Hello, and welcome back to The 8-Bit Guy. In this episode, I have a few different replica
sound cards, that I think you’re going to find really interesting. So, let’s take a look! The first card I want to take a look at today
is this replica of the Ad-Lib card. Now you might ask, why would anyone want to
clone an Ad-Lib card? If you take a look at eBay, you’ll see that
right now there’s only one original Ad-Lib card for sale right now. It’s in Canada and it has 7 days left on
the auction and already it’s bid up pretty high. What’s worse is this one is even listed
as untested, so they won’t even guarantee the card works. And if you go back and look at completed listings
to get an idea what these things have actually sold for, well, this top one here for $100
is actually another clone. I don’t know if it is the same clone I have
here, but the next two in the list are the real things and this one sold for $360 and
the next one sold for $450. So genuine Ad-Lib cards are very rare these
days, and very expensive. Since the card isn’t that complicated and
all of the parts are still available today, it sort of makes sense why people are cloning
it. Now, this clone looks really nice, but there
are some differences I will point out. First off all, one dead giveaway that it is
a clone is that all of the chips are socketed. I don’t think any real Ad-Lib cards had
socketed chips. Also, the original Ad-Lib came with a larger
style headphone jack, like this. But later models did move to the smaller one,
so this clone is, if anything, just replicating the later models. I’m going to be using this computer to test
the card in. Now, I borrowed this from DJ. This is just an AMD K6 clone machine from
probably the late 1990s. And the reason I’m borrowing this is because
the only machines I have in the house that have the ISA style connector in them, is my
old Tandy 1000 and it runs at 4.77 Mhz. So, it’s really not fast enough to properly
demonstrate some of the software I’m going to want to show you. So, this will work fine! Instead of a hard drive, I’ve got most everything
I need loaded onto this Compact Flash card. And I’m just going to pop that into this
little IDE adapter thing-a-ma-jig. And it just goes right down into one of the
IDE controller slots, like that. And next I’ll insert the Ad-Lib replica
and we’ll see if it works. I’m going to load up one of my favorite
games, Ultima VI. I’ll run the setup first and I’ll select
video mode, VGA, do I have a Microsoft Mouse.. actually, at the moment I don’t, so I’ll
say no. And here we go.. sound card setup, I’ll
select Ad-Lib Synthesizer Card. You may notice a note down here at the bottom
that says All Sound Effects are heard through your PC Speaker. This is because this game only plays music
with the sound cards, no matter which card you select, and still relies on the internal
speaker for sound effects. Anyway, let’s fire it up. It sounds like it’s working to me! I’m going to skip ahead to one of my favorite
Ad-Lib tunes. Of course, in the actually game play here
you can only hear the music and no sound effects because I’m recording directly from the
sound card and all of the sound effects are coming from the PC speaker. OK, well, moving along, I want to show you
another fascinating card. Now this is another replica of an even more
rare sound card. It’s based on the innovation SSI 2001. Now if you’ll notice the main socket here
is empty, but it is labelled that it needs a 6581 chip. Well, that’s the SID chip from the Commodore
64. This replica card doesn’t actually come
with a SID chip, however any SID chip should work, so I’m just going to borrow the SID
chip right out of my Commodore 64. So, where did this obscure sound card originally
come from? The first mention of this card can be found
in the 1987 release of the game GunShip by Microprose. In the README file it says Support has been added for the MicroProse
Sound Board - "The Entertainer". Presence of the board is detected by the program
and enhanced sound is automatically generated. Only two games are known to support this card,
and that is GunShip itself and also Sid Meier’s Pirates! Of course, with later copies of these games,
support was removed along with any mention of the card. It is believed this card was never officially
sold. Which is too bad, because in 1987 the only
established sound card for PCs had been the Tandy 1000’s integrated 3-voice sound system
which had come to the market in 1984. But up to this point, most regular IBM and
compatible machines had to make due with the little 1 voice PC speaker. 1987 was kind of the year when all of that
changed because that’s also the year the Ad-Lib card came to market, along with the
Game Blaster. And yes, that’s right. That was actually a card that came out before
the Sound Blaster that everyone has heard of. As well as the Roland MT-32. However, 2 years later in the August edition
of Compute! Magazine, you can see the Innovation Sound
Standard mentioned here. It says that The Commodore 64 has always outplayed
Big Blue and it’s pals with its sound-synthesis chip. It also says that the board was developed
jointly by Innovation Computer and MicroProse, which makes sense. And, as you can see, the Innovation card would
have been very price competitive at $129. However, apparently it was often on sale with
coupons directly from Innovation for as little as $69. Again, making this a very attractive deal. The trouble is, in those days any piece of
hardware you wanted to use, such as a video card or a sound card had to be directly supported
by each and every piece of software you wanted to use. There was no such thing as sound drivers back
in the day to give your sound card a universal software interface to other software. So, the key to making your hardware a success
was to get lots of software developers on board to support your device. Well, Innovation apparently failed in this
regard. One possible explanation is because the card
was directly supported by MicroProse, other software developing companies might have considered
supporting this card to be supporting their competition. But, another more likely explanation is they
were just simply to late to the market. Had this card actually showed up in 1987 in
full force with full marketing, it might have stood a chance. Still, there are a handful of games that support
it. If you go to MobyGames, and type in innovation
you can click on the sound card type here and it will show all compatible games with
this sound card. And there are only 13 listed. What’s worse, I downloaded all of these
games and found that only about half of them actually had support. Meaning that support was probably removed
in later releases, or that the copies that wound up being archived on abandonware sites
may have simply had the neccessary files removed. However, there are still a few I can show
you. But first I’ll need to borrow the SID chip
from my Commodore 64. Here we go, I’ll just pull this out. And I’ll stick that right down in there. I also wanted to mention the original card
could only support the 6581, but this card can actually support the later 8580 SID chip
as well, which runs at a different voltage and sounds somewhat different. And you may notice right there by my thumbnail,
there’s a little jumper wire. So to use the later chip you would need to
cut that and replace it with a transistor and some other changes. OK, let’s remove the Ad-Lib replica card
and replace it with the SSI replica. Now, I’m going to run the setup again for
Ultima 6. And this time I’m going to pick option 6,
for Innovation. I can tell the music is a little different
probably due to only having 3 voices. Let’s skip to the next song. While this sounds a million times better than
the PC-Speaker, I gotta say the Ad-Lib version still sounds much better. So, back to the Innovation card for a moment,
here’s the actual gameplay. Again, music only because the sound effects
are coming from the PC-speaker. Let’s look at another game. This is Bad Blood, which is another Origin
game and also supports the Innovation card. The music is ok, I guess. But it’s relatively underwhelming. The game itself also has no sound effects,
just music with this card. One thing I wondered about is if the actual
C64 version of the game sounded exactly the same, since it is the same sound chip. So, I download the C64 version and tried it
out. The music is actually totally different, and
I’d go so far as to say much better. In an ironic twist, the C64 version has no
music at all during gameplay and instead has sound effects, which is totally backwards
from the MS-DOS version. Here’s another game called Battletech, the
crescent hawk’s revenge. Interestingly in the setup, you can choose
your graphics card, so I’ll pick VGA. And for music device, they actually do not
list the innovation card at all. But for the sound device selection, they do
list Innovation here. So, let’s try it out. Yeah, so apparently it only uses the SID chip
for digital sound samples, not at all for music. Well, let’s try something else.. This is a DOS program designed to play actual
C64 SID tunes over an SSI card. Let’s try Commando. OK, let’s try Ultima 5.. I know the filename says 6, but it’s really
5. And here’s Monty on the Run. OK, well, this all works just fine. OK, let’s pull the card out for a moment
and then let’s pull the 6581 chip out. I want to try something else. This is a SwinSID ultimate. It’s a modern replacement for a SID chip. It’s actually a microcontroller that emulates
the SID. This is a really amazing little piece of engineering
here. It’s too bad that nobody can actually produce
real SID chips anymore. So this is the closest we can get. Well, let’s stick this down in here. This isn’t what it this chip was designed
to work in, but I’ll still be interested to see if it works. So let’s power on the computer. Interesting.. It made a little ding sound on power up. I wonder if it will do that in the C64 as
well. Anyway, here goes Ultima 6 again. Well, other than the volume being a bit lower,
I can’t actually tell any difference here. Let’s try the introduction music. Yep, sounds about the same. OK, let’s try the SID player again. Everything sounded pretty normal except for
Monty on the Run. There’s something wrong with the percussion
track. Let me demonstrate this in Audacity. So here’s the real SID version…… And this is the SwinSID version. You can hear some of the percussion track
is missing. So, what we need to do with this guy next
is try it in the real Commodore 64 and see how it works there. OK, so here’s an interesting piece of trivia
for you. As you can see, the computer appears to be
working, however, if you’ll notice, there is no SID chip. So, the C64 will actually boot without it,
it just won’t have any sound. But also certain other things may not work,
such as games that use paddles, programs that use random numbers from the SID chip, or old
modems like these, which actually use the SID chip to produce the DTMF tones for dialing
phone numbers. Anyway, let’s go ahead and stick the SwinSID
ultimate down in there, and see what it does. Interesting, it does make that same chime
sound when powering on. Let’s try that again. Yep, does it every time! I guess that’s a good reminder that there
is a SwinSID inside. OK, well, let’s try something with music. Check out the little LEDs on the SwinSID. There are 3 of them, one for each voice. Well, that’s pretty cool. Let’s try something with some digitized
samples. Well, that seems to work just fine. I suppose what we should do next is try Monty
On the Run and see if it has the same problem as it did in the SSI card. Well, one noticeable difference is the tempo. Most likely because this is an NTSC machine,
and the version we heard earlier was probably emulating a PAL machine. The CPU speeds are slightly different on those,
resulting in music that runs at different speed. Anyway.. It appears to be working perfectly
here. So whatever problem it had must have been
related to timing or something in that SSI card. OK, so there’s a few other things I wanted
to say about the SwinSID ultimate. First of all, there’s some extra registers
that you can send some POKE commands to from your Commodore 64 that will change the emulation
from 6581 to over to the 8580 so if you like the sound of the other SID chip or whatever
software you’re using sounds better with the other SID chip then you can change this
to have whichever one you like. It also has some extra waveforms that the
original SID chip does not have, which, so far I don’t think any software has taken
advantage of. But in theory you can produce some other sounds. As for the Ad-Lib card, thought, I’m sure
some of the ebay sellers out there that are selling original Ad-Lib cards are probably
not thrilled about these clones, but I’m actually kind of glad they are out there,
because the original Ad-Libs are so rare and these give an opportunity for more people
to experience the original Ad-Lib hardware. Now, I use the term original a little bit
loosely here. I mean, it is all the same original hardware
you would have gotten on an original Ad-Lib card, it just happens to have been manufactured
more recently. So, I still would think that this is a more
or less original. And, of course, the same thing on the SSI
card. I mean, these are darned near impossible to
find, so I’m glad somebody is making a clone of those as well. And who knows, maybe some more future software
will support that. I hope you enjoyed seeing these replica sound
cards, and stick around for the next episode, and thanks for watching!
