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

[Music] hello and welcome today i would like to show you one very rare sound card what is so interesting about it this combination of the ad-lib logo in the left lower corner and the year 1995 is what makes it quite exciting everybody knows about the first ad lib music synthesizer card from the year 1987 which became the most used sound standard in games of dos era most of you will also know that creative borrowed the technology and practically destroyed adlib later as it was trying to get their adlib gold onto the market i will not go into details now since clint from lgr already covered this topic perfectly and if you are good in russian artur from old robots also made a very good video about it i will put both links into the description but in this video i would like to take a look at what happened after the adlib gold fiasco to that company the information is parsed to be honest but as edlip went bankrupt canadian government acquired the company to save it from creative's clause first later adlib was sold to the german company bin lastega which renamed adlib incorporated into adlib multimedia and launched the adlib golson card as well as many other products then in the year 1994 ad-lib multimedia was sold again now to soft world taiwan and the name ad lib disappeared from the western market more or less completely however ad-lib multimedia continued its existence on asian market for a while and mainly produced oem products for computer manufacturers but retail products could also be formed from time to time however they were super rare during my short investigation i stumbled upon this website which presents a nice collection of different sound cards and also multiple ad-lib cards can be found among them there is the original ad-lib card and also some clones from the late 80s but also the new models which were released in the middle of or even in the second half of 90s obviously from around the time where ad-lib was already sold to softworld taiwan let's take a look for example at this asp 64 wave pro 4d ide beside the impressive naming we can see that this card was sold in germany for 240 deutsche mark texas not included the listed features seem to be very impressive the card is based on the crystal cs4232 chip which provides excellent compatibility with the soundblaster pro 2.0 and windows sound system it supports ad pcms on codec mpu401 has no dma clicking and no hanging node bugs funny enough its fm implementation is quite far from the yamaha chip which was used on the original ad-lib card from 1987. so if the asb-64 has no dedicated yamaha chip on board this sound card will not sound like the original on the other hand the sound card has outstanding dream sam 9233 wavetable processor paired with four megabytes sound sample rom and should provide some decent general midi sound let's take a look at the card itself the card has no wavetable header but the general midi circuitry is on board it has an interesting proprietary connector in the middle named adlib media connector which could be used for modem or other advanced cars as i already assumed it has no yamaha fm chip that is a pity but in the second half of 90s opl3 sound became obsolete and many manufacturers didn't bother however it's funny to see an ad leap card without proper opl sound unfortunately i don't possess this card and this video is actually about a different one so why am i showing this to you you might ask well i just wanted to share with you one interesting observation which i made during my investigation if you saw my video about pro audio spectrum you maybe remember that i said that at least until the end of 90s the quality was not a selling point of creative labs they built their business completely around the price the cards were made as cheaply and sold as expensive as possible but always slightly cheaper than the opponents this strategy wiped out all the high quality products from the market and companies like adlib and mediavision didn't survive however looking at the image of this card made me smile for a second despite that ad lib was already dead actually they couldn't betray themselves and continued to make high quality products take a look at the edge connector do you see this black colored surface here it is a ground lane inside of the pcb do you remember how i explained the difference between a bed and a good pcb in my video about the pro audio spectrum such a black colored edge connectors on the sound cards are almost always a guarantee for a good audio quality due to improved shielding as i realized that the ad lib was maybe not just a famous name but probably still made some good quality products in the late 90s i was even more curious about taking a closer look at one of their later products adli produced various products at that time from the high-end asb64 which i already mentioned to less high-end products most of which remained unknown and this is where this little card comes into play a member not a line from the german dos reloaded community kindly borrowed me this card some time ago so let's take a closer look and see what it offers first of all the card's official name is asp-16 and it was made by adlib multimedia incorporated in the year 1995. interesting is that it still says made in canada although at this point in time the company name was obviously already sold to soft world taiwan just like the previously mentioned asb64 this sound card was also built around the same crystal cs 4232 chip and as i already said it provides outstanding sound blaster pro 2.0 compatibility but unlike the asb-64 this one has also the original yamaha ymf-262 chip which provides genuine opl3 sound this makes the asb-16 to a really good option for the good old dos games beside the genuine opl3 this sound card provides also a wavetable header and full mpu for one compatibility so it can be used with any wavetable add-on module to enable general midi support on the left there is this white connector which looks like an ide header but it isn't this is a proprietary ad-lib multimedia connector which can be used for modem and other add-ons however during my investigation i didn't find any traces of such a dawn cards which could be bought back in the days i'd be curious to know more about it so please write into the comments if you can supply me with some information on the back side there is a label ad-lib multimedia ad-lib asp-16 special edition as you can see there is a quite large ground plane on the back of the pcb if you saw my video about the pro audio spectrum you will remember that the bigger the ground lanes the better the shielding and eventually the sound quality well this card has obviously no multi-layer pcb and so no ground plane inside and there is unfortunately also no ground plane behind of the cs423 chip but the ground lane behind of the mixer and amplifier circuits is not bad so i think that there is a good chance that this sound card's output quality is at least not bad furthermore look how it has almost no electrolytic capacitors except these two all the others are tantalum caps they are more expensive which is a sign of quality as well since tantalum caps are more precise and they don't dry after many years so they keep a better and more constant quality over the years however they tend to explode in flames sometimes which can be very exciting as well so let's summarize what we have so far probably a good quality sound cards with outstanding sound blaster pro 2.0 compatibility original opl3 synthesizer wavetable header and full mpu for one compatibility sounds like a dream card for a dos gaming machine right and i didn't mention the best feature of all yet this on card has an 8 bit i7 edge connector means that it can be used in any machine down to an xt this makes it pretty much amazing finding a sound card with these features is quite hard there are some 16-bit cards which would work in an 8-bit iso slot as well but an originally manufactured 8-bit card in this quality with full soundblaster pro compatibility and wavetable header is pretty darn rare the limitation of the 8-bit interface only is that you are obviously limited to rqs 5 and 7 as well as dmas 1 and 3. all the higher resources are located on the 16-bit ice extension and so unavailable for this card but i don't see it as a real problem anyway okay another theory let's give it a try as i got this card i was told that the fm sound seems not to work but let's do it step by step first of all drivers this on card is plug and play and has to be activated per software unison works just fine here not much to say as you see sb16 was detected sunblaster at the port 220 windows sound system at 534 by the way this is an interesting one crystal cs4032 officially has support for the windows sound system what unisound obviously knows and activates however window sound system needs full 16 bit data bus to work properly and it will not work on this sound card i made some tests and the silence confirmed my assumption so this card must be limited to soundblaster pro 2.0 only let's give it a first try in the decent setup utility as you hear digital sound works perfectly in stereo but we have no fm music indeed to confirm it i started some other games but there i got no fm as well okay let's grab an oscilloscope and make some measurements as you see the cards in the iso slot is faced away from me and it is not very handy to poke around with an oscilloscope like that therefore i have a trick which i am using quite often i'm using such an angled razor card it is a normal point for point connection razer card which you could find in thousands of desktop pcs back then nothing special about it then i use a piece of paper for isolation to prevent anything from shorting out and then i plug the cards i want to test into the razor slot this way the card is looking upright and i easily can access all the ics okay i will let the decent setup utility play some opl3 music and see if there is some signaling happening on the ymf 262 chip first of all power this seems to be good and we are getting 5 volts now let's check the chip select signal which enables the ymf-262 it is pin 8 and we should see some rapid triggers there and as you see there is nothing the signal remains at high all the time and the chip select is low active so the chip gets never activated let's see where the chip select trace is going to here it goes from the pin 8 bypasses the resistor r99 and disappears on the other side of the pcb here it comes through a vaya and goes to the ad-lib multimedia header that is strange because it has to go to the cs4232 somehow but if you look at the pins nearby they do actually go into the direction of the cs4232 indeed on the front there is indeed a jp1 inscription near the first pin where the chip select trace is going to it looks very strange but the first pair of pins seem to be a jumper and belongs not to the adlib multimedia connector let's give it another try again the fm music in decent setup utility is running let's see if we get some activity on that pins and what you look at that there is obviously some activity which looks like the chip select signal we are searching for let's add a jumper and see what we get and we have music [Music] and some activity on the pn8 of the opl3 chip as well that looks right now but really irritating with a jumper directly near their connector maybe the jumper had to be removed if an add-on card had to be installed who knows i really don't know since i didn't find any examples of such an add-on card by a closer look i found that the second pin of the ymf 262 goes to the second pair of pins on the connector the jumper can be set there as well but the second pin on the ymf 262 is irq and is actually optional i might be wrong but as far as i know it was not used by any software back in the days so it shouldn't make any difference if the second jumper is set or not anyway only one jumper was missing and now the sound card seems to be fully functional it doesn't make a lot of sense to compare the fm sound of this card since it is very same opl3 chip which was used on the original sound blaster for 2.0 [Music] all i would like to say is that it sounds great i couldn't hear any noise from the data bus and the sound is quite clean in prince of persia i couldn't hear any dma clicking and the digital sound was also very clean as i already have shown in decent setup utility the stereo sound works also flawlessly also pcm codec in duke nukem 2 works just fine [Music] [Music] so [Music] off-camera i tested this sound card with a wave table in general midi mode and that works also absolutely fine unfortunately i didn't capture that but i think that my wave tables deserve a separate video anyway all in all this is one very nice sound card for a dos gaming pc i am absolutely convinced that it deserves to have adlib logo on it and it is a really nice product maybe on the first side it is nothing special and has the same features as countless other cs4232 base sound cards like this crystal magic s32 for example however on the second side its quality the combination of the 8-bit iso interface sound blaster pro 2.0 compatibility and a wave table header make it quite unique and last but not least maybe an interesting point for the collectors among us it is one of the last products made by edlin the company which actually started the gaming sound revolution on apc after all and which gifted us with years of childhood fm's own happiness and i hope you liked this overview please don't forget to leave your feedback and i say thank you and goodbye

Channel: Necroware

Views: 14,251

Keywords: retro, hardware, soldering, repair, review, nerd

Id: IZ1-Z0hCIH8

Length: 17min 3sec (1023 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021