The "MADE IN ANGER" on the silkscreen cracks me up every time I see it. The juxtaposition of a silly message w/ my experience that only "SERIOUS TEXT" goes on PCB silkscreens makes for total hilarity to me.
I wonder if putting art on inner PCB copper layers is more common? Similar to silicon art on ICs? It would only be visible on x-ray and to people in the PCB fab.
I've never personally done it, or seen any in the wild, but it seems more likely to get away with? On a commercial product, something silly on a silkscreen is quite likely to be noticed by someone without a sense of humor.
Check out this awesome talk on how he reversed the Sound Blaster including never having one in person and how he got inside the 'DSP' chip to read out the ROM.
There is another project, with reverse engineered firmware rewritten to ATmega328P (of arduino fame): "BLASTERBOARD : A new SB 2.0-compatible ISA sound card" https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=61098
Offers vastly improved sound quality "idle noise level is around -94dB RMS". Firmware is available for download, but in binary only form.
Fascinating video that answered my question about why bother replicating 30 year old hardware. I had no idea that vintage hardware was going for such high prices.
This is becoming similar to the classic car market. I see an analogy with companies that are making car bodies that are replicas of famous historical cars. For example, there are numerous companies making body shells similar to the Porsche 356: https://www.kitcarlist.com/porsche356.html
It has always been like the classic car market for nerds. One guy paid me $500 to create a re-creation of the the VAXStation he used in grad school to do his thesis work on. I explained he could do everything he wanted to do with simh on a PC but it was the "feel" and the "sound" he really wanted to create. I was happy I could help him out.
It reinforced though that the money was being spent to recapture a time in their lives they felt things that they wanted to feel again. Classic nostalgia.
> Fascinating video that answered my question about why bother replicating 30 year old hardware. I had no idea that vintage hardware was going for such high prices.
I guess it depends on exactly which hardware. Looks like a SB16 can be had for $20 on ebay, or $40 'new' in shrink wrapped box.
The hardware of different SB16 cards can vary significantly. For example the earliest versions used a Yamaha OPL3 chip and later ones used software emulation. This is why on ebay SB16 listings generally contain the specific board model number and not just Sound Blaster 16. Differing models have differing values. Some fairly cheap and rarer models more expensive.
SB16s were fairly common so I'm not surprised about that. The Niche cards or later ISA SBs (thinking AWE) tend to be a bit more valuable.
It's been a while since I looked at the market, but I know that Gravis and Ensoniq cards tend to be a bit more valued since they were less common but in many ways superior to the SB offerings.
If I wanted a more or less as-new 486 system to run old DOS stuff on, what are my options? Are there companies that do custom builds, possibly in a more modern case, or places I could get unused components? I've considered this as a project for a while, because DOSBox only satiates my nostalgia to a point.
I wanted to do the same thing but not deal with too many old parts. There are a bunch of single board computers with clone x86 pentium-ish cpus available all on a single ISA card, so I plugged one into ISA backplane, added a vintage VGA and SB card, and wrote a TSR that uses one of the watchdog timers on the board to slow it down a bunch so I could play Wing Commander II again. It’s a fun and not terribly expensive weekend project.
You wanna get real with that? Look up the Bill Thomas Cheetah, or the Ferrari 250 GTO. Bodies may/may not be available. Actually, until a couple of years ago you could buy a 1970 Dodge Challenger body and a 1951-3 Chevrolet Pickup body, new reproduction.
"Chips not available from Mouser can be purchased from a variety of sources in China"
Good luck figuring out why your code doesn't work on your "genuine" 8051.
From my experience, as soon as there is some demand (this has hit HN after all) the resellers start selling fake or inferior chips. Doesn't really matter how common or cheap they are, its just hope things work now.
Edit: when we really have to buy from China, I always create a test rig to verify component characteristics. Easy for transistors and opamps, not so easy for CPUs.
The SB card uses a number of old sound ICs that are simply not manufactured any more, and can't be bought from Mouser. Chinese shops are now the only source for these, and in my experience buying a few, they do work. No idea where they got them from however, maybe all that electronic junk that was shipped to China did get in part recycled.
It would be fascinating to find out where some of these parts come from. CuriousMarc had a video sometime ago where he got a batch of exotic HP custom ICs for his HP 9825 from a random seller in China. He first thought they were counterfeit, but after testing and decapping they turned out to be genuine.
I don't think there's any profit in cloning such rare, old chips. Even in China I suspect fab runs are too expensive to justify making old chips for a handful of retro-computing enthusiasts. I think it's more likely these are parts pulled from old boards before recycling or forgotten new-old-stock someone found in a corner of a warehouse somewhere.
In this video, someone buys a bunch of chips from various places and evaluates them, pointing out why some are rubbish, or old-but-marked-as-new: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k72SFBOZ_lw
Typically they are old devices that have been painted and re-marked to make them appear newer than they really are. Often they still work fine, but since they've not been retested, it's not guaranteed.
I used to think that, but it turns out there is an entire process for straightening and polishing the pins (for DIP) and repainting and labeling the ICs to make them look new after they’ve been harvested (by hand or by machine).
Slightly off-topic, but the original Sound Blaster came with a piece of software called Dr. Sbaitso. It was the first chat bot I interacted with and you could ask him to say swear words and stuff. I had so much fun with that program.
I remember that fondly. We spent many a night chatting away at Dr Sbaitso only to get a vague but sometimes snarky response on a blue screen with yellow text.. if my memory doesn’t fail me? Also SB pro came with a few more tidbits, one of them was the nutcracker demo and a parrot app, breathtaking at the time too.
Heh, I had forgotten that already. I had so much fun with Dr. Sbaitso in the early 90s when I bought my first sound card, SB Pro 2.0.
After all these years I can still remember the introduction lines word-by-word. Scary..
I am glad to see old hardware is being preserved. Is there a fanbase for old Sound Blaster cards? The only thing I remember about my SoundBlaster 16 is that the MIDI presets sounded nothing like the instruments they were named after.
I think due to copying old discs to new storage, I still have copies of my old config.sys and autoexec.bat with the settings for my Sound Blaster. I remember getting it to work and never touching it again.
I had a DEC PC (not the Rainbow, the actual compatible line with the S3, I think it was the 4XX line), and I had some other settings. I think it was because of the S3 to be honest. I do admit I liked the Turtle Beach stuff better.
While I love this, and I totally appreciate the work and effort... why ISA? I mean, why not jack it up to be a clone that works with newer PCs?
I get that it is a clone, but it might have been even better if we could use it today. (of all the old junk I have, I no longer have a mobo with ISA, VLB or AGP slots)
This is intended for the retro PC community. Interest in building vintage PCs has taken off, but it's getting really hard/expensive to find certain working components like the Sound Blaster.
You can support a subset of PCI with a fairly simple fpga implementation, but even the antique pci with its 33/66Mhz bus can be tricky to design with correct signal integrity.
Yet another one of those projects which is an incredible achievement and where I find myself wondering if this is a just a total waste of time and creative energy.
People like to learn things. There's no better way to learn something than to do something. It's even better if your first project is recreating something that is known to work. In that case, if it doesn't work its because something in your build doesn't work. If you design from scratch and then build, you don't know if the build is wrong or if the design is wrong. Not everyone can ride a bike without training wheels when they learn to ride a bike. It just happens that training wheels for real world things tends to look a lot like making a copy of something else that already exists.
If that falls outside of what you approve of how someone spends their time/energy/money, then find something else to worry about.
