For anyone interested, the "Surround Module" is a Yamaha YM7128B. Even the official datasheet calls it a "surround processor" so that's probably why AdLib did also. It's actually a fairly simple chip. it has 16 audio taps (8 each for L/R channels), with customizable gain and delay times. It also only has a single feedback tap, which is why the "reverb" sounds so fluttery/echo-y. The reverb effect on an AWE32 or similar card is actually much better, but for 1992, this would have been the only game in town short of an expensive external midi module.
I wonder what else was on that surround board. Most of the chips on the AdLib Gold itself may be unobtainium, but the YM7128B definitely isn't... be pretty sweet to have a repro of even just that surround board still available.
@@Ikkepop depends ... i was listening to this kind of music on daily basis for half of 90's, because my brother loved it. It is burned in my memory, i cannot change it ;)
It makes me feel like I was around for a special time in the history of computing. Back in the days where it was just us nerds and gamers into these machines.
The video of the guy who ported this music is somewhere in youtube. He ported actual cd audio music into fm synth, its just amazing what he did. They had one of the rare boards sent to developers which is why they had this for Dune and some other game.
Very glad I listened to this in headphones. Those effects sound really good to me. The Stadium effect almost gave it a SNES vibe. Also this card would've been perfect to play Blake Stone Aliens of Gold with lmao
My ears and Philips headphones thank you. These sounded amazing. the 2nd last one gave me a vague memory of a game called Afterlife but only a few notes of it. Now I miss 80's to 90's PC music. As a fan of old school point and click games I had no idea Dune had one as well. Though it's a much older era than what I enjoy. That flight takeoff is super cool.
Doing a replay of DUNE is on my to-do list for my live streams. This game was so overshadowed at the time by DUNE II, but it was a really interesting management adventure game and yeah, that soundtrack is absolutely stellar.
Those were different types of games, the second most famously introduced the RTS genre, but this plays more like a simple adventure game. As a game itself is super easy, too easy in fact. Its almost like watching some movie i guess. What is impressive is how cool the music was ported to the Gold FM synth, because believe it or not, a real audio CD exists of this Dune music.
that's just a little 1270 LE CPLD. Doubt you could do anything this grand with it, like fitting a soft 8086 in it. Wouldn't be surprised if some wizard managed to, but I don't expect much from this one.
I don't think this kind of thing is that impressive anymore. A few years ago it was kind of an amazing fun fact. But at this point its true of like 95% of modern day retro cards, upgrades, remakes etc and has been for a few years. We're basically at the point where its more notable when they use something less powerful.
I miss the days when good soundcards were something sought after as much as graphics cards. Nowadays, most people, at best, just plug headphones into a cheap USB DAC and call it a day when gaming. I miss the good ole days sometimes.
Because the sound chip built into motherboards these days are good already, unless you need special ports or specific functionality or something, theres just really no reason to get a sound card in a modern pc (especially for gaming, as for some reason motherboard manufacturers seem to have developed an aversion to putting more then 1 pcie slot)
God I love that OPL sound, it reminds of me a child playing the Sega Genesis and PC DOS Games, it has this gritty, dirty quality to it, and it doesn't feel like it aged at all, as opposite to something like the SNES (or many other wavetable based synth systems from the period) which has low bitrate samples as basis for it's instruments, they sounded impressive at the time bud aged so badly. No reverb will ever save a low bitrate sample, it will always just sound like its playing from under a blanket.
So the surround worked on my home theater system. The songs were coming through all sides on surround. When dropped to mono it only came out the center. Neat stuff. Great tunes! It's like Carpenter Brut.
I think Adlib's marketing team really did a disservice to this by just calling it a "surround" module instead of really pushing the DSP functionality. If theyd made it clearer how much it actually did, it might have sold better back in the olden times
They didn't do much to sell the card period unfortunately. As mentioned Creative was the Microsoft / 800 pound gorilla they were up against. Sad really since one would figure the success of the first card could be dumped into more marketing. But eh...
Quality means little if you not have promotion, many companies went under with better quality things over the lesser qualified but better promoted ones.
I've managed to pass all tests on a Pentium 75. The surround module is the most speed sensitive, without it would work with something like VIA C3 downclocked to around 300 MHz.
Great sound from the 486 era. I wish IBM or Microsoft would come out with an updated DOS 9.0, just for 386 and up machines and adding USB 3.2 driver support.
@@christophero1969 : Honestly, at this point wanting a new DOS from IBM or Microsoft is just unreasonable. Looking to things like FreeDOS is the right choice.
@@absalomdraconis No... IBM ALREADY HAS THE CODE for 2003 servers. IBM would just have to recompile the code for 32-bit architecture and add modern USB and LARGE DISK SUPPORT. I have used FreeDOS, and NOPE, JUST Nope.
I really noticed the effects on my kenwood and pioneer speakers and receiver hardware really brings out the sound even have push buttons to bring effects as well no need for a card for that but the cards filled a void back in those days
@@Njuregen I still do. There is this thing called fluidsynth which can take any .sf2 files for midi samples so its nearly the same as having a midi module back, as long as the midis don't use SysEx which they rarely do, sound identical. For Example Doom music composed for the SC-55 sounds the same with a certain file called Scc1t2.sf2. Older windows used to provide a soft midi "device" with a subset of these very same samples, so its a very familiar sound for the old games. I believe there are ways for ScummVM and dosbox to use fluidsynth or similar one way or another. There are a bunch of Sierra/Lucas/etc midis out there, with like the whole score of the game in a single midi, you can play that and get half hour orchestral music in a minuscule 200k .mid file.
@@mrb5217 Yeah that's how it should have been, and actually was. Then came the cheaters who uses pre-programmed "instrument sets" for "midi like" use. Eww. Even Sierra, Lucas and others went this route, compose for like Sound Canvas and the rest whatever degraded result can get. Kinda like designing for VGA and let the lower cards display what they can which resulted in awful results compared to the "properly designed for" for the lesser types but less dev time i guess. Microsoft didn't help either by treating synth devices like midi doing the same.
The surround function definitely enables and disables music coming from the rear speakers af my Dolby pro logic receiver. Mono only comes out of my center channel.
That’s fun. Pro Logic is an interesting way of encoding it into stereo. It makes sense they’d do that on a high end sound card. (Pro Logic predates the Gold right? I’m pretty sure it does but I cba checking.)
@@initial_kd I’m aware of the evolution, just don’t have the dates memorised! I was thinking they must’ve been expecting the sound card to be plugged into your receiver. 1987 predates the Gold so it must be deliberate rather than an accident of a phasing effect.
Oh my goodness a brand new pristine and gorgeous looking Ad Lib Gold Clone and I freaking love it and it's about time that someone make a Ad Lib Gold Clone since the Original Genuine Ones are hideously expensive. So yeah I'm super excited to see a clone of one of the most Super Rare Soundcard of the 90's which is of course the Ad Lib Gold.
These sounds are so nostalgic! So many games from the day used the Adlib features of the SB, that I can't hear the adlib without remembering so fondly every PC game from that era!
It would be awesome to have one of these to record all the sample tracks in FLAC as cleanly as possible Or if someone could do that and upload the flacs....
yeah, that pseudo-"surround" effect was a bit of a thing for a while well before real surround stuff was more widely practical, I believe Impulse Tracker contained a similar effect, i think it is just some kind of stereo-"phased" reverb, but can def sound fairly uniquely interesting.....)
lol listening to this on a evga nu audio and its like a blast from the past. sound cards are not dead. it sounds 10,000% better than my onboard, so much more fidelity and clarity.
That is the best ive ever heard adlib sound, excellent sound card, direct capture and upload quality. If you were inclined to rip and upload the adlib test tracks and Dune before you sent it back, we would be forever in your debt.
Part of me wants to call this thing the Adlib Pyrite. Not as catchy as GoldLib, but very thematically appropriate since Iron Pyrite is Fool’s Gold and this is a clone (ie fake) Adlib Gold.
I can tell through RU-vid that that is the best sounding card Ive heard. The FM tones have such shape and each tonne exist in its own space. I personally do not care for the surround module. It's a funtouch though. I'm very upset I missed out on this.
Wow it uses a fpga, I wonder what would it take for making something compatible that is not that expensive. It's like the vampire cards for the amiga or the raspberry pi replacements that are more powerful than the actual pc.
Really takes me back to the days I was a kid. All this was New and everything was looking up and up. Now I just get depressed cause everything is moving towards an I am Ran and 1984 dystopian derp. The Days when Disk space was sparse and everyone was trying to cram everything on floppys when Midi was king.
That is one cool soundcard, shame it doesn't exist... anymore... I don't even run early era 486 type stuff... (my 90s stuff is Mac, I kinda dig AGP across the board, my pile gets more PCs after 2002-3...) I keep thinking about DOS gaming - as I emulate it across platforms, but I've never had a native one. And, this card made me consider it more seriously. Even if I can't have it. Sigh.
Oh man...that thing's ability to produce deep bass! Wow! The soundtrack for Dune is glorious on these cards! I so want that music uploaded from one of these cards!
While I love this old hardware and adlib was cool in a lot of ways. In no way would I go out of my way buying one of these. It is pretty neat, but thanks for sharing the awesomeness of the card. It does look pretty cool, but I would never be able to put it to good use. I mean it was videos like these that made me appreciate good opl3 playback. I was never that big of a fan back in the day of midi, but I occasionally would have friends who would find midi music and we'd share them and listen to them. I mean I love a good sound card, but i'm glad there are collectors out there who let us see this stuff with out having to waste hundreds or thousands on something obsolete.
Ah, the Adlib Gold... back in the day it solved a problem no one needed solved. By the time Creative had the sound blaster cards out with proper pcm as well as fm synth, Adlib had lost the war. The name Adlib was already too closely tied to "it has music, but not sound samples" for games, and most people wouldn't understand what this card brought to the table at the ridiculous price it costed.
Are you kidding? This was done before the SB16, but Creative played dirty with Yamaha and starved Adlib of the chips until their product was out in large quantities first. There was also the Gravis Ultrasound, a completely different approach, its a PCM multichannel board, tracker music style which is the same thing the SNES did but with better quality of course. That made much more sense than "SoundFonts" in midi, but eventually CPUs were strong enough to do everything in software with a regular pcm stereo output. Before the SB Live! there was a much superior product from another rival that Creative bought into oblivion, this was a 4 channel with real samplerate oscillation change, not do all at 48khz and resample the rest realtime like they did with their inferior but better marketed product SBLive. It was the Ensoniq AudioPCI. Heck, even Roland put out a midi board with pcm, the RAP-10. You would normally just use Sound Blaster + Sound Canvas, but alas, that didn't took off and it was a dead end as well (the Sound Canvas was simply a read only sample library for midis). Finally AC97 and their current modern equivalent finished Creative for good, nobody needs them anymore. Only a few discrete sounds boards exist for professional multichannel use, with chips from VIA, etc, but Creative is just gone.
I recognize Highway2! An evolution of Highway from the old Adlib Jukebox program from the early/mid-80s. I gotta say though, compared to other options contemporaneous with this thing, adding all this post-processing to OPL is kinda like putting lipstick on a pig....
We had an Adlib Gold back in 93 in our first PC, an AMD 386 DX40. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered the decent support for it in Dune 2 including voice samples, but always wanted a soundblaster due to better game support. The card went who knows where when we updated to a Pentium 100, possibly got scrapped some time after 😔
Sounds and looks really cool this card... but now I'm really wondering if I should get the Orpheus-II card... it's a bit expensive too but damn, it's so tempting
Give the AdLib Gold clones a few years and they're going to be worth $2k soon enough. They'll not get all the way up to a real deal ALG card, but they're going to get close in price. Impressive little piece of kit. I love watching these videos. As a kid playing on a 486, I remember wondering what some of the settings would be like. Hercules cards were a bit of a disappointment to see IRL.
I have used computers in music production for many many years starting out with the Amiga 1000 and the Atari Falcon and then on to PC, one of the great things about the sound card era was that you could get Pro Audio cards intended for music production with excellent quality DAC's and DSP chips although I used my outboard effects rack more than the DSP ones, the card I used was an M Audio DMP2 with an Omnia I/O expansion card which provided lots more stereo audio channels but now we have to buy outboard units that are much more expensive even accounting for inflation over the years, thats progress for you! For my gaming I had a little rompler type GM synth (outboard) unit who's name I cant recall for the life of me, it was quite popular for gaming at the time if my memory serves me well, if anyone can remember the name of this unit then please reply.
If you mean the daughter-boards for like the Sb16/32, Roland made SCB-7 (GM) SCB-15 (GS). Basically the SC-55 module in a board. Yamaha did some XG too. Creative had their own later integrated to their boards with fancy names like awe32/64 and things like that.
I'm thinking that Pseudo setting (perhaps others too) might sound pretty cool on a surround receiver in Pro Logic mode. Maybe someone can watch this video through one and confirm (I stopped caring about surround sound at home at one point and don't have a setup any more, although I do miss it sometimes)
