EverythingIBM
Experienced Member
Hi folks, yep, I'm looking for an adlib gold. Give me any offers if you have one.
Thanks.
Keep in mind I'm in Canada.
Thanks.
Keep in mind I'm in Canada.
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Adlib Gold wanted
- Thread starter EverythingIBM
- Start date
EverythingIBM
Experienced Member
I'm still interested in this. Offers? Anyone?
Or are these as coveted as MCA soundblasters?
Or are these as coveted as MCA soundblasters?
Cloudschatze
Veteran Member
I'd like to think that someone, somewhere, has a warehouse full of NOS Ad Lib Gold cards, but as it stands, I can count the number of known owners on one hand.
Is there specific functionality that you're after, or would any GSS-compatible card fit the bill? If the latter, your options are the Cardinal SOUNDvision, or the original Tandy Sensation! system, both of which bear the Yamaha MMA chipset. In addition, the AudioTrix Pro is compatible with the Ad Lib Gold as far as music playback (FM) is concerned.
Is there specific functionality that you're after, or would any GSS-compatible card fit the bill? If the latter, your options are the Cardinal SOUNDvision, or the original Tandy Sensation! system, both of which bear the Yamaha MMA chipset. In addition, the AudioTrix Pro is compatible with the Ad Lib Gold as far as music playback (FM) is concerned.
gerrydoire
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Aug 25, 2008
- Messages
- 1,145
I haven't seen any Adlib Gold's on ebay for along long long time.
EverythingIBM
Experienced Member
It wouldn't have to be new and sealed (I'm *not* a collector as I use these for audio design, and recreational gaming). Collectors never break the seal and don't share with others the potential of what old electronics can do
The Adlib Gold has:
#1 Quality components & good filtering
#2 8-bit ISA support (8086!)
#3 the surround sound module (which I can absolutely forget about owning as I imagine it's rare?)
#4 It's an adlib gold! Something I've always thought of... a handful of DOS games still had it in the sound options even as late as 1996.
I'm just surprised there were no offers. I guess... everyone already threw them out "back in the day" and moved over to SB and SB-compatible cards. I know of some folks who *did* own one years ago.
A lot of electronics I own I have never purchased on ebay (contrary to the common belief, you can't get everything there... unfortunately). Literature, too.
Cloudschatze
Veteran Member
Well, I'd be happy to sell you mine for just $1.00. The "surround" module is $999,999 though, and I can only let this go as a pair...
Trixter
Veteran Member
I'm one of the people Cloudschatze is counting on one hand. I own two of these, one loose and another open-but-hopefully-complete-in-box. (I also have three IBM Music Feature cards, as well as an MSound Stereo, giving you four more reasons to hate me.) However, until I get the Sound Card Museum project up and running, and have the card fully documented, I'm unwilling to let either of mine go, sorry. And since the card is genuinely rare and interesting and desired, my cost would have to at least equal what I paid for them (over $100 each). And I don't even have the surround module!
The Gold does indeed sound very clear and clean, but there are other rare/quirky/interesting cards you can get your hands on more easily if you want to experiment. The PAS series is interesting in that one of the models (maybe more?) can be put into an 8-bit ISA slot and give you 16-bit 44.1Khz stereo sound. Later PAS cards had 3D in the name (Pro 3D Spectrum IIRC) and had a "surround" bit you could flip for some fake surround. Some clone cards could do all sorts of wacky emulation; I have an Aztech Sound Galaxy Gold (at least, I think that's the name) that can emulate the Covox/DisneySS. Some cards somehow manage to tap port 0x60 so they can route PC speaker sound through the card (and some Sound Blasters and other cards have a cable jack that plug into the motherboard for that). The Sound Blaster 16 ASP has a programmable DSP that can be used for realtime compression/decompression of ADPCM audio as well as "3D" QSound, although only one game supports the ASP that I know of, name escapes me at the moment. You can almost always find an MT-32 or an LAPC-1 on ebay now and then, and those will obviously add dimension to most games published from 1989 to 1993. For truly amazing General MIDI sound, you can still sometimes find the original Roland SCC-1 which not only defined the GMIDI standard but still remains one of the best-sounding cards for GMIDI (some of the MIDI files that actually use the extended GS instruments/commands sound pretty damn amazing). While high-end and not very compatible with games, the Turtle Beach Multisound has really great MIDI wavetable that should be heard at least once.
King of the "interesting" sound cards is the Gravis Ultrasound. Very wacky, very capable, very limited, very unlimited. It can produce simultaneously the very worst and the very VERY best sound you've ever heard, depending on how well the application programmers understood the card. Doom, Duke3D and Descent (and others) get small speed-ups with a Gravis card because it is capable of playing up to 32 digital channels out of its onboard wavetable RAM, giving the CPU some more time to render frames. You can put the Gravis into any 286 or higher that has a true NMI. If you put it in a 386 or higher, find yourself some demos that support the GUS and prepare to be amazed at what your old slow computer can do. (Bonus hint: You can get Doom (not Doom II) running at nearly the full framerate on a 386-40 by using a GUS and hitting F5 as soon as the game starts to throw it into low-res mode.)
Sometimes a very uninteresting/dull/plain card can be put to very interesting uses; for example, DOS-era MPC-era gaming, where the audio consists entirely of redbook audio tracks (even the interactive speaking parts). This is something that emulation still has some trouble getting right (namely, the sync is delayed/off/slips), but on real hardware it usually works. I have a Tandy 2500 sx-25 that has a CDROM interface card with stereo RCA jacks -- it's perfectly capable of playing Jones in the Fast Lane or Loom or Monkey Island (MPC edition) or INCA or any other redbook audio-based game with no sync issues whatsoever without needing a secondary sound card (although having a real sound card adds more dimension to those games).
And finally, if you want to give even a truly shitty card the opportunity to sound awesome, grab yourself some decent Amiga MODs (or .S3Ms, or .ITs, or .XMs) and fire up a decent modplayer (or better, the tracker that originally created them). A 386-25 can calculate 8 or more digital channels mixed together in decent quality realtime and then feed that to your crap SB clone. If you have a Tandy TL/SL/RL machine with the built-in DAC, "TANTRAKR" is an excellent modplayer that uses the DAC and even on an 8086 can play 4-channel MODs decently.
You can even have some fun with the Covox Speech Thing (and other LPT DACs like the Disney Sound Source). The Covox by itself isn't very interesting and also draws quite a bit of CPU when playing audio, but if you have the software that came with the Speech Thing, it gets more interesting. The software contains some interesting utilities including an 8:1 speech compression method that actually works (modified CVSD) as well as a 2:1 compression scheme that works very well with music. Don't have a Speech Thing? Build your own using a handful of resistors and some wire!
So yes, it is unfortunate that the Adlib Gold is somewhat of a holy grail when it comes to PC DOS-era soundcards, but that doesn't mean you can't explore some other dark corners of DOS audio.
The Gold does indeed sound very clear and clean, but there are other rare/quirky/interesting cards you can get your hands on more easily if you want to experiment. The PAS series is interesting in that one of the models (maybe more?) can be put into an 8-bit ISA slot and give you 16-bit 44.1Khz stereo sound. Later PAS cards had 3D in the name (Pro 3D Spectrum IIRC) and had a "surround" bit you could flip for some fake surround. Some clone cards could do all sorts of wacky emulation; I have an Aztech Sound Galaxy Gold (at least, I think that's the name) that can emulate the Covox/DisneySS. Some cards somehow manage to tap port 0x60 so they can route PC speaker sound through the card (and some Sound Blasters and other cards have a cable jack that plug into the motherboard for that). The Sound Blaster 16 ASP has a programmable DSP that can be used for realtime compression/decompression of ADPCM audio as well as "3D" QSound, although only one game supports the ASP that I know of, name escapes me at the moment. You can almost always find an MT-32 or an LAPC-1 on ebay now and then, and those will obviously add dimension to most games published from 1989 to 1993. For truly amazing General MIDI sound, you can still sometimes find the original Roland SCC-1 which not only defined the GMIDI standard but still remains one of the best-sounding cards for GMIDI (some of the MIDI files that actually use the extended GS instruments/commands sound pretty damn amazing). While high-end and not very compatible with games, the Turtle Beach Multisound has really great MIDI wavetable that should be heard at least once.
King of the "interesting" sound cards is the Gravis Ultrasound. Very wacky, very capable, very limited, very unlimited. It can produce simultaneously the very worst and the very VERY best sound you've ever heard, depending on how well the application programmers understood the card. Doom, Duke3D and Descent (and others) get small speed-ups with a Gravis card because it is capable of playing up to 32 digital channels out of its onboard wavetable RAM, giving the CPU some more time to render frames. You can put the Gravis into any 286 or higher that has a true NMI. If you put it in a 386 or higher, find yourself some demos that support the GUS and prepare to be amazed at what your old slow computer can do. (Bonus hint: You can get Doom (not Doom II) running at nearly the full framerate on a 386-40 by using a GUS and hitting F5 as soon as the game starts to throw it into low-res mode.)
Sometimes a very uninteresting/dull/plain card can be put to very interesting uses; for example, DOS-era MPC-era gaming, where the audio consists entirely of redbook audio tracks (even the interactive speaking parts). This is something that emulation still has some trouble getting right (namely, the sync is delayed/off/slips), but on real hardware it usually works. I have a Tandy 2500 sx-25 that has a CDROM interface card with stereo RCA jacks -- it's perfectly capable of playing Jones in the Fast Lane or Loom or Monkey Island (MPC edition) or INCA or any other redbook audio-based game with no sync issues whatsoever without needing a secondary sound card (although having a real sound card adds more dimension to those games).
And finally, if you want to give even a truly shitty card the opportunity to sound awesome, grab yourself some decent Amiga MODs (or .S3Ms, or .ITs, or .XMs) and fire up a decent modplayer (or better, the tracker that originally created them). A 386-25 can calculate 8 or more digital channels mixed together in decent quality realtime and then feed that to your crap SB clone. If you have a Tandy TL/SL/RL machine with the built-in DAC, "TANTRAKR" is an excellent modplayer that uses the DAC and even on an 8086 can play 4-channel MODs decently.
You can even have some fun with the Covox Speech Thing (and other LPT DACs like the Disney Sound Source). The Covox by itself isn't very interesting and also draws quite a bit of CPU when playing audio, but if you have the software that came with the Speech Thing, it gets more interesting. The software contains some interesting utilities including an 8:1 speech compression method that actually works (modified CVSD) as well as a 2:1 compression scheme that works very well with music. Don't have a Speech Thing? Build your own using a handful of resistors and some wire!
So yes, it is unfortunate that the Adlib Gold is somewhat of a holy grail when it comes to PC DOS-era soundcards, but that doesn't mean you can't explore some other dark corners of DOS audio.
Trixter
Veteran Member
I have an MCA Pro Audio Spectrum I can never use (I don't do MCA), if you're interested. If so, drop me a line. I'm easy and cheap.
Edit: Unfortunately, I am an idiot. In the box where I thought it was, was actually two MCA cards and a regular PAS.
Last edited:
EverythingIBM
Experienced Member
I suppose the problem with the adlib gold is availability (it's unfortunate the majority of them, I bet, went to recyclers). I could offer even $500 and probably wouldn't get any offers.
Oh well. I'll keep my eye out.
Thanks guys! Certainly enjoyed reading and discussing about this fun sound card.
Oh well. I'll keep my eye out.
Thanks guys! Certainly enjoyed reading and discussing about this fun sound card.