I was checking on ebay and i saw this.
a solder yourself Adlib clone for $80 dollars.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/AdLib-Sound-Card-Clo … clone.TRS4.TSS5
Even clones are so expensive?
its a PCB made of known components or difficult to find components?
I would imagine this is an economy of scale issue.
Anybody who is interested in making little hobby projects understands where I'm going with that. It costs a lot of money to order 1, 2, 5, or 10.. etc professionally printed boards. The same can be said for even the caps and resistors in that project due to shipping costs on them for people without hardware stores selling individuals near by. You have to buy in extreme bulk in order to reduce the cost per unit. The seller then needs to source working ICs, usually ones that are no longer made. Then tack on a fee for their effort so they can pocket some money.
If there were a known demand for say, 50,000 DIY kits, we could drive the price WAY down.
Sup. I like computers. Are you a computer?
Still less expensive than what a "real" AdLib goes for these days. 😀
I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O
we should email the iphone guy from youtube
to see if he can make 500 adlib clones cheaper than 50 dollars each on one of those china factories.?
If you’re going to buy a clone anyway, wouldn’t it make more sense to just buy a cheap ISA sound card with a decent FM implementation? Or is that less fun?
Life? Don't talk to me about life.
which SB16 cards work as 8bit on a 286 for example?
i have not seen 8bit soundcards here in my city for a long long time.
While I don't have got that money to spend on such a kit, I don't think it's so expensive.
Sure, it is expensive in comparison to an old 8-Bit Sound Blaster or AdLib clone card you would find on a flea market,
or to a plain PCB, but for a complete kit, the price is okay in my opinion.
The one who made the kit doesn't make a lot of money at this price.
I imagine that etching the card and getting all the parts (incl. the Yamaha chip) could cost the kit maker about ~$30 to $50.
wrote:which SB16 cards work as 8bit on a 286 for example?
i have not seen 8bit soundcards here in my city for a long long time.
I would say any of the CT1xxx series would work in a 286.
In case of a SB16 series card, that would include CT1730, CT1740, CT1750.
Newer models may work, too, but would require EMU386 in order to load the "drivers" (CTCM/CTCU).
As for SB16 cards in 8-Bit slots: I heard this works, but I haven't really tried this myself so far.
Edit: I've got a cheap ESS688 card in one of my 286es and it works fine there.
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wrote:which SB16 cards work as 8bit on a 286 for example?
i have not seen 8bit soundcards here in my city for a long long time.
SB16 are hardly a regular "clone card" - they don't even do SBPro2.0 stereo...
An Aztech NX or BX does 8b just fine and costs a fraction of an Ad-Lib, indeed less than this clone card. Quite possibly many other 16b cards might work in an 8b slot, but never had to test myself...
wrote:which SB16 cards work as 8bit on a 286 for example?
i have not seen 8bit soundcards here in my city for a long long time.
I've never tried but yes from what I understand a lot of 16 bit cards will work in an 8 bit slot, at least for something as fundamental as FM synth. The venerable OPLSAx cards for example, which are cheap and ubiquitous, work OK.
Anyway sorry for the de-rail, it's a question that's interested me for a while. I kinda get the desire people have for owning a real Adlib - it's a classic. But a modern clone of something that was cloned to death seems more niche than usual for this place, which is already super niche 🤣
Life? Don't talk to me about life.
The appeal is that it’s a real clone, as in just like the real thing rather than other cards which are more like sound blaster clones. The other cards may or may not be better but it depends if you want a true Adlib experience or not.
I can chip in on this topic: I have assembled all in all 6 AdLib replicas. Two for me, one I donated to the 8bit-guy, which ended up in one of his videos. The rest I sold off. The PCBs were 20 EUR each, with heavy gold plating and thick copper, made by German manfucturer. You can get them MUCH cheaper from somewhere in China, so there you can save a lot, probably down to 5 EUR per PCB without gold plating and thin copper layer.
The components were about 35 EUR per card, including the OPL2 and the DAC. I ordered high quality components from Mouser. You could have saved a few Euros on the potentiometer, plus much cheaper capacitors and doing away with no IC sockets. Probably going down to maybe 20-25 EUR per card.
This gives you minimum 25 EUR material per card. Or maximum of 55 EUR for high(est) quality components.
Then comes the soldering, plus drilling holes in the bracket, testing. This took me the better half of a workday (in my spare time obviously). Assuming 4 hours of work, given a rather low compensation of 10 EUR per hour you end up with 65 to 95 EUR per card. Then eBay wants 10% off of your price. Hence 80 USD is quite the fair price I think, depending on the quality of the materials this guy used... 😀
All in all, I encourage everyone to try and build such a device yourself. It IS immensely fun and educational. Disadvantage is that you always order at least 3-5 PCBs, which is the minimum order at all manufacturers. And short of wasting all the PCBs you will have to build more than one! 😀
