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Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

Did any of you, back in the 90s, build a parallel port DAC to use with Linux's PC Speaker driver?

I never did, but was tempted. In the end I just splurged the 80 GBP for a SoundBlaster 16.

It's amazing what people can do with great software and just a little hardware. (See bottom of page: http://linux-audio.com/Sound-HOWTO-3.html)

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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.

I adapted 12-bit ADC and DAC to a PC parallel port of an 8088 PC running MS-DOS for my thesis project, and programmed it in Turbo Pascal. Already by that point MS-DOS was obsolete, but I decided that finishing grad school (in 1993) was more important than learning a new platform. Lack of the ability to run multiple processes in parallel was solved by running multiple PC's.

I ran that kind of DAC too circa 1990. We used the timer of the PC to play MOD file in parallel to graphic display.

Wow, your username is so appropriate.

I had a similar device branded as a "Disney Sound Source"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covox_Speech_Thing

Yes, I built a parallel port resistor ladder DAC.

It wasn't used with the PC Speaker driver though - it was the same as a Covox Speech Thing (mentioned in the original article here too).

At some point in the 90s a re-make of Zork (with graphics and sound) came out for PC (I think this was DOS era). However, most PCs didn't have sound cards, and it would be a hard sell to require customers to buy one (I think they were upwards of $100 back then?) on top of the cost of the game, so there was an option to purchase a parallel port sound adapter (basically a DAC) for about $20 (these are 90s prices) from the game company. We got one, but never could get it working, neither could some relatives.

Yeah, sound cards were always that bit too expensive and incompatible with each other. In the end I got my first SoundBlaster because it was also an interface card for a CD drive and they were doing good bundles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_16#CD-ROM_Suppor...

I got this Sound Blaster 16 as christmas present when I was a kid. I always remember it came in a very big blue package with the CD drive and some CDs with a lot of sharewhare applications.

My father told me very exited "I went to a friend's house and he was playing Prince of Persia, you can listen the footsteps "ton ton ton"."

I found a picture of the package: http://blog.hmvh.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/moby_SB16box...

My personal revelation was Wolfenstein 3D. I remember playing it on my Dad's work PC with the PC speaker. I copied it to a friend's PC (using MSBACKUP if I recall correctly) and when we fired it up it sounded glorious. I remember my parents coming to pick me up from my friend's house and we just had to give my Dad a demo.

"Coincidentally" enough shortly afterwards we had a SB16 of our very own. ;)

Yep, Wolfenstein was pretty revolutionary. I was in college at the time. A friend and I finished all three packs over a weekend, alternating as controller and navigator.

For me, the first game I played that really used sound to it's best effect was Doom (I think, or it could have been Quake - it was a long time ago alright :-) ).

There was one particular demon that you would hear half whispering in the distance. As soon as you heard that sound you knew that one of those demons was lurking around somewhere but you didn't know where, so you would start lookng frantically round, waiting for it to burst screaming out of the shadows and attack you.

To this day I have never played another game that evoked such a sense of tension and dread as that sinister whispering.

I just remembered now. My PC at the time had an IBM Blue Lightning processor, and (I guess) IBM chipset motherboard. The PC wasn't IBM-branded, but had a sticker on it that said it was manufactured by IBM in Scotland.

Anyway, the SB 16 worked fine in Windows 3.1 and in Linux (Slackware, with kernel 1.1.59), but it didn't work properly in DOS for some reason.

I looked online and found that others with the same chipset had the same problem, and no one had found a solution.

So the only way to play Doom with sound on that computer, was to run the Linux version.

Never did that but i know what it's like to shell out for a sound card. I had painted myself into a corner with an actual PS/2 with work discounts for OS/2 dev. I could dual boot to DOS but games suck without sound. After years of looking finally found a microchannel soundblaster compatible card by Piper Research (or something like that). Paid whatever was asked. Worked as advertized. Money did by happiness in this case.

Not a DAC, but plugging a "high speed" ADC (first it was an ADC0804, 1kHz, then after that some other faster models) was a good experiment

The trick was enabling the 3state inputs in the parallel port, which was only available on EPP ports I think

According to the list, AdLib is the only one that’s no longer manufactured.

> no longer manufactured.

OR IS IT?!

https://texelec.com/product/radlib-opl2-sound-card-8-bit-isa...

Sorry, it looks like this version of the doc is more recent:

https://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Sound-HOWTO/x96.html

And that someone realised it's too hard to maintain a complete set of 'no longer manufactured' indications.

AdLib replicas are currently manufactured.

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