Professionally made production clone of an obscure sound card from the 80s made with the best quality parts available and it costs 20 bucks. What a time to be alive.
That's the sad thing actually. We're fortunate to have retro hardware that lasts for decades as well as software capable of running in standalone mode, without requiring online activation, cloud storage and other forms of DRM garbage. Cell phones and tablets available today you won't be able to take out of the box and boot up, even if they're perfectly preserved. In addition, removable batteries are becoming a nuisance. If you buy a laptop from 80's or 90's, you can refit it with a new battery most of the time, or at least take the old one out and have it run off a brick. Ever tried firing up a cell phone or a tablet with a dead cell? Most will refuse to run outright. People who are growing up today - by the time they hit their mid life crisis and begin craving nostalgia - they'll have nothing to go back to, unless the entire experience gets simulated in VR. By then we'll all be living in Matrix...
Yeah, that's really bad. I like to go completely off-line from time to time, but it's hard. Living without a cellphone is getting harder and harder. But it's good to try it.
I remember building this for my 286/20MHz/1MB ram, before I could afford sound blaster clone card. No board, just pushed resistors into the parallel port and solder the rest in the air.
For better audio quality the device should be externally powered and LPT signals buffered before the resistor ladder. The DC-bypass btw removes the output capacitor but since most line-ins have one anyways it doesn't do much.
DAC chips are basically this inside, and 8-bit sound, which is what this is was fairly common. For instance Amiga did sampled playback but the DAC was 8-bit per channel. What's more interesting is getting a good sampling rate through the parallel port, there could be some caveats with that on some chipsets.
Not sure I'd call that expensive. BOM might be low but design and build costs must be considered. I'd say the price is reasonable. Another good video, Phil. Thanks!
Would be interesting to use parallel port's control signals to control a latch that would let you load samples into left and right latch to get stereo sound. By the way, this device can leave a DC level on output when playback stops. If plugged into some types of amplifiers or speakers the DC current can destroy the amplifier and speaker.
I have Covox Sound Things as well: integrated in an Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro (OPL3, Sound Blaster Pro, Covox Sound Things, AND Disney Sound Source) that I got for free back in April of 2016. It needs a new potentiometer since the volume knob is erratic, but it still works.
Aah, the 1980s... where a crude resistor-ladder DAC was considered 'good sound' :) I think it would be interesting to see how good of a sound quality you can get from one of these on a much slower system (I'm thinking late 486?) as I believe they require a lot of processor time to wiggle the parallel port lines. Greetings from the UK!
0.1% resistors have the same accuracy as an average DAC chip. In fact a DAC chip is quite similar to this inside. It's really a matter of discrete vs integrated. Not much quality difference. So yes, it's good sound.
There are Covox trackers for 8088 PC's. Resistor-ladder is the fastest possible DAC type and output distortion is dependant on resistor value accuracy, being only 8 bits is a limitation here but if you could also use the 4 control signals you could have 12 bit resolution, thats plenty. Given fast enough CPU you can have as high sample rate as you want.
Good video, there is a dos sound blaster emulator for the speech thing, but I have no idea how good it is... Will post a link to it on your Facebook group.
I made one of these just last week for my IBM PS/2 P70 as a proper sound card is like hen's teeth. MOD files and Pinball Fantasies sounded great! I couldn't get the SoundBlaster emulator to work though.
It's just a bunch of resistors? So in other words it's just an R2R ladder? Does DOS have high resolution timers? It's hard to push out sound a sample at a time without timers.
The IBM PC real time clock is programmable. It is set to 1kHz by default, but if you write your own interrupt handler you can increase the frequency by decreasing the divider value. If it were me writing the routine, I'd set the divider to 1 so you'd have a 32kHz sample rate (not too bad), and call the original interrupt handler every 32nd time. Another option would be to poll the VGA card registers and make a software timer using the horizontal sweep/sync (most standard VGA compatible modes are around 31kHz). Software timers are pretty CPU intensive, 'tho. Wow, that's a bit of a trip in the distant programming past for me ;)
Just a small correction: The IBM PC doesn't have a real time clock. You are referring to the Programmable Interval Timer chip, the Intel 8253-5, which is used to trigger an interrupt every so many counts.
R2R is pretty interesting circuit. The only problem with it is that it requires precise resistors to be linear. And that probaby is where the most of the price of this device comes from. But… It is prefectly possible to build 12 (maybe even 14) bit DACs with cheap 5% resistors and still make it linear. The key is matching them. Few years ago I've written a simple program to match high tolerance/low precision resistors for R2R ladder. The absolute values do not matter, they can be all over the place. It's the ratio of the equivalent resistances that matters.
It's close to linear but not perfect. In fact DAC chips have a linearity tolerance that just so happens to be similar to R2R. It's not a coincidence. ;)
well, with the market for this sort of post-production things emerging it wouldn't be surprising to see repro sound cards for MCA and other obscure buses.
It might even be posstible to create an internal Covox, running o a ISA or PCI slot and only the audio plug on the back. The original sound with the convenience of a sound card.
you should add a disney sound source inbetween :) You could also compare the product to a more known product to check out the difference in sounds (sb16 or so)
It doesn't sound that bad, a little distorted. I had a friend who had the Covox voice master for the C-64. It was fun to play around with but the sound quality was horrible.
Great !...I have a modern laptop that I want to use to play old games and it is hard to find DOS drivers for the Sound chip. This is the solution I am looking for. A little bulky however it will work. -Thanks.
I remember owning a 286 that didn't even have a pc-speaker. My brother installed one at some point, and I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread! Then few years later on a newer machine I heard Sound Blaster for the first time, when my brother bought a CD-ROM drive bundled with a sound card. He loaded Wing Commander 3 which was preceded by an "Intel Inside" into and that thing alone was enough to knock my socks off. What followed left me completely speechless.
unless he's buying his stuff in massive bulk he earns less than 5€ per board, that calculation is excluding assembly. Sounds quite alright to me as well.
I wonder if it can support Disney Sound Source, from what I understand it's more or less the same thing but with a built in FIFO buffer to up the sound quality going to the bulit-in speakers.
@@philscomputerlab is it possible to listen to mp3 in Windows through it? is it possible to write a voice to the microphone through it? is it possible to connect to the computer via a usb-lpt adapter? (translated from google)
Yep, if you are cheap you could cobble it together with a bunch of resistors flapping in the breeze straight from your tinker-bin. It simply uses the parallel port 8 bit lines as a DAC and including some software PWM magic you can achieve some great quality.
I think you are mixing it up with the 1-bit PC speaker digi sound playback, which uses the PWM technique. For the Covox you simply send 8-bit unsigned PCM to the parallel port.
Can you please show the tandy emulator ? github.com/volkertb/temu-vsb Being able to emulate tandy properly, the list of compatible games would be way longer Btw.... i found a shop offering those in Europe: retrocables.es/tienda/index.php?id_product=52&controller=product&id_lang=1
my covox still has not arrived but i found those emulators. maybe you want to give those a try? web.archive.org/web/20080514042812/zap.eltrast.ru/en/dldos.html
Professionally made production clone of an obscure sound card from the 80s made with the best quality parts available and it costs 20 bucks. What a time to be alive.
In a future our descendants will re-create cellphones and tablets
Cellphones and Tablets will still exist them but in a form we can't think of.
That's the sad thing actually. We're fortunate to have retro hardware that lasts for decades as well as software capable of running in standalone mode, without requiring online activation, cloud storage and other forms of DRM garbage. Cell phones and tablets available today you won't be able to take out of the box and boot up, even if they're perfectly preserved.
In addition, removable batteries are becoming a nuisance. If you buy a laptop from 80's or 90's, you can refit it with a new battery most of the time, or at least take the old one out and have it run off a brick. Ever tried firing up a cell phone or a tablet with a dead cell? Most will refuse to run outright.
People who are growing up today - by the time they hit their mid life crisis and begin craving nostalgia - they'll have nothing to go back to, unless the entire experience gets simulated in VR. By then we'll all be living in Matrix...
Yeah, that's really bad. I like to go completely off-line from time to time, but it's hard. Living without a cellphone is getting harder and harder. But it's good to try it.
@enilenis, You sir deserve a standing ovation!
I remember building this for my 286/20MHz/1MB ram, before I could afford sound blaster clone card. No board, just pushed resistors into the parallel port and solder the rest in the air.
It play MP3 too. Its great. I’ve tested in DSS player for DOS and it works fine!! Awesome device!
Interesting item. Those demos and tracker music at the end make me want to get out my Amiga 500 and watch some demos.
i remember making those things with a bunch of resistors a DSUB and a output lead ;)
For better audio quality the device should be externally powered and LPT signals buffered before the resistor ladder.
The DC-bypass btw removes the output capacitor but since most line-ins have one anyways it doesn't do much.
It's fascinating how such a simple device is able to produce a reasonable quality sound.
DAC chips are basically this inside, and 8-bit sound, which is what this is was fairly common. For instance Amiga did sampled playback but the DAC was 8-bit per channel.
What's more interesting is getting a good sampling rate through the parallel port, there could be some caveats with that on some chipsets.
I'm such a sucker for the sound of speech things, always love them. The build of this one looks much better than mine, might have to pick it up.
Not sure I'd call that expensive. BOM might be low but design and build costs must be considered. I'd say the price is reasonable. Another good video, Phil. Thanks!
3:56 AESTHETIC
ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ
This one looks much better than those I soldered myself back in the 90's. I guess it sounds better too :D
I remember making one of these things years and years ago for my DOS computers.
Would be interesting to use parallel port's control signals to control a latch that would let you load samples into left and right latch to get stereo sound.
By the way, this device can leave a DC level on output when playback stops. If plugged into some types of amplifiers or speakers the DC current can destroy the amplifier and speaker.
See, now you're thinking like an 80s computer engineer!
Only if you turn the DC filter bypass on though.
almost all audio amplifier designs have the DC bypass capacitor at the input already. I think the DC bypass cap here is for headphone users.
Isn't that more or less what the SB Pro 2 does, albeit inside the silicon?
Great video Phil, thank you!
Smart idea to use R-2R dividers to perform DAC. It's a basis of all sound card devices.
I have Covox Sound Things as well: integrated in an Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro (OPL3, Sound Blaster Pro, Covox Sound Things, AND Disney Sound Source) that I got for free back in April of 2016. It needs a new potentiometer since the volume knob is erratic, but it still works.
Aah, the 1980s... where a crude resistor-ladder DAC was considered 'good sound' :)
I think it would be interesting to see how good of a sound quality you can get from one of these on a much slower system (I'm thinking late 486?) as I believe they require a lot of processor time to wiggle the parallel port lines.
Greetings from the UK!
When these were new, they were often used with XTs and ATs, so I'd say they probably sounded fine... At the expense of all available processing power.
0.1% resistors have the same accuracy as an average DAC chip. In fact a DAC chip is quite similar to this inside.
It's really a matter of discrete vs integrated. Not much quality difference. So yes, it's good sound.
There are Covox trackers for 8088 PC's. Resistor-ladder is the fastest possible DAC type and output distortion is dependant on resistor value accuracy, being only 8 bits is a limitation here but if you could also use the 4 control signals you could have 12 bit resolution, thats plenty. Given fast enough CPU you can have as high sample rate as you want.
Good video, there is a dos sound blaster emulator for the speech thing, but I have no idea how good it is... Will post a link to it on your Facebook group.
I tried that Tandy and SB driver, but didn't have much luck. I tried Prince of Persia, Gods for SB and Space Quest and Maniac Mansion for Tandy.
I made one of these just last week for my IBM PS/2 P70 as a proper sound card is like hen's teeth. MOD files and Pinball Fantasies sounded great! I couldn't get the SoundBlaster emulator to work though.
Steve Cooper Yea the SB and Tandy emulators didn't work for me either.
It's just a bunch of resistors? So in other words it's just an R2R ladder? Does DOS have high resolution timers? It's hard to push out sound a sample at a time without timers.
The IBM PC real time clock is programmable. It is set to 1kHz by default, but if you write your own interrupt handler you can increase the frequency by decreasing the divider value. If it were me writing the routine, I'd set the divider to 1 so you'd have a 32kHz sample rate (not too bad), and call the original interrupt handler every 32nd time. Another option would be to poll the VGA card registers and make a software timer using the horizontal sweep/sync (most standard VGA compatible modes are around 31kHz). Software timers are pretty CPU intensive, 'tho. Wow, that's a bit of a trip in the distant programming past for me ;)
Just a small correction: The IBM PC doesn't have a real time clock. You are referring to the Programmable Interval Timer chip, the Intel 8253-5, which is used to trigger an interrupt every so many counts.
Correct. The Covox Speech Thing and the Disney Sound Source are both just R2R networks.
R2R is pretty interesting circuit. The only problem with it is that it requires precise resistors to be linear. And that probaby is where the most of the price of this device comes from. But… It is prefectly possible to build 12 (maybe even 14) bit DACs with cheap 5% resistors and still make it linear. The key is matching them. Few years ago I've written a simple program to match high tolerance/low precision resistors for R2R ladder. The absolute values do not matter, they can be all over the place. It's the ratio of the equivalent resistances that matters.
It's close to linear but not perfect. In fact DAC chips have a linearity tolerance that just so happens to be similar to R2R. It's not a coincidence. ;)
Indeed.
He forgets to mention IBM PS/2's and their outrageous pricing for MCA sound cards.
well, with the market for this sort of post-production things emerging it wouldn't be surprising to see repro sound cards for MCA and other obscure buses.
It might even be posstible to create an internal Covox, running o a ISA or PCI slot and only the audio plug on the back. The original sound with the convenience of a sound card.
Seems pretty cool, I do own an old 486 laptop without any soundcard.
you should add a disney sound source inbetween :)
You could also compare the product to a more known product to check out the difference in sounds (sb16 or so)
Nice Latitude C500 there. They actually had quite the nice graphics card for a laptop.
It doesn't sound that bad, a little distorted. I had a friend who had the Covox voice master for the C-64. It was fun to play around with but the sound quality was horrible.
Gives the latitude d610 great dos compatibility apparently.
Retro DOS gaming on a PCIe based system.
Covox was really popular with post-Soviet ZX clones.
The laptop in this vodeo is my current day daily driver laptop. the Dell D630 with 4GB DDR2 256GB SSD core 2 duo t2750 and Lubuntu
Great !...I have a modern laptop that I want to use to play old games and it is hard to find DOS drivers for the Sound chip. This is the solution I am looking for. A little bulky however it will work. -Thanks.
there is a driver for this that make it appear as a soundblaster to the system.
I tried that Tandy and SB driver, but didn't have much luck. I tried Prince of Persia, Gods for SB and Space Quest and Maniac Mansion for Tandy.
Yes two one is a REMUS.exe and emulate a lot of sound card but is a bit complicated ... and the other is Virtual sound Blaster
Why clone the Covox Speech Thing and not the slightly more compatible Disney Sound Source?
Because it is not more compatible, has max sample rate of 9.8 Khz etc. Covox will work with anything supporting "LPT DAC".
Should the printer port be set to EPP printer mode with the bi-directional feature turned on.
Fortunately I don't lived the soundless computer era. Our first 386 already came with a Sound Blaster 16
My 386 only had a PC speaker. :( It did have a VGA card though. :)
I remember owning a 286 that didn't even have a pc-speaker. My brother installed one at some point, and I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread! Then few years later on a newer machine I heard Sound Blaster for the first time, when my brother bought a CD-ROM drive bundled with a sound card. He loaded Wing Commander 3 which was preceded by an "Intel Inside" into and that thing alone was enough to knock my socks off. What followed left me completely speechless.
Is that a Dell Latitude D400 series laptop? I do my microprocessor programming and CNC milling on one just like it! Ha!
I wonder why no one seems to use an actual DAC IC for these. The only issue I see is the requirement for external power, but that's not hard to do.
20 quid? mate, that's pretty reasonable.
unless he's buying his stuff in massive bulk he earns less than 5€ per board, that calculation is excluding assembly. Sounds quite alright to me as well.
What's up with the Dell Latitude D600 / D800 you got there?
I wonder if it can support Disney Sound Source, from what I understand it's more or less the same thing but with a built in FIFO buffer to up the sound quality going to the bulit-in speakers.
No it doesn't support the Disney I'm afraid.
Never let these guys read you poetry.
I cant get my 1993 pc to boot from floppy drive.Its a Acer Motherboard it has 32mb of RAM and a Cyrix Cx486dx2 .Could you help me?
to think IBM was too cheap to throw some resistors to the PC so it could have sound
Gaming on an old laptop with good sound.. cool. Shame everything didn't support it.
Checkout the OPL3 version, it's MUCH better. Basically an Adlib.
@@philscomputerlab Thanks, I will.
A E S T H E T I C S
Have try with transport tycoon or a-train
можно ли через него слушать мп3 в Винде? можно ли через него писать голос на микрофон? можно ли подключить к компу через переходник юсб- лпт?
??
@@philscomputerlab is it possible to listen to mp3 in Windows through it? is it possible to write a voice to the microphone through it? is it possible to connect to the computer via a usb-lpt adapter? (translated from google)
@@gmergmer2606 I don't know.
Needs more cowbell
Walken right into that one...
Can i put it on some new system like p4 or athlonxp?
Yes that will work fine, just needs a parallel port.
DC bypass should be switched on. You don't want DC on your audio out.
3:54 does this sound familar
reminds me of that crazy frog video.
I think it's the beverly hills cop theme.
yes that Too!! why didn't he GIVE US THAT FULL AUDIO!
Ok, it's called Axel F. Here's the original: ruclips.net/video/Kp86pVEPZS8/видео.html
i think there's a linux driver for this
So it has no chips? Just resistors? Weird.
Yep, if you are cheap you could cobble it together with a bunch of resistors flapping in the breeze straight from your tinker-bin. It simply uses the parallel port 8 bit lines as a DAC and including some software PWM magic you can achieve some great quality.
I think you are mixing it up with the 1-bit PC speaker digi sound playback, which uses the PWM technique. For the Covox you simply send 8-bit unsigned PCM to the parallel port.
For €250 they could have used 0.01% resistors instead of 0.1%
Can you please show the tandy emulator ? github.com/volkertb/temu-vsb
Being able to emulate tandy properly, the list of compatible games would be way longer
Btw.... i found a shop offering those in Europe: retrocables.es/tienda/index.php?id_product=52&controller=product&id_lang=1
Didn't work for me. Let me know how you go with it.
As soon as my covox arrives I will definitely test that :)
my covox still has not arrived but i found those emulators. maybe you want to give those a try? web.archive.org/web/20080514042812/zap.eltrast.ru/en/dldos.html
Well, DIY one will be a lot cheaper. Just like Covox from this video:
ruclips.net/video/Vxnv-I_ryDM/видео.htmlm4s
20 Euros? Really? Going for dinner costs more...
Whoa! Totally didn't expect your answer! Well, here as a student i have monthly 1860 roubels(30 Euros), so yes, for me 20 Euros is kinda big money.
You should sell old computer parts on eBay and get rich :)
Maybe i'll do it someday) Love your vids, by the way.
Covox, not covvox. pronounce it properly.
Just for fun, try it on a Windows 10 setup with a USB to parallel adapter!