Thanks for the shout out! As I saw the card the first second I thought, that I know it. I used to write CMS with the pencil on the GAL chip. What a funny surprise :D There have been made couple of video about the CT1350B card already, but this one is the best by a huge margin. Thank you very much!

I came for the history... I stayed for the Ultraforce demo!

I vaguely remember programming audio demos using these cards as a teen using assembler. I must say having direct access to the hardware was so much more satisfying.

Great memory!

For Indy 500 to produce Adlib sound, you need to type indy /adlib.

The Philips SAA1099 sound generator is a 6-voice sound chip used by some 1980s devices. It can produce several different waveforms by locking the volume envelope generator to the frequency generator, and also has a noise generator with 3 pre-set frequencies which can be locked to the frequency generator for greater range. It can output audio in fully independent stereo. The Yamaha YM3812 also known as the OPL2 (OPL is an acronym for FM Operator Type-L) is a sound chip (i.e. integrated circuit) created by Yamaha Corporation and famous for its wide use in IBM PC-based sound cards such as the AdLib and Sound Blaster.

This was my first sound card I bought as a kid off my savings for 79,- DM in 1995 which is around 60€ now. I replaced it a year later with an SB16 and gave this one away to a friend for free. I know this might sound silly but I don't miss the 8-Bit quantization noise. But compared to fuzzy PC-speaker it was a huge improvement.

Oh 🦌.... I loved wave studio when i was baby child in the 80s... Reversing own voice was the reason to have a computer 😂

For indy 500 dos game you can get adlib sound by using command line parameter /a. You can also use /c for cga /e for ega and /m for mcga. There is also /t option for tandy sound and video mode.

Since my old 386 PC came with a Soundblaster when it was handed down to me in 2003, and said 386 DX40 was manufactured in 1992, 8bit cards were definitely still period correct when your 386 PC was manufactured. Still got it and its board in working order since it used an external battery pack (unlike my 286 and 486SX), and its original IO controller and 80MB HDD as well. If I ever set it up though I'll end up using an ESS Audiodrive 1868F that I repaired - sounds nearly indistinguishable next to my Intel SE440BX-2's integrated Yamaha audio.

To break the OPL stuck notes, I used to run the AdLib TEST program which would silence itself after ending.

This takes me back. I was about 10 or 11 when I got my first Sound Blaster for Christmas...idk if it was a 2.0 but it was 8-bit.

Thanks for sharing this gem 💎

As a teen I worked at a computer shop, we used to look through every computer customers brought in for repair... One day I discover a bunch of creative labs libraries for a bunch of languages. One was designed for QB45.. I struck gold and knew it. From then I could use all the features of the SB16 directly from QB45, including the DrSbaitso text to voice. I made some awesome alarm clocks with that. A DOS based CD player done with ANSI. A basic wave editor and a few other little things. Good times

From memory Soundo'LE did a bit more than just record and playback. I had a Sound Blaster Pro 2 which shipped with the same software bundle and was learning Visual Basic 3 at the time. Soundo'LE allowed you to use Microsoft OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) to add a sound control in VB projects (and Office documents too IIRC) which would allow recording and playback. Back then it was pretty amazing to be able to include sound support without needing hardware level knowledge or linking to arcane DLLs! I would have killed for a copy of that Sound Blaster book though..

I had a Turtle Beach sound card... Sound Blaster was very expensive

Congrats, great detailed video..I loved it :-)

My first sound card was the slightly earlier CT1320 which I'm still running in a 286 to this day. I was one of the very few who bought the CMS upgrade as it happens although I only needed the 2 CMS chips for that card so I've had the other rarer chip sat in the packaging for all these years since. Never knew anyone was looking for these things! I don't think they were too expensive to buy back then but I really can't remember after all this time. Silpheed and Times Of Lore have two of the better CMS soundtracks from what I recall but I never used CMS much having got it. This card blew my mind when I got it having had nothing but 48k Speccy and PC beepers for about a decade previously. I had it hanging out of the top of a Sinclair PC200 at first which wasn't exactly ideal given that machine was only built for half height cards.

Good video of the Sound Blaster 2.0- Maybe not the "original Sound Blaster" but a later iteration of it. The CT1320A was the first model and often called "Sound Blaster 1.0". The follow up revision is often called "Sound Blaster 1.5" and has the model number CT1320C ... might have been a CT1320B but I have never seen one

How I loved my Soundblaster... I had a 5.1 sound system, DIY. The problem with many sound cards was that although they separated low, mid and high sounds, they still chased high and mid sounds through the woofer. With Soundblaster and the Creative-Software i was able to fine-tune the Frequency for Low, mid and high sounds. Simply THE perfect sound card with the perfect Software!

I'm running a Sound Blaster 2 Pro (16-bit card) in an XT of mine. This works perfectly fine, so long as you configure the IRQ and DMA settings to what an 8-bit slot can handle (IRQ 7 & DMA 3 or lower), and you're not using the CD-ROM connector. Just let the 16-bit edge hang off the end of the 8-bit ISA connector, and make sure it doesn't touch anything. So I find nothing at all odd about a 386 running an 8-bit card. There's enough XT games that support Ad-lib, or early Sound Blaster for it to be worthwhile adding a Sound Blaster to an XT if you can support it, not to mention Jim Leonard's 8088 Domination Demo (which never fails to impress). You could probably get a non-PnP Sound Blaster 16 to work on an XT as well, but I don't have the relevant card to test that with. Sure there's more XT games that support Ad-Lib than Sound Blaster, but more of us probably have old non-PNP Sound Blasters kicking around than genuine Ad-Libs.

I had one. Worked great until I upgraded to a Soundblaster 16. Never used mine in anything but a 386 and a 486 for a while. I remember that software.

Fab vid. I have a no name sb2 clone, it has an Intel microcontroller and a bunch of Philips chips which I guess are for oscillators same as this. No idea which is the opl2 clone chip. This gave me some stuff to think about and try, time to get it out again 😁

To me the sound blaster as a whole wasn't really used at its max potential. Most games used crappy midi to opl2 converters, DSP was used for sfx and CMS was totally unused. But I saw a creative demo that used both DSP and CMS, and I also saw a game that used both the DSP and the OPL2. So my assumption is that it's very likely you can use all three of them together. Also the CMS chips are a bit more capable than what you may think if you check the datasheet. They're not only 6 channels each, but they're also capable of stereo sound, volume control, noise and have some sort of envelope control (although for the latter it hasn't been documented by creative and I couldn't get it to work on my card. Not sure if creative gimped the chips or if that was just my sloppy code). But since they were used even less that the OPL2, they never had a chance to shine. Sure they're "only" doing squarewaves, but the Tandy 1000 and the Master system used a three voice mono chip and got away with great tunes, so this thing could have been an absolute monster with 12 stereo voices ! Fortunately, PC wasn't the only platform that had these chips, the ZX spectrum apparently had a sound card with one chip and it sounds great actually ! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/fNZ0ftWV1r-okoE.html About DSP + OPL2, the game I mentioned is named Zone 66 kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gNSSpdKktdHVj4E.html This is the only game (perhaps the only piece of software) I know on PC that did this on a sound blaster (the adlib gold had some demo musics that did that). This is quite frustrating to thing that something could have been made more often, but almost nobody ever tried :( This kind of thing was much more common on the megadrive which has similar capabilities. I've always wondered what the SB1.x/2.0 was truly capable of if you used DSP + CMS + OPL2. All these chips complete one another quite nicely if you ask me ! If you want a lot of voices or stereo ? The CMS has got you covered. You want smooth sounds ? The OPL2 is ready for you You want realistic sounds ? The DSP is your best friend

I own about 30 different models of ISA sound card (several bit including a CT1350B included), these are nice but I don't think I would use it in a build I would use every day. I own an Adlib remake card and find that a much better option on an 8 bit system. IMO the best SoundBlaster cards were the ones in the same series as the CT1600, they have clear audio, great compatibility, real OPL3 and no hanging note bug. I tend to use ESS cards in most of my DOS builds now as they are quite compatible, while most do not have real OPL3 and might be a deal breaker for a lot of people I use the Roland SC-55, SD-35 or SC-88 Pro for FM synth.

As for Indy 500 not working, have you tried jumpering the SB2.0 to IRQ7? Back in the day some software assumed that to be the default, which may have been a hold-over from (I'm guessing here) perhaps an SB1.0 practice, but which collided with LPT1. I do recall some games' audio not working unless you jumpered and CONFIG.SYS-configured things to IRQ7. The later default of course was IRQ5, but when I had my SB2.0 I stuck to IRQ7. I did have a printer, but I don't think I ever had any DOS software that would have wanted to print and play audio at the same time.

I was listening to Loom and it’s either the video or your card but the CMS music is mono only.

Can CMS be used concurrently with Ad Lib?

Wait.. JROK, as in the guy who made Pac-PC, Ms. Pac-PC, and PC-Bert? Also, I think some early SB-compatible games expect the card at IRQ 7, and won't play on any other settings as a result.

12:56: Oh wow, that brought back memories, including of the music hanging. On a barely related note (heh): I've long been looking for video of that AMIBIOS boot-up sequence. It's very hard to google now. Actually, what I'm REALLY looking for is a BIOS+VGA card combo that produces one of these graphical logos on the first screen (e.g. Engergy Star logo or the like, possibly created by redefining ASCII characters), because I have a theory that with such combos, there's a subtle resolution switch between 640x400 or 640x480 NAPA text mode on the logo screen and 720x400 on the specs table screen, after the CLS, and I'd love to prove or disprove that theory. The reason for that theory is that I know that the 9th character cell column is either blank or doubled from the 8th (for C0-DFh) in the default VGA text mode. If anyone knows this or could even test this, I'd love to hear about it.

I had that exact card back in the day, first in a 286, then in a 386, but I'm pretty sure now mine didn't have those Creative Music System chips, and as a completionist, if I had known at the time that my card was actually lacking those, I would have been so pissed.

Try to launch game with : indy /a in command line

I have a "Sound Blaster 16 PnP" ISA card with integrated CD drive interface, and it works fine with Windows 98 SE. 😊 However, I grew up using the "general Microsoft MIDI" in Windows, so I not like the MIDI of the SB16 that much... 😐

I want to thank you for providing the answer I was looking for after getting part of the way through Adrian Digital Basement's recent video - kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mKiJiLeosLjdfp8.html - where he talks about how the GUS soundcard on PC was such a big deal because of its hardware mixer. This got me thinking: how did the original SB do mixing? Thanks again.

Haha, the sound is so horrible. Yet it surely amazed people at that time.

Expensive and sought after: yes, but not really that rare. A ct1320c or ct1320u is what i'd call rare ;)

My first sound card was the Gravis Ultrasound Max, which introduced me into the demoscene - for which I'll be eternally grateful - as well as programming soundcards. I love that card so much, It is the only part I still own from my 90's 486dx/50. When I lent it to my friend so he could use it with his Roland E-16, I got his SB PRO 2.0 instead. I was shocked at how bad it was. Besides a loud hiss, about everything would be audible through the speakers - clicks when the mouse moved, when the floppy started reading, you name it. You better didn't have a scsi controller . Since then I developed a strong dislike for Creative Labs and their products. They apparently pushed Adlib into bankruptcy by blocking their supply chain. A lot of their products have hardware bugs. Same for the software/ drivers. Wondering why you can switch left & right channels in some games? Because the SB PRO occasionally switched them, and there was no way to detect this bug from software. The drivers for the SB Live were so bad, that the community actually wrote their own after a while. It was supposedly a 24bit card (great for marketing, better than 16bit yeah) but all interfaces to the Roland chip were only 16 bits... When I worked at a computer chain in the early 2000's, we got some Creative Labs gamepads. They simply didn't work by design, they were not properly engineered. They went straight to the trash. In my eyes, the company is all marketing, and no quality. On the positive side, I learned to program in Assembler because of the SoundBlaster, as it was the only way to get the mixer of my .mod player fast enough ;) Unfortunately, documentation was sparse, and it was only in the late 90' / early 2000's that I got the auto-init & hi-speed dma modes to work properly.