VOGONS


A gallery of strange sound devices

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Reply 20 of 60, by jaypo

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and in the backplate the vga-out port, the joystick port in the middle that needs an adaptor , and the sound in/out port in the right that needs ANOTHER adaptor

I used to have one of these things (probably still do in a box somewhere). First card I ever owned that did 15 and 16 bit color.

The connector at the top was for a breakout box that gave you a hardware volume control, MIDI In/Out/Thru ports and Line in/out/mic In jacks.

The DIN port in the middle was actually for a bus mouse.

Reply 21 of 60, by EscapeVelocity

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I had a Aztech Sound Galaxy NX-II as my first sound card, that I bought retail as an add in. It was shorter than the NX 16 Pro. It likewise boasted of Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source compatability, as well as Ad Lib and Sound Blaster.

It worked great in Sound Blaster mode...never a hiccup.

I still have the box I think, but no other documentation.

I could kick myself for giving this computer away several years ago.

Reply 22 of 60, by TheMAN

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so who has a real WSS? nobody really bought those things!

I remember those ATI cards.... and I think my mach32 card does the same flash rom settings crap too... not sure because it's been many years since I used it

Reply 23 of 60, by SquallStrife

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I had a home-made Disney Sound Source/Covox Speech Thing at one stage, but then I scrapped it because I wanted the veroboard for another purpose. 😜

It was kind of crappy anyway, barely anything supported it, and the Windows 3.1x driver locked the machine up while it produced sounds.

None the less, it did produce mono audio of a reasonable quality in the few games that supported it, and a MOD music player (Interia Player I think).

Reply 26 of 60, by antz

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Does anyone have the original Software for the Adlib 32/64 IDE 4D,
the Tools who are described in this Manual http://www.fanyee.com.tw/download/Audio/AdLib/ENGLISH.PDF
Especially the Win3.x Software would be interesting.
I've got the same Card like on the Picture in the first Post, unfortunately without anything

greets from Vienna, Antz
(please excuse my bad english)

Reply 28 of 60, by antz

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Thank you very much 😀
btw, impressive Collection you have..

I have another Question, about the Connector for additional Ram,
described as "CyberRam Connector" in the Manual.
Do you or anyone knows something about it or how it looks like ?
It have 30 Pins, so I wonder if a SIPP-packaged Dram-Module would fit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIPP_memory
The only thing, that prevented me from trying this,
is the question which is the right direction to plug in the Module,
and if something could damaged if I do it the wrong direction.

ps: On the second view, my Card is not exactly the same as the one on the Picture,
the ROM-Chips are labeled as "dream" and for the question in another Post in this Thread, the Numbers are GSM931600N and GSM931601N.

Reply 29 of 60, by Cloudschatze

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sar10_s.jpg

Here's a board that, while not necessarily strange, is at least interesting, providing both speech-recognition and audio-response functionality. The speech-recognition portion is mostly self-explanatory (I've half a mind to "train" the board with Sierra's AGI/SCI0 vocabularies), but it's the audio-response functionality that is, perhaps, the more interesting feature - You've essentially got 256KB of onboard memory in which to upload up to 250 ADPCM waveforms (of varying sample/bit-rates), which can then played-back via simple I/O routines (albeit, monophonically, as far as I'm aware).

This board was released in 1984, when dinosaurs roamed the land, and computers were slow and had limited memory. While mostly intended to assist with computer accessibility, and frightfully expensive besides, just imagine what might have been possible back then, game-wise, had some enterprising individual or company taken an interest in it.

Reply 30 of 60, by VileR

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a PC audio board with voice recognition and on-board sample RAM in 1984?! That's pretty wild - don't think I've seen this mentioned anywhere before. It would seem that IBM was going that route at some point, but apparently that was a couple of years later (anyone have more details about the unnamed "project" in this video?)

[ WEB ] - [ BLOG ] - [ TUBE ] - [ CODE ]

Reply 31 of 60, by fillosaurus

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(Me see Scotty speaking into a Mac mouse, back then in Star Trek IV)

Y2K box: AMD Athlon K75 (second generation slot A)@700, ASUS K7M motherboard, 256 MB SDRAM, ATI Radeon 7500+2xVoodoo2 in SLI, SB Live! 5.1, VIA USB 2.0 PCI card, 40 GB Seagate HDD.
WIP: external midi module based on NEC wavetable (Yamaha clone)

Reply 32 of 60, by Jolaes76

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Here is another one. I was asking for help on another thread to identify it, and although we still do not know the brand, it turned out to be a Sound Blaster clone with limited SB Pro 1 FM compatibility 😮

The jumpers for mono and stereo OPL2 are swapped on the card (or the inscription is swapped) and the SBPVOL TSR (which I use for the CT1330A) did not work properly with this card. It also had to be set up at 220h / IRQ 7 /D IRQ and DC ACK 1 for proper operation

So far I have been listening to some nice dual OPL2 tunes from:

- Dragonsphere
- Cobra Mission
- Tetris Classic (from Spectrum Holobyte)

- Creative Labs' sbfmdrv.com v1.30 (7204 bytes) + playcmf.exe works flawlessly in stereo on CMF files

Strangely, I can also select Audiospectrum Pro (8 bit) in almost any game that supports it but this results in mono OPL2 music.

The card still needs some cleaning and replacement of bad capacitors.

Attachments

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    SBproClone.jpg
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"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 34 of 60, by Cloudschatze

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Here's another sound/video board - Sigma Designs' "WinStorm" - which combines a full PAS-16 with the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5422, SVGA chipset. It's truly an impressive amount of functionality for a single card, and for that, it was apparently (somewhat) popular with the Amiga Bridgeboard crowd.

I don't know what role Sigma had in this, but it's an OEM product, designed and produced by Media Vision.

pas16v_s.jpg

Reply 35 of 60, by keropi

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^ hm, this seems better than the ATI VGA Stereo/FX I was using with my bridgeboard A4000 setup... I actually did not use it much because the ATI vga part was kinda crappy, too much DOS stuff not working correctly like Commander Keen games...
the Cirus on the other hand looks great

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Reply 36 of 60, by Anonymous Coward

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A few weeks ago I stumbled across an ET4000/Sound Blaster Pro combo. Anyone ever seen one of those before?

Found it here: http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/showthrea … a%C2%B4s/page39

dscf3542xjusm.jpg

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Reply 37 of 60, by Cloudschatze

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Here's another oddity - the Digispeech DS201A "Speech & Music Unit."

ds201a_s.jpg

This little device has a number of things going for it. Using a customized DSP, it's capable of playing-back a number of different (and in some cases, esoteric) digital audio and speech synthesis formats, and is somewhat compatible with IBM's PS/2 Speech Adapter. (This functionality didn't work in two games I tried that supposedly have support for the IBM device.)

Here's an interesting bit of apocrypha to help describe the "music" side of the equation:

"The DS201 and DS201A Audio Adapters contain a three voice tone generator which emulates the Complex Sound Generator (SN76496N) device used in IBM PC-Junior and Tandy computers. The DIGI drivers provide BIOS-level compatibility for programs written for these machines via the INT 4D API."

Awesome, right?! Tandy music on your non-Tandy PC!

Well, not exactly, no.

First of all, the noise channel isn't "emulated," and second... I've not been able to get anything to play 3-voice music through this thing at all.

Did I mention that it plugs into a serial port? 😀

Reply 38 of 60, by Great Hierophant

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Anonymous Coward wrote:
A few weeks ago I stumbled across an ET4000/Sound Blaster Pro combo. Anyone ever seen one of those before? […]
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A few weeks ago I stumbled across an ET4000/Sound Blaster Pro combo. Anyone ever seen one of those before?

Found it here: http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/showthrea … a%C2%B4s/page39

dscf3542xjusm.jpg

A very nice card, two of the best ISA cards in one!

http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/ - Nerdly Pleasures - My Retro Gaming, Computing & Tech Blog

Reply 39 of 60, by Cloudschatze

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Anonymous Coward wrote:

A few weeks ago I stumbled across an ET4000/Sound Blaster Pro combo.

This looks like some sort of Taiwanese job. Interestingly enough, Creative filed their own "VGA Blaster" trademark for an unreleased product that presumably would have combined the SB16 with an SVGA chipset.