Is this the last 8-bit sound card, which was ever made by AdLib? 

Nope. As long as the card uses the LF347M op-amps, the FM-synthesis sounds like rubbish. They need to be replaced with LMV324M or something similar.

@@radovanm.2392 You know what, i find the distorted crunch actually compliments FM sound. It was a key "feature" of Megadrive, though for different reasons. FM can sound pretty thin, it gets really lush at 6op, kind of tolerable at 4op, and tends to be super thin with 2op as used by DOS games. The distortion introduces some added intermodulation which thickens it right up. Maybe it's even intentional?

scams scam scammers AdLib yamaha sound opl midi

Oh! What a pleasure! Thank you very much for this interesting insights and of course a big thank you for creating this great sound card :)

Yes, probably. I also noticed the jumper on the ASB64 later during editing of the video. I don't know, where this ASB16 comes from, may be it was rescued from a scrap yard and someone salvaged the jumpers previously. We'll never know.

well, it was less of a fix, more a try to find out what's going on )

I'm glad, that I gave you a good reason to stop :D Gutten Appetit!

Thank you. As I said in the video, WSS unfortunately didn't work, it was initialized, but neither were the games able to detect it properly, nor did it play any sound, when I set it manually. Since I never saw an 8-bit capable WSS sound card, I assumed, that it needs the full 16-bit bus for the data transfer. I'm still not sure about that. And about the crystal, the presence doesn't mean much. Many high quality sound cards avoid using the 14.3MHz frequency from the ISA bus and use instead own oscillator for higher quality. From experience I also can tell, that such cards usually run better in faster systems (f.e. P2/P3). I'm currently working on an own sound card and I'm using dedicated 14.3MHz crystal as well. Divided by two you get a perfect OPL/CMS clock as well. I don't know if I want to use the crystal in the final version, but for prototyping, it's handy to have it. In regards of the card in the video, may be it has a pass through of PC speaker as well, but most likely it hasn't. At least I don't know about that feature in the CS4232 chip, but who knows?! The crystal is not necessary a hint that it is such a pass through.

@@necro_ware I appreciate your clarification, thank you. Shame about the WSS portion; I guess that leaves the PAS series as the only cards capable of 16-bit audio output while installed in an 8-bit slot. (The GUS technically qualifies, sort-of, as you can use it in an 8-bit slot but can't use DMA, so the only way to play 16-bit samples is to upload them to the card via PIO and then play them, limited by onboard memory of course.)

Lemmings ;)

Necroware Little bastards :)

I think, that was the plan, however I found only modem add-on cards. I guess Adlib eventually never came up with the actual idea of that header.

Yes, I found it in the documentation afterwards as well :) It is also not quite precise at that point, they say jumper at position 1 and 2, where it's not clear if they mean one jumper over the pin 1 and 2, or two jumpers at the first two pairs.... Well, now I know, that they really mean two jumpers at the first two pairs and it works now :)

To be fair, the German manual is the only one where the Jumper is not mentioned, but in the French and English Version 😂

@@copyright_karl Exactly, that was actually the reason why I was asked to take a look. The owner didn't find anything about it in the German manual...

Hi, it's FNIRSI-5012H. It promises 100MHz, but it can handle about 35MHz at best. However, for my retro repairs it is good enough.

@@necro_ware Thanks !

Those are PCI cards. It's unlikely, that I'll make a review on them since I'm collecting only ISA Sound Cards. I have couple of PCI sound cards too, but they live somewhere in the spare parts box :)

The ground plane is inside of the PCB on the multilayer cards. You can't scratch through to it.

If you’re managing to dig out the ground plane burried deep in the PCB you’ve got worse problems; like completely removing gold plated connectors and snapping the card in half.

I don't understand the question

Planned

Thanks for reminder. I made the info points in the video, but forgot to put the links into the description. Just updated!

Why shouldn't I believe that? It's absolutely common for the SB1.0

@@necro_ware The other way round was more common ;) I got my card directly at the soundblaster booth at the cebit 90´ !

@@logipilot For the SB1.0 it was usually either the way you had it, or all of the ICs were soldered. They started to install the CMS into sockets with SB1.5, where later revisions were even delievered with the CMS chips at all.

I think we, retro nerds, are glad to see such card, because it is part of AdLibs story, which was very important back than and because it would be a good option for an old XT. Not everybody is a period-correctness extremist ;)

Yes, I'm very glad it was just that and nothing worse.

@@necro_ware You should also replace the LF347M op-amps with LMV324M or something similar to get rid of the ugly FM-synth distortion. The 5V power supply is not enough for them as they require 7V or more, according to the datasheet.

@@radovanm.2392 Thanks for the advise! However, this card was just borrowed...

Yeah, though what I find intriguing is that "Made in Canada". I'm asking if it still was designed by the same people. May be only the name traveled through the world, but not the team of engineers. At least this cards were obviously very well done, so the thought is may be not that wrong....

@@necro_ware Haha.. I have my doubts about the legitimacy of that claim. ;-) But yeah, once those drop-in codecs showed up, it was pretty easy to manufacture a decent sound card. Creative gets a lot of hate - and a lot of it is well deserved. But the initial SB DAC, as janky as it is, sits neatly in the "cheap and cheerful" category for me. Essentially bit-banging audio samples to make a device that could be manufactured easily and relatively inexpensively... It's a total hack, but an effective one, and it got digitized sound into the hands of a whole era of PC users. Can't be too mad about that.

@@necro_ware As mentioned by Francois Menard in several old USENET posts, the engineering group responsible for the design of the Ad Lib Gold was hired by Mediatrix after Ad Lib's bankruptcy/acquisition, making the Audiotrix Pro and Audiotrix 3D-XG something of spiritual successors. I don't know that I've ever seen any reference to who may have engineered the later cards that were released under the Ad Lib Multimedia moniker, but do recall at one reference mentioning that the ASB 32/64 was the only member of that group designed "in house."

@Nick Wallette Despite how much disagreed I am with the former behavior of Creative. I'd never say, that they don't deserve a place in the history. They made many interesting solutions, it's just that if Creative wouldn't make that game, we'd probably have even better solutions back in the days. MediaVision showed for example, how it works. And in regards of "Made in Canada" it's not that wrong to think that way. For example Nokia was sold years ago to China, but the most design and management work is still done in Finnland until today. I have a phone by HMD/Nokia and it is a really good product in my opinion.

It's quite hard to create analogue synthesizers in FPGA and make it sound like the real thing. That's why nobody managed to make it so far.

@@necro_ware not really. It's all digital. The most analog circuits are after the DA, which also have been put in a chip (think tripath amps). The combination of a Yamaha soundchip cloned, a wave table, sound blaster compatible processor, the digital circuitry of a tripath amp, the dna/irq routing, and some sound inputs can be very easily put in an fpga.

@@ProDigit80 On the second thought, you are probably right in regards of digital, the YMF262 has external digital to analogue converter, so it must be digital indeed. But still, I think it's going to be hard to implement it in FPGA. A dozen of companies were trying to implement it in their ICs back in the days and not one succeeded to get the genuine sound. I guess, that's for reason, but if you have an idea, I can only cheer you up to go for it. My concerns shouldn't be a real reason not to create something like this.

Late reply, but there was a project being worked on a couple years ago that sounds like what you were talking about. Search "The one sound card to rule them all" for a video explaining the project. It's a shame it seems that COVID has stalled development...

Funny enough Vortex was made by the same people as PAS. So you were loyal to the MediaVision from the beginning :D

@@necro_ware I can recall playing Unreal Tournament on a Vortex 2 card with headphones and actually being able to hear other players above and below me. Creative never had anything that compares.

Aureal A3D is still unmatched for 3D positional audio. It is in a way slightly cartoony/exaggerated but there is no 3D positional audio (software or hardware) that allows you to pinpoint sounds better; especially above and below. In all other respects the card is very outdated.

@@soylentgreenb Next to nobody runs a soundcard in a PC these days for good reason. I've got at least 4 Creative SB PCIe cards and they are all still shit. I'm much happier with a high end motherboard based audio solution. Running an Aurus x570 master at the moment with a 3950X. The A3D cards were just so much fun to play with.

Lemmings, that is one of the most famous games for all platforms of that time :D Just google for it.

It's a simple task to make it. As far as I know, all the chips are still easily available.

Hah.. yeah, ironically, this would be the easier one. Although, frankly, if your "clone" of the Sound Blaster was less concerned about authenticity, and more concerned with having the most effective, compatible card you could make, then there wouldn't be a great deal of difference. There are plenty of all-in-one codecs, like this Crystal chip, that can give you a good DAC with SB/P/16 compatibility. And they're so tightly integrated, that it's kind of hard to screw it up. Do a half-decent job laying out the PCB and you're golden.

@@nickwallette6201 Couldn't agree more.

€? In the 1/2 90s? He clearly said DEUTSCH MARKS. Also, has that law always been on the books?

I am from Germany ;) "Netto" means taxes not included and it's not quite true, that the tax has to be always included. In normal shops yes, but there are shops for companies, for example "Metro", where you can pay "Netto" prices.

@@necro_ware Very interesting. Thanx :)

@@necro_ware maybe he bought it in the supermarket named "Netto". Then it was included tax. ;-) But i don't think, that "Netto" sold soundcards back in time.

@@eltrash Yeah, that must've been it :)

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