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Creative Sound Blaster Pro 2, CT1600, some questions

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First post, by retro games 100

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I notice on a CT1600 card, there is the PCB datestamp revision of 0894xx, meaning that it's revision 8 (in 1994). Were there really this many revisions specifically for the CT1600 card?! Perhaps this number is higher than 8, on some cards? If it was higher than 9, then Creative's datestamp revision numbering format would look different, as it would break the xxyyzz format, where xx=revision, eg 08 for the 8th revision, yy=year, eg 94 for 1994, and zz for the week number in that year, eg 01 for the 1st week in 1994.

2) I see on this card that there are 3 main chips, clustered around the right hand side area of the CD-ROM interface. What do these 3 chips do?

Thanks a lot for any comments people!

EDIT: BTW, does the Yamaha OPL3 chip play Adlib music perfectly? In other words, does its "built in" OPL2 YM3812 technology remain totally unchanged as far as Adlib music compatibility is concerned?

Reply 1 of 9, by gerwin

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Hello Retro Games 100, good to see you around again.

1) Here is the "CT1600 revision" topic, and 8 it is indeed:
Sound Blaster Pro 2 CT1600 Revisions

2) Maybe the Sound Blaster book I have at home has a schematic with some basic info...

3) I never heard anyone nag about the backward comaptibility of the OPL3. Only about the OPL3-L low power model, since it uses a different sample rate.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 2 of 9, by retro games 100

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Thanks very much Gerwin! That post contains very useful info. Much appreciated.

Reply 3 of 9, by Scali

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retro games 100 wrote:

EDIT: BTW, does the Yamaha OPL3 chip play Adlib music perfectly? In other words, does its "built in" OPL2 YM3812 technology remain totally unchanged as far as Adlib music compatibility is concerned?

Technically: no.
The OPL2 had a rudimentary 'speech synthesis' mode, known as CSM (composite sine mode).
For some reason, this was not implemented on OPL3 and later chips.
However, I don't know of any software that ever used it, so in practice, you probably will never notice the difference.

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 7 of 9, by gerwin

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We were talking about the SB book in This Topic.
To avoid wrong expectations: The book is technically rather shallow. The scan above is about the most technical thing of the entire 660 page book.

The one Scali kindly linked to seemingly has a different cover. Below is the one I have here. ISBN 0-07-882000-6.

--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul

Reply 8 of 9, by retro games 100

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Very interesting info people, thanks very much. So the main chip is called the bus interface chip. On an AWE32 for instance, where you have the E-MU 8000 chip, would that also be a bus interface chip, or might it be called a chipset chip, (or processor chip), even though there's only 1 chip in question here, because a "set" of chips, like Northbridge and Southbridge for instance, would refer to more than one chip - a pair of them in fact.

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