I'm surprised you're not going after him for infringement of the Oddware™ brand. It really confused me for a minute. I thought it was LGR. No it's a guy without an impressive radio voice. Disappointing.
It works far better than I ever expected. The Sound Blaster compatible audio isn't so bad as to be unlistenable in my view. Whoever did the hardware design must have put a lot of thought into making it work, especially at the data rates needed for 44.1 kHz 16-bit audio. That "Breeze" song in wave format was also included on a Microsoft Multimedia demo bundle that Packard Bell used to include with some of their computers.
+uxwbill The external Zip drive I used to have in the late 1990s reminded me of just how impressive parallel port I/O performance could be as long as you made sure to set it to ECP mode. If I could copy the entire contents of a 100MB disk in 1-2 minutes, no doubt it could handle a CD-quality PCM stream. I wonder how much buffering was needed due to the lack of DMA and the potential for stuttering that could cause.
I noticed when playing 44.1 kHz sound that the audio was lowpass filtered at around 13 kHz, suggesting that maybe they were cheating a little bit by having it downsample the audio. But at least it has an anti-aliasing lowpass filter, unlike many early sound cards and parallel port DACs.
I had one of these as a kid. It works amazingly even with something as slow as an 8088, regardless of what the box says, it works in DOS and with very slow old PC's. The speaker unit was not shielded, and would easily ruin a floppy if you got it close. It was AMAZING but not cheap. About $175 new back in the day.
When I was a kid with a IBM PS/2 386 that had no chance of ever getting a compatible sound card, I would have been stoked for this. I take it you lose your parallel port entirely so if you had a desktop it would mean alot of unplugging and plugging back in if you wanted to use the printer. Oh well - that was life before USB!
It is a dim, ghosty passive matrix LCD with terrible contrast. (The camera actually makes it look better than it does in person.) I will be glad when it dies.
It's because sound cards became good enough to play pretty much anything these days, while graphics card can _still_ see nice improvements! It's how it goes, I guess.
I had an IBM PCMCIA audio adapter with my 486 laptop. It actually sounded pretty good. My 486 DX-2 50 with 20 MB of RAM just barely wouldn't play a 128 Mb/s mp3 through it with WInAmp.
+Lachlant1984 It was made in 1995 or 96. It got pretty warm when in use, and the ports were on a dongle that had a delicate plug that looked like an iPod 30-pin.
A place where I've used to work have had one of these in the office supply drawer. I always borrowed the aux cable it came with to use in company vehicles.
I can confirm that the tiny adapter with the headphone jack and the RJ45 style end is an unamplified output, but is a stereo output. The unit IS very speed sensitive, Turbo functions messed with it and when I moved it from an 8088 to a 386, even the sound files I had recorded played at the wrong speed. The unit does indeed have a microphone in the speaker, very low quality. The windows drivers were buggy at best, and DOS wasn't much better but it worked (mostly). There were a series of updated drivers that helped. The last package I remember getting was a Windows9x package of drivers that had updated DOS drivers as well. I ABSOLUTELY remember the setup did not work. Also the unit WILL stand up (even though it will put a lot of weight on your parallel port) if you push down that little tab that is in the center of the unit below the hinge, on the side that plugs into the PC. You must push it to put it up or down. There are not a lot of these out there.
This is what the Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source wanted to be when they grew up! Used to have a ton of old PS/2s and whatnot, I would have loved to have 10 or 12 of these things around back then!
Man, hearing those MODs again sure is a blast from the past. Also, this is a really cool device. If I can find anything like it I might get it for my parallel port sporting thin client. Or maybe a more modern and available solution might be wiser... :P
The portable sound plus is reviewed in the March 1995 issue of PC WORLD UK magazine in their "first impressions" section. They concluded that it was basic and did its job well, but needed better apps "to give it oomph" This was priced at £139.
4 Mbps - more than triple the speed of USB 1.1! Edit: Oops, I was thinking USB 1 was 1.2 Mbps, it's actually 12 Mbps. But still, 4 Mbps was pretty decent before the USB era, and definitely enough for sound. You could also buy external hard drives that connected to the parallel port.
Breeze.mid/wav is from the Windows Multimedia Pack. The Soundblaster emulation sounds horrible. Does the emulation driver require EMM386 to be loaded? If so, its using a v86 port trapping API to support emulation. It likely doesn't work with protected mode DOS games either (try anything that uses DOS4/GW like SimCity 2000 or DOOM). Its also likely that the Windows 95 drivers have better SoundBlaster emulation in a DOS box. A friend of mine had one of these back in the day and wasn't impressed too with it.
The SB emulation requires either an EMS or XMS memory manager, and does not support DOS extenders, at least as of v2.0 in 1993. (I don't know if the Windows 95 drivers improved DOS mode support or not.)
It very much resembles the front of a Bose Companion 2 Series I multimedia speaker system, which I was using for my computer speaker set as of recently.
I used to build covoxes myself. Just solder 8 or 9 resistors onto db25 plug and put that in lpt1. It played mods quite well even on XT clone I had in early 90s. Never ever heard about this Portable device though. My first real sound card was Gravis Ultrasound with 1MB of ram in 1994.
There are notoriously dangerous laptops out there. My Fujitsu B2131 400mhz Win2k laptop got so hot under my wrist it would actually burn me. Dare I close the screen before it cooled down it would melt the bezel a little more! Literally slow cooks your hand until you go away and come back and feel the sizzle.
All I could think of during that Soundblaster emulation sound sample was "Your call is important to us. Calls may be monitored and recorded for training purposes".
CD quality of its day for puters' back in the old days, as the IBM partner so proudly said. It really is wax CD cylinder sound quality there, painful to listen to MIDI at an even lower quality of that dog-forsaken format!
that is because this ones are better, but the new ones are a work in progress, maybe you can ask that to the manufacturer through some plus or something.
PC speaker didn't sound very good?? It's fuckin' AWESOME, especially the Lotus tune that you played, how can you say that? There's so much charm in the way the generic pc speaker used to sound.
Interesting solution. Not necessarily something you should go with permanently IF you can upgrade to a real sound card, but I can see this as an awesome solution for a laptop that has no actual sound hardware available. But very interesting piece of hardware nonetheless.
ive got that same laptop (except its a 100 not a 105) and ive never seen something that can do good pcm audio out of the parallel. but now i know something exists! too bad its hard to come by.
Sound card, speaker, and power adapter. How much was it? My creative USB HD came only with RCA to headphones cable; I thought that they were generous to include the cable. BTW, the USB card value is around 99$. Good old oddware. Thanks for the video.
You'll have to do a video sometime about how you found Slugbug. It was through your vids/radio show I found his stuff. So damn entertaining and quite the musical genius.
I wonder how much space the memory resident program needed for Sound Blaster & FM support in DOS takes up. Just loading mouse and CD-ROM support was already pushing the limit for a lot of the more finnicky titles out there. I still remember having to control the point-and-click UI in Privateer with a joystick for the longest time.
which mod file did u use at 6:16 PS Why didn't u use Galaxy Music player and which player is that? PPS: What is this beep sound when you close the laptop?
The title is displayed on the screen. ;-) Intertia Player works and sounds better than GLX on 386 and faster systems. And the beep is Toshiba's "panel close alarm".
This looks like it could be pretty awesome for early 90s laptops. I have an old 486 Compaq Contura that only has PC speaker, where can one get this card?
Nice device! Is it CPU consuming? Did you try to hook it into that background Tandy? Also it would be good to see a teardown - wanna know how this magic works. P.S. Yay for the Space Debris!
Random comment about slugbug I actually port computers again as well as some of his other songs to my SE/30 via the serial port, though the audio had to bit crushed to hell for it to be a decent size the the Mac to Handel without hanging it up
Honestly I know it was the 1990s but too me I feel like those speakers are still kind of a mid to low end product. We're there any high end speaker products?
This is a neat way of getting decent sound on a laptop. Did laptops at the time have PCMCA buses? It sound like they didn't or if they did they where no sound cards for them.
Yes, most 1990s laptops had PCMCIA (a.k.a. PC Card) slots, but PCMCIA sound cards were rare and expensive and many did not have Sound Blaster/AdLib emulation.
I'm getting one soon (found one on eBay and hit buy it now right away). Sadly, it's not 100% complete as it's missing the RJ-45 to 35mm jack adapter. I wonder if that can be fabricated somehow?
Here is the co-creators current website : www.srsinnovations.com/ of that device, maybe he could give you the 411or hey, he might be intertained that its still being used!
+ducttapeanddreams I doubt it, I don't know if Windows 10 even supports parallel port devices. I remember some very early MP3 players that connected to your PC via the Parallel port, and I remember in 2003 reading on the Internet that at least with one MP3 player may by Spirit, the player in question was only compatible with operating systems up to Windows 98, the website seemed to incite that later versions of Windows such as Windows XP only supported printers via the Parallel port, of course this could be wrong because even when Windows XP came out, there were people still using the parallel port ZIP drives and things like that, but as for Windows 10, I doubt this will work at all, and the drivers won't be compatible.
Well, someone _did_ manage to get a similar device running on modern Linux*, so it might not be _entirely_ unfeasible with the right drivers... *the OPL2LPT, which has the same AdLib chip. See vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2018-adlib-opl2lpt
8:29 good ol windows sound recorder. I kind of miss it b/c I had it on my old 486 and my mom had the same one on her PC and I'd make all kinds of funny audio clips. I liked the Win 3.11 version better b/c the window refresh was better than the win 95 version which refreshed 4 times per second. Oh the memories, Now I use GoldWave to make and edit audio. I don't like the one that comes with Win 8.1 b/c it records to .wma and you can't change the format.
***** I did that and got it to work but some things don't work and it only gives me 23 seconds of recording then gives me a low memory error and I have 8GB.
***** I tried the length trick but I'm not getting the full 60 seconds of recording whether I open a new file close and reopen the program. I just get 23 seconds and that's it. if I try the copy, open new recording then paste I get the low memory error. Is that all that's required just the soundrec.EXE file or is there another file that the program wants like a .DLL file.
***** I found a way around the error. Record about 10 seconds of blank audio and copy it then open a new file and then just "paste insert a bunch of times. I held Ctrl-V for maybe 10 seconds and got maybe 500 seconds of audio
+Frank Lafreniere I was playing around with it some more and I can use it to record from line input source. I have a modded PLL digital tuning headset radio which I've added a line out jack for recording and was able to record into it as full CD stereo quality but you get like 7 seconds on mine for some reason. I just recorded a few seconds then copied then pasted into a new file but each time you need to reset the quality to CD stereo as it defaults to 22,050 16 bit mono but it works. Kind of a pain in the ass though. I love my GoldWave.
