On page 7, it says "Was ist miroMedia Surround?" Unfortunately, I can't read German properly.

My German is pretty rusty, but it seems just to be marketing-speak rather than any actual information... the gist of the "What is miroMEDIA Surround?" is something like:

"Congratulations on your purchase of a miroMEDIA Surround Card! The miroMEDIA Surround Card is an ISA board with a Dolby ProLogic decoder, which adds to the sound quality of existing sound devices.

You've experienced it in cinemas or your living room: 3d sound with Dolby ProLogic Surround. The action no longer takes place just in front of you, but you're right in the middle, surrounded by fascinating and realistic music, sounds and noises coming from all directions.

With the miroMEDIA Surround Card you can now hear these sounds on your PC. Thus, your video games, multimedia presentations, digital video clips, action films or concert recordings become a fun experience - high-tech entertainment in your house."

Dolby ProLogic decoder is all we need to know!

It's basically analogue technology. Dolby ProLogic technology has surround information "embedded" in normal Stereo.

This card (or a dedicated ProLogic Decoder / AMP) takes the Stereo signal and extracts the surround information and outputs individual channels.

I believe ProLogic was used for VHS, Laserdisc, TV broadcast and movie cinemas. It was quickly superseded by Dolby Digital as soon as the DVD launched.

I believe ProLogic was used for VHS, Laserdisc, TV broadcast and movie cinemas.

I don't know about others here, but I at least already knew what ProLogic is... in fact, I have a Prologic setup in my living room. I think the real question about that card is, what use was ProLogic on a PC? It talks about all these wonderful things you could do, but... I don't remember any games that supported ProLogic, especially not in '96-97, nor did any of the digital video at the time, and I don't know how you were supposed to use it in "multimedia presentations." I know it's possible for a ProLogic decoder to simulate surround sound from a regular stereo source without surround encoding... but that really didn't work for crap in practice, so I wouldn't have expected a company to sell a device just for doing that.

You (still) have a ProLogic setup 🤣

Anyway that card makes a lot of sense considering that miro also sold TV tuner cards! Many TV stations in Germany would broadcast movies, sports and other events with Dolby Pro Logic audio. It would have made sense to market this as an upgrade to an existing miro TV tuner card.

IF this card also has analogue inputs than you could hook this up to VHS and Laserdisc as well...

well the card AFAIK has a normal 3.5mm sound input...

keropi wrote:

well the card AFAIK has a normal 3.5mm sound input...

Well there you go!

The most famous of all PC scene demos, Second Reality has a Pro Logic soundtrack that actually works! 😀
(Just found out that my elderly A/V receiver supports ProLogic. 🤣)

Haha that's awesome!

I wonder what technology you needed back in the day to encode Pro Logic...

You (still) have a ProLogic setup

Yep, complete with a Pioneer Laserdisc player, Samsung NTSC/PAL "world format" VHS deck, and a high-end JVC pro SVHS deck (plus a TBC and video processor)... and hooked to my 42" 1080P LED TV. 🤣

Awesome 🤣

Keropi there are 3 RCA and 3 headphone jacks. Are they labeled by any chance?

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

I don't remember any games that supported ProLogic

Unreal supports Pro Logic. 😀 That's what the surround option does apparently.

Otherwise Pro Logic decoding is very useful in HTPCs. Netflix has a boatload of stuff with just the 2.0 stream and this is almost always Pro Logic encoded. I know that most Creative cards will decode it. I have a 5.1 setup and an X-Fi and it definitely works.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Awesome 🤣

Keropi there are 3 RCA and 3 headphone jacks. Are they labeled by any chance?

this is what I know:

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/sound-cards-multi … ROMEDIA-SU.html

😊

edit: soooooo any takers? decode yer dolby streamz for freeeeeeee 😊 😊 😊

Do you still have the card by any chance? 😀

keropi wrote:

and lastly something non-sound... an 8bit card that is supposed to be a HDD bios that attaches itself to your normal bios and al […]
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and lastly something non-sound... an 8bit card that is supposed to be a HDD bios that attaches itself to your normal bios and allows older systems to use hard disks bigger than 512MB (how much bigger I have no idea) , never tested it and on the one machine it would be usefull to me (yep my IBM) has only 3 ISA slots so I am not gonna waste one for it (using diskmanager instead)

Back when I has an AST Advantage! 486SX-33, the system BIOS didn't support larger HDDs than 540MB, so when I got a larger HDD (1280MB), I also bought a "Promise EIDE MAX", which worked that way. It was a 16-bit ISA card with an EIDE bios on it, which would piggyback your existing IDE controller and allow you to run larger drives and PIO mode-4. It worked really well actually. First case of "plug and play" I can remember.

Woah! They actually got a new-in-box of these cards on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Enhanced-IDE-Disk-Contr … E/dp/B00GVHGPTQ

As it says: "Give your existing IDE controller a boost!" 😜

You know, I have to wonder if those EEPROM / option ROM BIOS cards could be repurposed to hold full-blown boot environments like Plop Boot Manager or gPXE/iPXE.

Or possibly even a bios add-on module that would only contain the necessary code for PS/2 mouse support on systems that don't natively have it. :3