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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyged8Vk8uk