digger
Experienced Member
since some of us have been creatively pitching vintage hardware projects, here is one of mine, which I would like to call the "über sound card".
It would be an 8-bit sound card with some or all the following features (yes, I know I'm going all-out here):
You might have noticed the absence of Gravis Ultrasound compatibility, since all GUS revisions were 16 bit designs, requiring a high DMA port I believe, and hardware compatibility could therefore never be achieved on XT class machines, as far as I know. (But feel free to correct me on this if this is not the case.)
Now I know that the above feature list is quite ambitious, and it may not be practical to implement all of these features (well, not in a first revision at least ), but what do the rest of you think? Is this just a pipe dream, or would such a project be feasible, even with just some of the mentioned features? And perhaps you have additional features to suggest that I hadn't thought of, particularly things that are typically missing in existing sound cards for no apparent reason, but are easy to implement and awesome to have.
Designing and building an actual working sound card (and LPT DACs don't count) was a dream of mine years ago. These days, in a forum of tinkerers such as this one, this idea has popped up in my head again. Also, since high performance DSPs and microcontrollers are very cheap these days, I think most of the features in this list may be surprisingly easy to implement. But of course, someone else in this thread is undoubtedly going to give me reality check on that.
I think the best (and most flexible) way to go about it would be a flexible microcontroller design with a flashable BIOS (like in the XTIDE), the mentioned ports hooked up, and all inputs being run and mixed through a high resolution DSP, the analog inputs all being converted through ADCs first, methinks. Of course, quite a few microcontrollers these days are so fast, that they could mix and process all the audio sources without a separate DSP. But I do have to say that having a processor core on the sound card that is several orders of magnitude faster than the vintage host CPU does feel a little bit like cheating.
Any thoughts on this are welcome, as a matter of fact. Let's have it.
It would be an 8-bit sound card with some or all the following features (yes, I know I'm going all-out here):
- compatibility with all systems that have 8- or 16-bit ISA slots (from 8088 to the newest CPUs)
- full 8-bit sound blaster compatibility (1.5, 2.0, and Pro)
- CMS compatibility
- OPL3 compatibility
- OPL3 Stereo switchable between SB Pro and SB16 modes
- Tandy 3 voice compatibility (oh yes :mrgreen
- virtual LPT port with Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source emulation (a feature already found in some Sound Galaxy cards)
- Full MPU-401 compatibility (intelligent and UART modes)
- internal Waveblaster-compatible daughterboard connector
- external game/midi port on the backplate
- mini-XLR ports on the backplate (no more crappy mini-jack connectors or feedback hums)
- digital S/PDIF ports on the backplate
- internal 2-pin input connector for the internal speaker source
- internal connector(s) for CDROM audio (perhaps both digital and analog)
You might have noticed the absence of Gravis Ultrasound compatibility, since all GUS revisions were 16 bit designs, requiring a high DMA port I believe, and hardware compatibility could therefore never be achieved on XT class machines, as far as I know. (But feel free to correct me on this if this is not the case.)
Now I know that the above feature list is quite ambitious, and it may not be practical to implement all of these features (well, not in a first revision at least ), but what do the rest of you think? Is this just a pipe dream, or would such a project be feasible, even with just some of the mentioned features? And perhaps you have additional features to suggest that I hadn't thought of, particularly things that are typically missing in existing sound cards for no apparent reason, but are easy to implement and awesome to have.
Designing and building an actual working sound card (and LPT DACs don't count) was a dream of mine years ago. These days, in a forum of tinkerers such as this one, this idea has popped up in my head again. Also, since high performance DSPs and microcontrollers are very cheap these days, I think most of the features in this list may be surprisingly easy to implement. But of course, someone else in this thread is undoubtedly going to give me reality check on that.
I think the best (and most flexible) way to go about it would be a flexible microcontroller design with a flashable BIOS (like in the XTIDE), the mentioned ports hooked up, and all inputs being run and mixed through a high resolution DSP, the analog inputs all being converted through ADCs first, methinks. Of course, quite a few microcontrollers these days are so fast, that they could mix and process all the audio sources without a separate DSP. But I do have to say that having a processor core on the sound card that is several orders of magnitude faster than the vintage host CPU does feel a little bit like cheating.
Any thoughts on this are welcome, as a matter of fact. Let's have it.
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