if you ignore things like single cycle 16x16 multiply(10-20 faster than 386), it might still be too slow. For comparison ~3x faster DSP56001 in Atari Falcon needs 16MHz CPU assist to decode MP3.

It was heavily pushed as part of Bush's writing to read program.

It can’t have been made for that, since the IBM PS/2 series of computers was not released until 1987.