The story behind the reverse engineering Creative Music System Upgrade for Sound Blaster 2.0. How to create your own upgrade kit and my appeal on the community. 12:29 jump directly to how to GitHub Repository: github.com/fandjelo/sbcms
To avoid some irritations. My nickname on various forums is scorp, I'm using it constantly since 1992. Necroware is my channel, but I don't use this as a nickname anywhere.
On a different topic. Did not find you video with the analog to usb joystick project. My method was to solder all joystick wires to the micro the same that you used in the original. Could I modify your software to work on this joystick. Joystick is a Saitek cyborg 3d digital.
I really appreciated your angle of reasoning and totally agree with it. It's OK if you want to make money of of your discovery, but to risk of the loss of knowledge by keeping things secret without giving back to community is just an asshole move.
Like that one guy, who died some time after inventing a material which could insulate against temperatures upwards of 10.000 degrees Celsius but didn't want to share the recipe with anyone. (Best known material today will only insulate against temperatures upwards of 6.000 degrees Celsius.) It was a setback for humanity. Some discoveries are just too important to not share with the rest of humanity - we're on this rock together.
This is the spirit that made the Free Open Source community a reality. You can make money in the first sale but after that the community can very well get it free (if either the buyer or seller wants to share it). FOSS licenses don't stop you from selling (you are just asking a fee for you making a copy to them), it also won't stop others from sharing free or for a fee. Naturally sooner than later one person will share it for free so its pointless to keep asking a copying fee at that point. The very first sale can be the cost of the entire project so the community could get together and buy it. That is how you make money with Free Open Source Software.
Also the guy didn't hold any rights anyway as he altered existing code. If Creative of whoever created the original would start sueing him for making financial profits of their work, he and the others would be moaning about it.
110% agreed keep it open source. And please offer a option to purchase for the person who just wants to plug in the chips. I have run into this problem too many times. Great video I'm almost ready to release my video on this card in a Tandy 3100 Model 10
I’m glad you went this route. That’s something I’ve been preaching for years. We should be giving back more to the community. I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels this way.
I'd like to say thank you for all the time you spend doing all these videos. I'm 65 yrs old and still have some of the old 386 & 486s around and may be an old 8068 somewhere. I'm tying to get my 13yr old grandson to look in the past and going to restore one for him with DOS just to show him what we went through to play games. I totally agree with your last statement but it seems to be in part of our life a bit of greed. Thank you
Good work! I'll probably try it out by myself at some point. Nice to see my AdLib picture I uploaded like 20 years ago on Wikipedia is still being used ;). I actually have an original SB 1.0 and 1.5 with CMS chips, as well as two CMS cards, on in German packaging disguised as the product of some other German company (possibly Genius or so). These cards were quite easy and cheap to obtain in the late 90s/early 2000s. But that's a different story now, 20 years later...
Thank you! And for the Adlib picture as well ;) I also have now multiple different cards with CMS since then. After I reverse engineered the logic, I bought 6 different SB2.0 cards and one clone by QuickSound. It's exactly the same card, but I wanted to be sure, that my code works everywhere...
Ah, the old opensource "fuck you", where you see someone pointlessly hiding things behind a paywall, and then do it yourself so they can't keep pulling that crap.
Great work, I totally agree with you regarding the open-source aspects. Love the game blaster version of Monkey Island. I think I'll have to try and build my own gameblaster card (as I don't have any SB 2.0 in my collection). Might be a fun project!
Thank you Tobias! A custom game blaster would be a fun project indeed. As a starting point, there exists CMSLPT already, I guess the experience from that project can be taken to develop an ISA CSM card, may be even with some kind of digital effects support to be SB compatible. What I'm also very curious is, if OPL2 can be somehow converted to CSM on the fly?! I know, they are different, but if all the instruments from OPL2 can be somehow mapped to similar CSM samples, may be a universal driver can be made to play all the Adlib games on CSM :) May be we can chat about that on dosreloaded if you are interested.
@@necro_ware This project seems to be getting cut short: github.com/gemedetpaps/MUS-1099 There's already a finished board layout for a gameblaster using 74's logic chips. I've ordered the (somewhat rare and expensive) stereo potentiometer and headphone jack at mouser (along with some other stuff) and I'll try to build one :)
Although still very exciting, this seems to be a CMS only clone and is not SB compatible. However, you can have it just as an additional FM sound card to a normal SB compatible for digital effects.
@@necro_ware I've built the card now: forum.classic-computing.de/forum/index.php?thread/21914-bautagebuch-micro8088-computer-mit-cms-sound-und-cf-karte/&postID=262955#post262955 Still waiting for the SAA1099 chips, though... :)
@@Manawyrm That was fast! And with the solid caps it looks very cool! :D I'm curious how it will sound and if the caps will make a difference. Did you order the SAA-1099 from China? It can take some time, I was waiting for the delivery quite a long time I remember. Hope to see a video on your channel :D
Our first sound card, which was installed in a VTech XT clone, was a Game Blaster from Radio Shack. The uncle was a store manager at the time, so we ended up with a lot of Radio Shack and Tandy stuff. Just about the only games that supported it came from Sierra, and I found myself annoyed with the lack of AdLib and/or Sound Blaster support. It's funny to see now that cards with CMS support are so sought after and are going for such a premium.
The argument against reverse engineering was right, but when he said that GPL is an infection he blew it. Thank you for sharing and enforcing the same freedom for everyone else.
Thank You very much... Even I am not into the retro staff but this video shows up on my RU-vid notification... Love the way you are approach about knowledge sharing... Subscribed👍
I'm not plugged in enough to know anything you didn't say.... I actually don't have an issue with secrets, so long as the secret holder is up front about saying why they don't want to share. Even if it's as simple as "I would rather not share because it benefits me to keep it a secret." That's fine. It's not what's best for the community, but the world doesn't have to revolve around what's best for the community, everyone needs to decide for themselves what the best thing is for themselves. What's not fine is the name calling, and putting up road blocks to stop others from sharing and discovering. I'm glad you got this working, and things seem ok now. I'm also glad that what's best for you seems to be what's best for the community. Thanks for that.
I open source all of my projects, despite, that it would probably be the best in a short term for me to keep them secret and sell the parts instead. But I am absolutely convinced by open source mindset and think, that in the long term this is the better philosophy for all of us. Think of Linux, it is the most used OS Kernel in the world, a lot if people earning Billions of dollars with it, where others got a super solid platform for tinkering, learning etc And all that is possible because one guy didn't want to keep things in secret.
Just wanted to say hello and I'm first! Lol And thanks for this video! I agree wholeheartedly with the sense of community. I myself have created some PCBs to help the community. If anyone would like to collaborate, reply to this post and let me know. History needs to be learned and shared!
@jeramy brecles If you like the channel then subscribe, It is a way of showing how much we appreciate the work that is done here and motivate Necroware to do more...
Even if I don't have time to try everything, I try at least to read everything I can get, so if you have some information to share, you are always welcome!
Thank you for your work on this! I don't have a SB 2.0 and I'm not interested into one, but I always love efforts like yours. Always spread the knowledge, that's the idea!
This is why I basically stopped interacting with the Vogons community. It is full of elitist and gatekeeping crap like that. People trying to milk money from everyone for everything. If the open-source community would have been like that, we wouldn't have Linux, Android and lots of other cool things today. Keep on doing what you're doing, it is very much appreciated!
lol ... two years ago I bought a refurbished X230 and the same logic analyzer for my electronics projects and other random stuff. The picture at 12:00 made me chuckle. Nobody cares, but RU-vid's algorithm likes comments, and I like your videos, so here you go :)
Hi Necroware! I dont know how to thank you for the community effort and share spirit. There are not many guys like you... It was a very good explanation about turning on and off the chips by the GAL I wish to have one SB like yours...If you find one for sale at affordable prices give me a signal, I will send the money by paypal :)
Hi Jorge! Thank you very much, I try my best. One of the cards in the video is borrowed, one already sold and two are installed in my retro machines. If I have one spare, I'll contact you :) Is it actually possible to write private messages here?
@@necro_ware Well the only thing that I can think is by clicking on my name you go to my "page" in the tab "about me" you can see a button that shows my email. I placed that to prove to bangood that a ksger T12 soldering station come without soldering iron, and not working. They sent me a new kit... With the new kit I manage to repair the initial station and bought an iron for it
By the way... The station is AWESOME!!!!!!!!!! If you say 340ºC in the setup it will deliver 340ºC, it puts hakko stations away... Very good station and very cheap
Simply amazing! You would normally think reverse engineering a sound card is a tedious task, however, this video proves it wrong. It makes it feel like building a LEGO tower. Thank you for your contribution!
I'm quite sure, that it is not always as easy as it was here, but in this case it was like LEGO indeed :) I also thought first, that it would be more complicated, especially because people were talking about it for like 7-8 years? Anyway, with this video I also wanted to show, that it is sometimes simpler, than we think and people should not be scared, just because many other people apparently failed. And again, once the solution was found, the knowledge about it should be shared with the community. Thank you for watching!
This is great to hear. Thank you for your efforts. I love the square wave sound. It's very nostalgic for me and I often prefer the cleaner sound over the muffled OPL3 or even MT32 sounds, which for me can sound off, perhaps due to the uncanny-valley effect. Cheers!
You are welcome! If you have some card revisions, which I are not listed on the GitHub already, I'd be glad about your feedback. May be there are still some corner cases, which I didn't take care of.
Thank you! Glad you liked it, but the card I was talking about in the video was SB 2.0 without Pro. The SB Pro 2.0 is a completely different card, which has no CMS support, but therefore stereo capabilities.
I got the version 1.5 and C/MS chips. That was my first sound card. I did the C/MS upgrade a few month later. However, the C/MS wasn't popular among the game developers.
That is true, only about 100 games support it. However, I have no explanation why it was not popular. I really like how it sounds if it is well implemented, like in Monkey Island. Also CMS was stereo, where OPL2 was only mono. I guess the square wave sound on the PC was not cool enough in the 80s, because every game console used it. I love it :D
My original SB1.0 with CMS was discarded after the system it was installed in had a power supply magic smoke failure. Luckily at the time I worked at a company that used SAA1099 and was able to get a SB1.5 and update it. I didn't realize until watching this video that the 2.0 was missing the decoding logic!
Really loving your channel and your contribution to the retro community. Please keep the great content coming. Would like to see how you tackle that broken CT2230 you showed in an earlier video.
Hehe, I'll try to find some time to come back to that. I actually have two Creative SB16 sound cards with the same error, so I'm also very interested in repairing it. However, they both are so highly integrated, that I'm not sure if I can do something about it..... what do you think, shall I make a video public even if I fail?
Thanks. This explains a lot. I was wondering why I had two CMS chips. I must have taken them from my SB 1.0 thinking I could use them on the new SB1.5 or newer. But now I have an SB 2.0 but have no PAL/GAL.
Oh there is hope for my 069328 Board with CT1336A . I actually own a original CMS Kit for Soundblaster but have never tried to install it because of the CT1336A. Good News and good Work.
The trick in IT is to always ensure that you never become the singular point of reference for knowledge or skills, because if that does happen, then you'll never be able to take a day off work in peace without people trying their hardest to contact you. Document everything and share it. This, of course, does not hold true if your continued employment relies on you being the sole IT wizard for a very specific piece of hardware or software that the company relies on. If sharing that knowledge would put you out of a job, then don't do that. Just set your phone to block those numbers on your days off and enjoy job security through obscurity. Still document things, though, just make sure to upload them to a forum in a way that the google web crawlers will have difficulty indexing, like uploading the relevant documents in a compressed file. As long as it's on an appropriate forum, then the people who wish to preserve that knowledge will still be able to find it, but the lay-person your employer might try to replace you with won't have such an easy time.
Working in the software development since 30 years. People who keep secrets to save their jobs are the ones who kill companies and themselves in the long term. Because they tend to stop learning and after 10 years, when they realize that the secret is obsolete, it's too late. I was teaching software engineering and such "security by obscurity" is the last thing one should do.
@@TomStorey96 thanks to one of my friends being far more skilled in IT related matters than I am, at least with that subject, I rarely end up being the smartest in the room. Dude did some installer sleuthing on a pre-release storage array to figure out why the installs kept failing and rewrote them as necessary. Luckily they were in a parsable language instead of being pre-baked code. I definitely wouldn't be able to do that. I just don't have a head for code.
I believe releasing under GPL3 is a good choice. Then your work will always be open and available, including derived works using your code. Many consider the GPL a "business-unfriendly". All software derived from GPL-licensed code must in turn be licensed under the GPL
For archival purposes there's not really any alternative, people wanting to profit shouldn't get in the way of preservation - that's just holding historical knowledge to ransom. As Necroware says, there's plenty of ways to make money as a hardware/software engineer - I think that doing this to the community is just malicious. (Another case of this but not malicious at all is Steve Chamberlin/Big Mess O' Wires - He's got every right to protect his designs and I've got nothing but respect for the work he's done - but I'd really love for him to open up more of his Mac products, they've become a necessity for 68K Macintoshes, I definitely know as an owner of his FloppyEmu. He's already opened some up but the rest of his Mac work should be archived)
Only if re-distributed publicly (for example in a hardware product) you are required to publish the source code with your modifications. And you can perfectly sell your first copy as much as you want, even tag the cost of the entire project and some extra. The buyer is free to either give copies away or ask a fee as well for a copy. It will rapidly become free when a buyer shares it for free because the license allows it, but at least you can be sure to have your project cost covered with the first sale. You are not selling the copyright, but in a way its similar to how book authors in the past sold their works before copyright existed (a one time sale, publisher got to print it in perpetuity).
King's Quest, by Sierra, supported CMS, Adlib, and Tandy sound. I did some music, fx, graphics, and game logic edits to my copies of those. First was Death March when you got killed. Next was responses to naughty words (kq3: Bleep the cat. Come on, i'm sure every other rotten kid typed that $#!+ too?) Then i hid user manuals inside the games to be found by players. Looks like this would be one more reason for people to dig out their favorite old gems, and give them another spin. BTW: Great work on reversing that chip.
Cool! Awesome to see more CMS stuff! I recently got the Texelec's SAAYM for my retro rig, and I LOVE it! (highly recommended, btw). You mentioned in the video that you're primarily a software engineer, wanted to ask you how feasible it would be to write a DOS TSR to route commands for Tandy 3-Voice mode in DOS games to the CMS? Not necessarily for you to write it, just wanted to know if something like this is feasible and how it could be done.
Man this channel is crazy good... You really need to update the thumbnails and art and you will be golden.... Your videos are awesome and you are very nice and passionate. I have been watching all your videos non stop for a week now... would you mind if I create a logo for you?
Thank you very much, I'm glad you like it. I think the channel develops in a good pace. I would be scared, if it would grow faster ;) Anyway, thank you for your offer, but I have a logo already, I just don't use it. I just trying to make a good content and everything else will get better with the time ;)
I wonder if it would be possible to write some sort of TSR (something like the Tandy emulator for Covox) that could capture the CMS data and translate it to something the OPL3 can use. OPL3 can do stereo, has square waves and has enough voices for both square and noise, though I can forsee issues with the noise channels, since the OPL3 doesn't natively do those (I don't think). One could to programm some presets for noise, but I don't know how well that would work for every scenario.
I wonder if the I/O lines for Yamaha and Philips conflict on the SB. If not, I wonder if they can be used at the same time without sounding bad. I must obtain one, and write a programme.
If I had any way of knowing how desirable some of this hardware would have become, I would have tired harder to find a way to keep my old Tandy and SoundBlaster 2.0 with the CMS upgrade way back when. Alas, my parents probably wouldn't have let me have both the Tandy and my shiny new 386. :)
This is great information and I'm glad you made it available. However, do you know why the original CT-1300 software won't detect this upgrade as a CMS card, and will refuse to run?
By original CT1300 you mean THE original CM/S card by Creative? That one didn't have this programmable logic IC at all. It was introduced on the CT1350B and was implemented in the microcontroller on the previous cards. EDIT: Ah, I guess I didn't understand the question :D You, mean the software in DOS. Yeah, just don't take the latest version of it, that one has a bug, which doesn't detect the CMS.
@@necro_ware But the latest version of the CT-1300 software does work with a real CMS board, so it's detecting... something? Maybe someday when I have time and interest :-) I'll disassemble the later CMS software and see exactly what it is checking for. Maybe it's something that can be added to the GAL programming in the future.
It doesn't have anything to do with the GAL. Original CM/S base address could be selected between 0x210, 0x220, ...,0x260. For CM/S detection a byte at the address 0x2_4 (_ stands for 1,2,3,4,5,6) was checked to be 0x7F, then a byte was written to the address 0x2_6 and read again from the address 0x2_A. What was written must've been the same as what was read. The same byte was then again written to the address 0x2_7 and read from 0x2_B. Usually the same byte was used to write to the named addresses, so on the later SB cards (1.5, 2.0) the same 8-bit buffer was used behind 0x2_6 and 0x2_7 address for further costs reduction. Basically you could write to 0x2_6 and read from 0x2_A or 0x2_B the same value. This did work until Creative decided to write different values to the named ports in the latest version of their software. Don't ask me why, but they broke the compatibility to all non original CM/S cards (which had two separate buffers as far as I know). Also all of the clones out there use only one buffer for both addresses, because it is simple, so they all don't work with the latest version of the CM/S software. Why do I know that? I am working on a sound card, which shall be also CM/S compatible.
Thank you for your work :) By the way, could the "audio issues" be for example a CMS chip or a channel being less loud than the other ? I have this problem with one of my SB 2.0 and it's bothering me ... I tried to replace the caps, but it didn't change anything
Hi Deksor! Thank you too! I did some research on the SB2.0 aside of CMS, may be you remember my Tandy video, where the SB2.0 turned out to be very noisy?! Anyway, I wanted to make another video one day about this card and how the sound signal is wired on the board. At my current knowledge state, I think, that a mixer circuit on your sound card could be broken. As far as I saw, the FM sound get mixed in a different way as CMS on this sound card, so may be there is something odd about that?! But it's just a guess. At least I can say, that I didn't experienced any balance problems on all of the cards you can see in the video.
@@Dxceor2486 May be you installed one of the caps accidentally in reverse? Such things happen to me from time to time, if I'm tired or not concentrated. I'd check the polarities once again.
Hello, well If I hadn't already subscribed I would have after watching this video. Excellent Work! Now after I watched this video. I got to thinking about my own Sound Blaster 1350B. I had ordered upgrade Chips for it a few years ago. What looks to be September 14, 2018 if I'm reading the package correctly. From a Daniel Siebler? In Wuppertal, Germany. I took a glance at my Card, and it's the CT1336A Rev. 049151 So it needs the newer revision Chip to work then, right? Is it possible that's what I had ordered? Are you familiar with that name at all? Obviously I haven't installed the Chips yet, but I am in the middle of working on a Compaq 486 that has a Good PSU with -5V on it. I think I'd finally like to use this card in that machine.
Hi there! Thank you very much. The name Daniel Siebler doesn't ring the bell for me, I don't think I know him. Regarding the ICs you bought, they could be a problem with your card indeed. As I told in my video and as far as I know, the logic equations, which were available before the very end of 2018 or beginning of 2019 didn't work on all revisions of SB2.0 with CT1336A controller. At least I don't know about any solution before that date, so if you bought your chips from in Sep 2018, then they are for CT1336 only or Daniel had a solution, but didn't share it with the world back then. Who knows? You can try it and if it works, nice! If it doesn't work, you can reprogram the GAL you bought from Daniel with my code, just as I explained in the video. If you don't have a programmer and you live in EU, write me a message, I can reprogram it for you. But try first the version you have, it is just a matter of minutes. This sound card doesn't need any drivers, just plug it in and start a game. As I told, Monkey Island is good for testing CMS.
@@necro_ware Alright. I'll do that. I'm in the US, but I did buy a chip programmer along while ago. However the project I was working on at the time didn't work out so I don't know if I've ever successfully programmed a chip. This could be something I could try again if it doesn't work.
Oh! I'm very sorry, but they all been sold out and I'm now out of SAA1099 ICs. Unfortunately, I forgot to remove the link. If you are interested, I'll make some more kits and can drop you a notification here. But it will take some time and, dependent from where you live, the shipment cost could be high. So please take it into account.
Prince of Persia opening music sounds the same in both modes, try it. Also 1990 is not just Monkey Island, its Loom, so Tchaikovsky, try both! Hmm so my Sound Blaster with cms chips may be valuable after all, i still have the thin black Creative carton box where those chips came...
Retro community has *asholes who want to rip off their "colleagues" While many are doing research and dumping ROMs the others are trying to earn cash by selling the data or making super expensive converters. I find this unacceptable. We are one step from losing huge amount of knowledge and need to cooperate to save it.
Retro community is full of shitlords like that and the sentiment of "I came up with an idea how to do exactly the same thing the creators did, but won't share" is unfortunately strong. This sort of thinking killed Terrible Fire accelerators for Amiga, because shitlords were angry that the man developing those was giving the designs out for free - he was harrased so hard he gave up on the project and removed everything. In this case I think the bus factor is not a huge loss to humanity, fuck those greedy bastards.
@@necro_ware more specifically, my decoder on my Sonos sound system seemed to think it should do things specifically with that soundtrack, with my 5.1 setup. Normally RU-vid only comes through my front speakers.
@@randomfrequency This is because Dolby Pro Logic surround sound is extracted from analog hard right and hard left sound. There is no middle channel, you have to sacrifice 2 channels to create one. Amiga works this way too. So the decoder wrongly assumed you were running DPL encoded surround sound.
Oh man, there's an Ebay seller selling this card for $550 USD complete in box with an $8 sale list price written on the label 😅 and another seller selling the CMS upgrade kit for $30 USD. Bother.
gatekeeping is a toxic trait in people who are in these communities, selfish. in order to preserve the technology the information should be openly available.
Business is business. Ad-Lib should have learned from IBM not to use just off the shelf parts and to patent their designs. If you don't protect your intellectual property, you're begging for someone to steal it.
@@dennisp.2147 Counter perspective: If you want your design to take over the world, you make it easy to clone. The descendants of the IBM PC are still in widespread use while its contemporaries all died out. Adlib compatibility went far and wide while sound cards still had FM capability. A half-decent design that's easy to clone will win out over a stellar design that's locked down and/or hard to clone. Think of all the nifty-sounding features Creative put on their cards over the years that only got used by their own software. They tried to keep those features proprietary, and nobody used them.
@@Roxor128 IBM of course had no such intention when they used all off the shelf parts. They were simply trying to meet a deadline. Had they known, they would have taken a far different tack. It's simply a happy coincidence that the PC was so clone-able. Whoever bungled the licensing with Microsoft for DOS should have been fired. IBM spent the 25 years after the release of the PC trying to stuff that genie back in the bottle. First with the PC Jr. then with OS/2 and then the MCA architecture on the PS/2 machines. Go try and buy an actual true blue IBM PC today... Lenovo doesn't count. The true measure of success is having a design that you can control and license that is so superior that no one can compete.
@@dennisp.2147 Yep. All those proprietary attempts by IBM were failures because they were proprietary. Just like Creative's assortment of sound card features. If people can't implement it easily and cheaply, they won't. They'll look for something else that'll do the job instead. Your true measure of success is basically impossible in practice. In theory it would work. In practice, you either make it open and cheap (or better yet, free) for others to implement and get possible success, or you make it locked-down and proprietary, with expensive or nonexistent licensing and watch it wither on the vine.
К сожалению этого везде достаточно. Вообще, люди по всей планете больше похожи друг на друга, чем некоторым кажется. Причём, как в негативном смысле, так и позитивном, но многие любят тыкать пальцем в других.
Wait. You can't use Adlib and CMS at the same time? That kills a lot of musical possibilities. What idiot at Creative Labs thought that was a good idea?
Creative killed their own product, and some of their competition (others bought). Thankfully, nobody cares about them anymore, ac97 etc killed them. But there was a time, were PCs could only do beeps and blips, and Adlib changed the world, then Creative sold their next product (Sound Blaster) as "Adlib compatible" (that was literally printed in the box) to cash on the existing software library only to destroy Adlib later when they starved them from the crucial Yamaha chips for the much superior Adlib Gold which would have come way before Sound Blaster 16 if it wasn't for the Creative CEO playing dirty and making Yamaha not deliver in time and quantity and price.
