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!