Reviving Sound Blaster 1.5 and upgrading a rare SB2.0 clone

I honestly do not understand why they relabelled those Atmel parts when they were already the actual parts.

"...MWave..." -- Good luck! haha :-D

For me, ES1688/ES1868 based cards are the most hassle free, provide good compatibility for DOS games and nice sound. The games that use native ESS synth sound even better. If I was building a retro PC, I would use an ESS card plus external midi (Roland) or a midi daughterboard (like Turtlebeach RIO). Mi first soundcard was Genius Sound Maker 16IE.

love the square wave sounds

I much prefer the pacing of the CMS sound over the OPL sound on Monkey Island. The OPL music seems to slow down and speed up and sound inconsistent, plus it has the usual flappy/farty sounds from OPL chips whereas the CMS tune is well-timed and crisp.

I wonder if the OPL's tendency to... flatulence is just programmer error rather than a chip limitation. The FM synth in the Mega Drive for example is capable of way tighter, crisper tunes, but on some of the worse titles it sounds just as sloppy as PC OPL music.

Mp3 music has the inbuilt codec, that uploads into the sound card. You can experience this with phones and tabs.

Good you have saved those! Any 8bit ISA sound card is hard to find. Where I live those are close to impossible to get. Not speaking about the original sound blasters...

Great video. Thanks for saving those sound cards!

I have this Typhoon Sound Card in Original Pack, and all papers.
And a Original Sound Blaster 16 but she has sadly give up his ghost, she was working just fine, and after a PC new start it not longer works, and widnows will not longer Detect it.. :(

Thank you for that Video.

Great video! 🙂👍 Always awesome to see some of the original sound blaster cards back in action. I noticed this trend of relabeling ICs with newer date codes as well. I remember hearing that some suppliers have cut off dates for IC age or they won’t purchase them. No idea if this is true but I can’t think of any other reason they’d go to the trouble of doing this.

Thank you so much. Great experience! I've owned AWE 64 those time and that was a treasure. Naturally, my socket 7 pc looked then like an application to this sound card.

great video...subscribed

Great to see your subscriber number continuing to increase - justifiably so!
love your work :)

I wonder if you could use both the CMS and OPL at the same time to get better sound. Obviously you’d need software designed for it.

Tolles Video. Und keine sorge was die Uploadfrequenz angeht. Deine Zuseher warten auch gerne etwas länger auf gute Videos :)

Hello, regarding the ICs, sometimes you need to look at the factory too, at work i also had issues with strange looking parts, but after asking the manufacturer (TI, Microchip, …) it came out that the marking looks different from factory to factory. Its always a bad sign if they look different, but it must not be wrong.

That's really funny. The number chosen for the LS512 is just like the YM215 but backwards. Which means that the LS262 is also backwards. 😂

Your channel is so good, damn.

Really enjoyed this overview, for the algo. Many thanks!

Great work! China as always can't do something without fakes.
Can you talk to me what the "dioxide" you use to clean contacts?

its always a good day when you put out a new video.. cheers..

If they just admitted they were clones, it would be fine. Bloody Chinese copies piss me off.

Great to see you post a vid!

For the tiny screw - there are replacement screw kits on eBay for the Nintendo Switch with various types of tiny screws in it. I bought some of them and since then I almost always have all the tiny screws I need.

Why do they relabel IC's? If they are what you expect them to be, they work and they are actually the correct part why do they do it?
Obviously if it's a completely different IC that would obviously never work and they just expect that many won’t bother returning it.

Great video!
In reality, this was a big luck with SB, that none of other chips were damaged when MCU was powered in backwards.. And, looks like, that old Atmel has reverse polarity protection.. 😂

Back in days, when I wrote firmware for my stereo, every time, before update, I needed to remove DS12C887 RTC IC, to save settings and needed to plug it back in socket after update.. One time I inserted it backwards and turned on.. 😢 I understood my mistake, when garbage appeared on screen. But I wasn't so lucky. I killed poor DS12C887 and one output line from 74LS138.
After this accident, I always double check before powering something on.. 😂

Follow the notch! :D

I have a Yamaha OPL3-SA3 based card from 1996. The Yamaha OPL3-SAx family of chips are a complete soundblaster pro and opl3 compatible chipset in a single chip. It was apparently popular with card manufacturers for it’s ease of integration.

Another excellent video Necroware - I love how your video's are all so clearly explained, very enjoyable! 😊

you think you can redirect general midi through fm, meaning, write a small program to redirect midi, general midi, through fm. get something out of it like a stock awe32. you wouldnt need an external midi module. youd have to store samples in ram, slow but just to see if it works?

I love this video! More please!!!

Nice!

I had an Mwave sound card in my IBM Aptiva which I got as a used machine. It seems that it might have been a later revision than the ones shown in this video. I would genuinely like to see a video to show us Necroware fans exactly what they are capable of doing. For context, my IBM Aptiva (Pentium 100MHz CPU) shipped with Windows 95 pre-installed.

and yet, videos about sound cards are the most interesting for me))

I did not watch every video, so pardon me if I'm asking something obvious. Back in the days, I remember that Gravis Ultrasound was the card to have. Do you also have one of those? Obviously I was young at that time and my source of information was not very trusty, so I'd love to hear some more trustworthy stories around it, too.

Tiny screws for that volume knob; Trashed laptops are a great source of them.

They sometime re-label to make them look like new-old stock, but those re-labels made them look even older/worse - lol -.

Opl3 is more than just "two opl2s". It has more waveforms and also supports 4op mode.

The first volume control was screaming at me "80s pocket AM radio" 😅

The "rebranding" of ICs is very annoying. Many times they are working ICs, but they removed the original text and printed it again in a different style to confuse us. But the worst is when they sand off the brand and type and print a different one, like with some of my EPROMs. It works if you search the ID and set it according to the ID and not the text. But sometimes you can damage the EPROM by using wrong writing voltages if you choose the type according to the label... But we can be glad to be able to order these ICs even with these annoyances.

I have a ESS 1868f card, which is nice. But! When no sound is playing and I crank up the speakers, I can hear some noise. Is this normal for these cards? Or maybe I should get an AWE64 that has apparently better quality sound?

Ess688 is not a sb pro/2.0 clone, it is pretty solid 16bit sound card with good sb\sb pro compatibility. It's main drawback comparing to other 16 bit solutions is the lack of MPU-401 midi support.

You can use the sound blaster 2 firmware on this card. It's around.. we also use it in the snark barker's

Thank you again for the amazing content! I wish i had our skill with electronic repair.

I wasn't at all familiar with CMS. I think compared to a stock OPL2 it almost sounds like a newer wavetable card. Very interesting!

Thanks for video and explaining. Have few isa sb cards, will test.

Necroware puts out a new video, and I have to find a way to stop what I'm doing 😊