This is gonna be great. Huge.
Any intention of opening a kickstarter or patreon or ko-fi?

Thanks for your hard work!

I know this is way too late now, since the interviews were done years ago, and the documentary has already been made, but one thing that I've been wondering is why they never got the idea to launch a gaming-oriented variant of the Adlib card with an integrated joystick controller, earlier on. From what I heard in an interview in another documentary, the integrated game port was at the time the major selling point of the Sound Blaster over the Adlib card, before games even started to commonly make use of digitized sound.

Even if gamers weren't initially Adlib's intended target audience, as soon as they saw that market take off, for instance through their collaboration with Sierra, they should have jumped on it.

Heck, Adlib could have cheaply integrated Disney Sound Source compatibility on such a game card as well. Basically an integrated Centronics-compatible parallel port, a simple 16-byte FIFO buffer and an 8-bit DAC. With jumpers to set the DSS-compatible part of the card to any of the standard LPT port addresses (0x378h, 0x278h or 0x3bch), so it could coexist with an existing parallel port.

This could have been done cheaply, without the need for a microcontroller or DMA logic. That would have totally undercut Creative Labs. Alas, this would probably fit into the "could have been" category.

Anyway, it would have been nice to ask the former Adlib people if they ever had such plans in the earlier days, before they realized that Creative Labs was eating their lunch. Did Sierra never ask them for an improved version of the Adlib card with such functionality?

digger wrote on 2024-12-29, 16:52:

Even if gamers weren't initially Adlib's intended target audience, as soon as they saw that market take off, for instance through their collaboration with Sierra, they should have jumped on it.

Not sure exactly why. Roland LAPC-I and IBM Music Feature card had no game port, either, though.

digger wrote on 2024-12-29, 16:52:

Heck, Adlib could have cheaply integrated Disney Sound Source compatibility on such a game card as well.

The Rainbow Arts PC-Soundman had something similar like this (1991, AdLib compatible, had Covox-ish resistor ladder DAC).
https://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?title=PC-Soundman

It's a well-known fact that Adlib wanted to add the PCM functionality - but they aimed too high: 12-bit when everyone else was doing 8-bit, which resulted in delays...

Also, non-DMA DAC isn't a good idea - there are hardly any games with *good* support for "Covox".

I don’t think people at Adlib ever thought like businessman, that’s why they didn’t come up with the Sound Blaster. Even if you look at what they did later at MediaTriX, you will realize, they haven’t changed their attitude. I still like what they did, even if it didn’t end up commercially successful.

Grzyb wrote on 2024-12-29, 17:51:

It's a well-known fact that Adlib wanted to add the PCM functionality - but they aimed too high: 12-bit when everyone else was doing 8-bit, which resulted in delays...

Also, non-DMA DAC isn't a good idea - there are hardly any games with *good* support for "Covox".

As per Rich Heimlich, it's a well known fact that Martin Prével dismissed the Killer Card's new features as not needed. Despite Rich telling Martin to take notice, Martin thought the revolution was to change the then current AdLib from the 5 and a quarter jack to a 3.5mm jack.

Also the 12bit DAC was not aiming too high. Sim Wong Hoo (Creative), got Yamaha to delay the MMA chip just enough to buy them time to release the Sound Blaster 16 first.

GL1zdA wrote on 2024-12-29, 20:30:

I don’t think people at Adlib ever thought like businessman, that’s why they didn’t come up with the Sound Blaster. Even if you look at what they did later at MediaTriX, you will realize, they haven’t changed their attitude. I still like what they did, even if it didn’t end up commercially successful.

I like this attitude. Sometimes it's better to stay true to yourself, even if it means your business may not last.
However, the legacy will remain the more so. AdLib may be gone, but it lives on in our memories.
Other, more successful companies are now just a footnote.

carlostex wrote on 2024-12-29, 20:47:

As per Rich Heimlich, it's a well known fact that Martin Prével dismissed the Killer Card's new features as not needed. Despite Rich telling Martin to take notice, Martin thought the revolution was to change the then current AdLib from the 5 and a quarter jack to a 3.5mm jack.

Well, it depends what exactly moment we're talking about...
I guess that at the end of 1989/beginning of 1990 they indeed dismissed the PCM.
But when there came games with digitized SFX, it convinced them to add that feature.

Hello, it's me again emerging from the shadows!
I was busy since our last update, and here's some more news 😀

First and foremost, the interview phase is complete!
The result of all this work is 7 new amazingly interesting people interviewed.
In total 18 people have been interviewed for the project, and this MEGA HUGE phase is now behind us which is reassuring.

Here's an overview of what happened since May 2023.

1. October 2023, interviewed Jean-Yves Deschênes, programmer/engineer at AdLib.

2. December 2023, interviewed Nancy Houley, sales representative at AdLib and later AdLib Multimedia.

3. Early 2024, Henri Chalifour previously interviewed, shared lots of material for inclusion as B-Roll in the documentary. Of note, a picture of AdLib's booth in late 1991 or early 1992.

4. I wanted a way to compare different versions of the AdLib cards and go into detail of the changes that happened between revisions. To have full coverage I got a motorized turntable, but had trouble centering the card so they would match perfectly every time. The cards also fell down often so it required a way to hold them upright, center them, and make sure they couldn't move during rotation. I had to engineer a modular bracket that goes on top of the turntable, to fit that purpose. The bracket had to be temporary, show center every time, and hold cards of different lengths and sizes (if for example, I want to compare an original AdLib with a clone).

Here's the resulting bracket's first test run :

And here's a shot while using a whitebox, of a real AdLib prototype. With shots like this, I'll be able to fade from one card to another seamlessly and have it be visually appealing :

You can see it in better resolution here : https://youtube.com/shorts/pcPJqWf9iXw

5. More B-Roll material was acquired and licenced for usage in the project, regarding Martin Prevel's studies under classical guitarists Ida Presti and Alexandre Lagoya (first image). Marie and Martin Prével can be seen in the second image.

6. December 2024, interview with Pierre Pilon who shared offices with AdLib, and shared booths at trade shows as well early in the 80s.

7. In July 2025, interviewed both Louis Chouinard and Louis Bélanger from Lyrtech (aka Instruments Lyre) both engineers who designed the AdLib Gold card amongst others.

Louis Bélanger speaks about the last months of AdLib when government started to audit the company ruthlessly :

Louis Chouinard speaks about AdLib licensing graphical routines code from Lyrtech :

8. October 2025, interviewed Monique Désy-Proulx, copywriter/editor for AdLib.

9. December 2025, interviewed Louis Moreau in our final interview of the project. Moreau was doing sales/marketing for AdLib and left when 5,000 cards had been sold.

Also spoke with multiple people namely Jim Bull, Raymond Duval, Rich Heimlich, Emmanuel Giasson and Marie Dionne as well. Even though complete video interviews were not required, the knowledge and information they shared is crucial to the project.

What am-I doing now? Editing. There's roughly 2 hours of raw footage per person (so 35+ hours total), which I'm cutting down, grinding down, sharpening into snippets and more digestible topics of 1 minute or less. Basically I'm doing micro-editing locally on each interview. And once I'm done with that phase, editing the macro project will happen much easier.

Take care!
Hope we're all still not dead from old age when I actually finish this 😀
Here's a compilation of clapperboards from the project :

Eagerly waiting for the finished film. Did I see Alexander Brandon in the clapping video?

looking forward to it!

Awesome! Excited for this.