Seeing old hardware being restored is better then most ASMR videos on RU-vid =) Keep up the amazing work, I really enjoy watching, and learning from you!
Repair neglated and worthless old hardware just for the challenge and satisfaction when seeing it running again? I'm totally sold for this kind of content. Great work!
I absolutely love watching your repair videos. Salvaging the parts from the destroyed PCB, and then adding the amplifier circuitry as well to the restored card was really fascinating. It is so satisfying to see something turn from scrap to an almost new looking fully functional piece. Your repair skills are incredible.
@@necro_ware had a voodoo 2 with a halfway torn off TMU chip yesterday, desoldered the chip, straightened all ~160 pins and resoldered it. Guess what: To my surprise, it was working again! Those old hardware-bits are as hard to destroy as a terminator! Except harddisks ...
@@necro_ware yes, totally forgot this was from you. Great work 👍 I'm always happy to see people do such kind of low level repairs and safe old hardware from the dumpster!
Awesome job! Transplanting the whole amplification circuit was something else. I do like the sound of the card actually, it's different, sometimes better sometimes worse but we should definitely not just preserve the mainstream stuff. And the extra "guitar" distortion in Doom was excellent actually.
Thank you and good job as always. Love the fact that you repaired it just for the challenge. I was surprised how good (but different) it was sounding in the end.
After watching the channel of someone who salvages scrap metal for a living, I'm now on a mission to buy up as many gold plated components as I can for my own personal projects. I'm doing a lot of stuff with Motorola 68k family CPUs, so I've got myself some gold/ceramic 68020s and 68882s. And since I built a VGA card just recently, I picked up a tube of INMOS G171 RAMDACs in gold/ceramic as well. Saved from destruction and put back to use. A bit less gold going to the scrappers. :-)
That's cool, because I remember Doom as it sounded on the Analog Devices card. Even after all this time, I can tell the difference. I had a Media Vision ProAudio Spectrum 32 sound card.
Great job, glad you managed to save one of them! I'll never understand the scrappers getting 1 cent of gold out of a 20 dollar (or sometimes 200 dollar) retro card... I actually like the FM synth, it's different, but good different unlike some really bad ones. Sorta kinda want one of these now... But from now on, when testing FM synth devices... MONKEY ISLAND! ;)
Even worse, a couple of years ago an Arcade went out of business and some idiots broke in and smashed *everything*. The Simpsons Arcade machine would've brought a couple thousamd Euros, smashed for a few cents worth of copper and the fun of destroying stuff. And there were over 100 machines in there.
@@senilyDeluxe wow, stuff like that really makes me mad. I know you shouldn't wish for bad things to happen to someone.. but sometimes it's hard not to.
Very good intro design, it was a good idea and it's funny. The music you use in the background is pretty cool too. You did a great job restoring the sound card. Congratulations.
It's always surprising how much abuse hardware can take and still be repairable. Trying to cut the connectors off for the tiny amount of gold plating on them is really stupid though, I didn't know people did that. Also I know exactly what you mean about making videos about repairing things taking more time than the repair itself! It's really hard cutting down hours of soldering and fiddling about into something people will spend more than five minutes watching.
The FM sound of TT1816-S is clearly different from OPL, but it still sounds nice. I've heard much worse implementations of FM sound, especially on cheap PCI sound cards from later era...
Thank you for sharing this video. It turned out really great: commendable intention to save the card, good work and really nice music. Very satisfying. Great job. But it is a bit unfortunate you can't share all the repairs with us. It is understandable that cutting and releasing videos is time consuming. But I (we) will very appreciate if you could ,say, film more repair videos and then group them in one cutting/editing batch to save some time. It could be like repair-a-thon video. But thanks anyway.
More... More... Moooooore :-) I do repair some stuff in this way too... I should start a channel too... Maybe in portuguese, there is not much content in Portuguese :-)
In my opinion, the best way to experience a sound comparison between two separate cards would be to mix the two stereo outputs of each of the cards individually into mono, then mixing them together, synchronized together and hard panned to stereo for the video. Say, the reference card's mono output on the left, and the comparison card on the right, for a split screen, split audio showdown. Not one RU-vid retro tech channel I've seen have done so yet. Great for those of us with two working ears.
As I said in the video, comparing those cards was not the main point. I just found it interesting to mention, that there is a definite difference between Yamaha OPL3 and AD implementation.
@@necro_ware That's fine. Just thought I'd throw out the idea, since that would have been a neat way to hear the difference. But it was a good video for your purposes.
Great video as always. I have the newer Terratec Base-1, with the AD1816AJS chip. I'm not sure if it has the same FM implementation, but it's the weak point of the card. It sounds off and kind of distorted in some games (regardless of volume). PCM playback (SB Pro compatible) is good though. The Base-1 has a wavetable connector as well.
I always find it amazing when someone takes something and restores it better than original, and you transplanting the amplification circuit from the donor card just thrills me! It makes me wonder what the unpopulated chip to the left of the crystal oscillator is?
I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's for the EEPROM, which can hold the settings over a reset and probably even to initialize the card without the need for a driver. At least this is how it works on many Aztech sound cards.
I remember doing a small gold finger mod for IRQ bank changing of a PCI sound card. Stupid Asus motherboard allocated same IRQ to every slot (bad mapping table in BIOS). After this, i could select any one of the four (A, B, C, or D). Oh, the fun times of custom IRQ mapping.
Well, FM + General Midi = Catastrophe. :-D However there are some soundtracks written exclusively for FM, and these sounds great, like Goblin 3. Anyway I like you chanel, it is something interesting about it, to bring back to life, these old HW. Keep doing good job.
Honestly, it sounds pretty good for FM guitars, especially Doom E1M1. Different from Yamaha's implementation, sure, but still pretty good. I wouldn't mind a playback program with the option to switch what FM chip it's emulating and let you hear what a given FM piece of music sounded like on different old cards.
Bravo on the save. :) It's strange that Analog Devices never made a big splash in PC sound. They very much know their DAC's and ADC's, and they've been doing it for a very long time. It wasn't very common, but AD also made some AC97 sound chipsets back in the P3/P4 days for motherboard integrated sound. Typically, you would see VIA AC97. Although, back in those days if you cared about your sound, you wouldn't be using the onboard sound anyways.
It was not only about the quality of the on-board sound. Also the performance suffered quite a lot, if you used an onboard sound chip. I made a video some time ago about AMD based Win XP gaming machine, take a look at that. In the end I compare the on-board sound chip to SB Live! and the performance difference is quite a lot.
It just sounds different. I don't hear it worse or better. Let's keep in mind that the Yamaha chip wasn't anything to write home about either ... NICE REPAIR.
Well, it's just that Yamaha was the original and all the others were reimplementations. So I guess it's natural, that people compare all the other versions to Yamaha. And if it sounds good or bad is a matter of taste. At least I like how AD sounds and I didn't expect it before the repair.
I really like resurrections of dead hardware. Glad to see this was a success. This video also gives me some confidence in the ADI based card that I bought. Two questions though: 1) Would that card work in an 8-bit ISA slot at all (in an XT class PC)? 2) Could we get more videos like this one?
Thank you. 1) Is a good question, may be it is even possible with some limitations. I guess, I have to try... 2) I always make the sort of videos, which I like myself. Since I like such restorations, probably I'll do more in the future. But it will be more a mixed bag. Some restorations, some repairs, some introduction of my own hardware. So, stay tuned ;)
@@Jim_Bo I'm not sure, if the card will initialize without 16-bit expansion. It makes some P'n'P stuff to get it up and running, so I don't know. I'll make a test and report.
I actually like it more than the original OPL3, it's less harsh. It sounds nice :) Never quite understood all the fuss about OPL3, maybe it was just the most widespread? Didn't catch those times by just a few years, but I'm now interested in retro stuff and I'm wondering why everyone likes OPL3 so much. Other stuff just sounds better to me.
I definitely prefer the AD synth to the OPL3. Personally, of all the PC Yamaha synth chips, the OPNA on the PC-9801-86 sound board for the NEC PC-98 series (also found built-in to the PC-9821 A-Mate and C-Mate machines) is the only one I really like.
Would love to try this myself since I also have a Terratec TT1816-S V1.0 sound card without amplifier. Do you maybe have a component list, what parts need to be added where to make the magic happen? :)
I do like when OPL implementations sound different but not worse. A good candidate for that is the S3 sound card (yes S3 made a sound card, and it's not that bad). For the sound however I do hear the noise :p (is it the way you record old cards that creates noise ?)
I meant noise on the databus, as it was very usual on the ISA bus. But also the slight noise you can hear in the recording came unfortunately through the leveling in the video cutting software. The recordings were made with different cards and to make them sound more or less equally loud, I had to balance the sound. Unfortunately it introduced some slight distortion. It is totally not noticeable when you hear the card directly, even with good headphones.
Phil reviewed a similar card, Terratec Base-1, but that card had AD1816AJS chip. That card produced single DMA click in Prince of Persia. The card in this video has AD18max10JS and there're no clicks. Maybe it's been fixed in this revision?
Yeah...I have to agree with the sentiment that this soundcard's midi implementation sounds better than OPL3. To me it is better than my 440BX-2's YMF740C and ESFM on my AudioDrive and Solo-1/1e.
I know I'm super late to the party with my comment, but... When you have very rusty boards that you're trying to save, you can remove the rust very quickly with HydroChloric acid. (And then an immediate rinse with Lye (Caustic soda, or Sodium Hydroxide). It will immediately remove any ferrous rust. However, you need to be a tad careful, as a strong acid can also damage speakers and other things. As well, Lye will react with aluminum. HCl + NaOH = NaCl + H2O. So, if you've done your ratios right you end up with salty water. Now, after your Acid/Base wash, be sure to wash it thoroughly with plain water and then dry out the PCB. This method can get rid of fairly substantial rust.
Yes, thank you very much. I made a video about a similar topic some time ago. It was about neutralization of electrolyte with acid. However you have to take pretty strong acid to work again iron oxide (rust) and it can be dangerous for the copper traces on the PCB, since they are very glad to react first. I'd be very careful with that. If you are interested to take a look at that older video, here it is ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sVxqLBp6l1c.html
I actually love the sound of the AD. It feels like it matches the tone of DOOM better than the OPL3, it's punchier and less subdued. Maybe a bit worse in Duke Nukem.
I repair a lot of stuff just for fun and without a camera. It's always a hustle to work on something with a camera in your face. Sometimes, I just want to relax and do some repairs without having to think about light and camera position ;) But there will be definitely more restorations and repair videos in the future .... glad you liked it.
@@necro_ware yeah, totally understandable. I also do repairs for relax because my daily job has nothing to do with technology not to mention retro pcs. Besides, I did not consider this card bad even back in a day. Maybe because i had (well, my parents did) quite decent speakers attached, but I remember most of people having crappy unamplified speakers
@@necro_ware interesting, extra parts almost always mean more cost, so at least they had noise filtration on the part of the preamp at heart. Thanks for the answer 🙂
Awesome job bringing this worthless old sound card back to life. Repairs like these are my favourite; where stuff that isn't worth fixing is fixed anyway. Why not? As you say.
I'm really not sure how I feel about the sound of that card...I guess it's because the first two games you tried were ones I played since they released and I was a kid, and got used to certain sounds. Still interesting, though!
its missing the dynamic fade and sustain of the yamaha. probably cause its a cheaper chip with less features, perfectly playable tho. You get a similar thing in modern gaming with the pandora versions of arcade games, its not terrible, but you can tell it just sounds that wee bit different.
I would've soldered wires to the half-cut slot board and save both sound cards. I just have to be careful to select the machine to put it in, because once it's in, it's gotta stay in. Forever. (otherwise the board will break off and finishes destroying the damaged card) (I actually have some of these cards, some with amp, some without, some with 1816 chips, some with 18max10)
Then I'd have two cards in bad condition. I prefer to have one, which looks pretty and is reliable. But as I said, those cards are not valued by the retro enthusiasts, so you can get it for 1€ each in a stack :D I just made it for fun, not because I needed this card. And though I have it now in my collection...
