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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

They also have a reproduction AdLib card https://github.com/schlae/adlib http://tubetime.us/index.php/2016/07/22/a-reproduction-adlib...

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Speaking of AdLib, a couple of years ago an AdLib Gold 1000 ISA card sold for US $3,400 on eBay. The starting ask price was 99 cents and the first bid was US $50.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Ad-Lib-Gold-1000-ISA-Sound-Card-/27... via https://twitter.com/lazygamereviews/status/70847562292704460...

Also, speaking of sound cards, here is another thread from a few months ago about old sound cards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17779741

In that thread a user named rahimnathwani said:

> Did any of you, back in the 90s, build a parallel port DAC to use with Linux's PC Speaker driver?

And someone else, dharma1, replied:

> 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.

If that person (dharma1) sees this thread, I have a question for them: Could you take a picture of that schematic and post it?

There were multiple designs floating around the BBSes at the time. I don't remember the Scream Tracker one but they should be fairly similar.

That kind of DACs were compatible with Covox, which has a schematic on wikipedia:

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

Thanks.

I just noticed that I have two SoundBlaster 16 PCI cards in their original boxes, but apparently they don't approach the AdLib's level of scarcity. (Similar items are selling on eBay for about $40.)

Wasn't the PCI version based on a different chip, and not fully compatible? I could be misremembering.

I think there is something about the PCI version that's pretty significantly different, but I don't know what exactly.

Creative bought out Ensoniq and repackaged their chips into PCI cards, they did that after struggling with own designs.

Geez, I have a Gravis Ultrasound card somewhere in a box, I should probably put it on eBay I guess?

Yes, I think that card is desirable. The LGR review shows that it sounds much better than a Sound Blaster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92olhbB3KKM

I'm pretty sure a GUS still in its box would turn up a rather good price from nostalgia enthusiasts.

I mostly remember it for the fact that a great many demoscene demos and even some games would only play sound (music) if you had a GUS, a Soundblaster wasn't enough.

I think it had something to do with it being easier to play MODs on a GUS, or something. I imagine this was because you could load sounds into its memory and trigger them? I'm really not sure, someone please clarify :)

Either way, make sure you get a good price for that GUS :) Or better, make sure it finds a home with a loving enthusiast :)

The Resound OPL3 is widely available today and Adlib compatible. The original hardware is not of mucb interest today, other than to collectors.

The old DOS program ModPlay came with a file called which detailed several designs for DACs that attached to a parallel port. I was pleasantly surprised to find that ModPlay has its own web page: https://awe.com/mark/dev/modplay.html. The first download link on that page (https://awe.com/mark/bin/mp219b.zip) is a .zip file that contains HARDWARE.DOC. That file was designed to be displayed on DOS. In order for the diagrams to show up correctly you'll need a text editor that can be configured to display text in the DOS codepage (CP437). Notepad++ can do this via Encoding | Character sets | Western European | OEM-US. If anybody has instructions for other programs / operating systems, please feel free to jump in below.

The HARDWARE.DOC file contains designs for 2 different mono devices that use DAC chips, one mono device that uses an R-2R ladder, and the "Stereo-on-1" which produces stereo using only a single parallel port.

I built a Stereo-on-1 back in the day. I had to send away to England to get the required chips from Maplin. It didn't work properly when I assembled it because I didn't understand how the pins on the chips were numbered. They're numbered counterclockwise, starting from the pin with the dot but for some reason I had thought they ran down the left side and then ran down the right side. Years later I revisited this, figured out what I had done wrong, and fixed it. It still worked the last time I checked a couple of years ago. It produces quite decent sound.

To read the file on a modern terminal:

iconv -f cp437 -t UTF-8 HARDWARE.DOC

(I'm suprised that this worked so well. Also the zip file is a zipbomb without a containing directory, MS-DOS style.)

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