Speaking of AdLib, a couple of years ago an AdLib Gold 1000 ISA card sold for US $3,400 on eBay. The starting ask price was 99 cents and the first bid was US $50.
> Did any of you, back in the 90s, build a parallel port DAC to use with Linux's PC Speaker driver?
And someone else, dharma1, replied:
> My friend's dad built one for him, for DOS/windows though. Must have been around -89 when we were 12.
> I think Scream Tracker had the schematic bundled with it as an ASCII drawing. We were taught how to solder in primary school, but I remember the schematics being way too advanced for us. Looking at it now it's just a simple resistor ladder tree
> I think it was roughly the same as Covox, someone had written a sound blaster emulator for it, and it worked pretty well on games, scream tracker/fast tracker and demoscene demos - for the price of a parallel port connector and a few resistors, pretty cool.
If that person (dharma1) sees this thread, I have a question for them: Could you take a picture of that schematic and post it?
The old DOS program ModPlay came with a file called which detailed several designs for DACs that attached to a parallel port. I was pleasantly surprised to find that ModPlay has its own web page: https://awe.com/mark/dev/modplay.html. The first download link on that page (https://awe.com/mark/bin/mp219b.zip) is a .zip file that contains HARDWARE.DOC. That file was designed to be displayed on DOS. In order for the diagrams to show up correctly you'll need a text editor that can be configured to display text in the DOS codepage (CP437). Notepad++ can do this via Encoding | Character sets | Western European | OEM-US. If anybody has instructions for other programs / operating systems, please feel free to jump in below.
The HARDWARE.DOC file contains designs for 2 different mono devices that use DAC chips, one mono device that uses an R-2R ladder, and the "Stereo-on-1" which produces stereo using only a single parallel port.
I built a Stereo-on-1 back in the day. I had to send away to England to get the required chips from Maplin. It didn't work properly when I assembled it because I didn't understand how the pins on the chips were numbered. They're numbered counterclockwise, starting from the pin with the dot but for some reason I had thought they ran down the left side and then ran down the right side. Years later I revisited this, figured out what I had done wrong, and fixed it. It still worked the last time I checked a couple of years ago. It produces quite decent sound.
I'm pretty sure a GUS still in its box would turn up a rather good price from nostalgia enthusiasts.
I mostly remember it for the fact that a great many demoscene demos and even some games would only play sound (music) if you had a GUS, a Soundblaster wasn't enough.
I think it had something to do with it being easier to play MODs on a GUS, or something. I imagine this was because you could load sounds into its memory and trigger them? I'm really not sure, someone please clarify :)
Either way, make sure you get a good price for that GUS :) Or better, make sure it finds a home with a loving enthusiast :)
I just noticed that I have two SoundBlaster 16 PCI cards in their original boxes, but apparently they don't approach the AdLib's level of scarcity. (Similar items are selling on eBay for about $40.)
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Ad-Lib-Gold-1000-ISA-Sound-Card-/27... via https://twitter.com/lazygamereviews/status/70847562292704460...
Also, speaking of sound cards, here is another thread from a few months ago about old sound cards: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17779741
In that thread a user named rahimnathwani said:
> Did any of you, back in the 90s, build a parallel port DAC to use with Linux's PC Speaker driver?
And someone else, dharma1, replied:
> My friend's dad built one for him, for DOS/windows though. Must have been around -89 when we were 12.
> I think Scream Tracker had the schematic bundled with it as an ASCII drawing. We were taught how to solder in primary school, but I remember the schematics being way too advanced for us. Looking at it now it's just a simple resistor ladder tree
> I think it was roughly the same as Covox, someone had written a sound blaster emulator for it, and it worked pretty well on games, scream tracker/fast tracker and demoscene demos - for the price of a parallel port connector and a few resistors, pretty cool.
If that person (dharma1) sees this thread, I have a question for them: Could you take a picture of that schematic and post it?