Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

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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?

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.)

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.

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 :)

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.

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

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