Ad Lib MCA replica build + CPLD programming. Sound card for IBM PS/2 Micro Channel Architecture
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- Опубликовано: 10 ноя 2023
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PCB Prototype the Easy Way. Full feature custom PCB prototype service.
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Plaid Bib GitHub page here: github.com/schlae/plaid-bib-cpld
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Xilinx XC9572XL CPLD ISE 14.7 DLC9LP
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Tools I regularly use
DeoxIT D5 Contact Cleaner
Hanstar 861DW Rework Station
Pro'sKit SS-331 Desoldering Station
UNI-T UT61E Auto Ranging Multimeter
UNI-T UT890D Manual Ranging Multimeter
MESR-100 mk2 ESR meeter
PINECIL Soldering Iron
PinePowerPSU
TS-100 Soldering Iron
AMTECH NC-559-ASM Flux
Kester 951 Flux pen
MaAnt Grinding Pen
Multicore 60/40. 0.38mm and 0.5mm solder
TL866 II Plus Programmer
RIGOL DHO800 70MHz four-channel digital scope
Tektronix 2246A 100 MHz four-channel analog scope
InfiRay P2 Pro Thermal Camera
PCBs from PCBWay.com :)
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Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio 
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I love descriptions on PCB.
Does anybody else experience flickering lines in the video?
The printings shows the designer has a humour similar to mine.
I've seen these lines too. At first I thought my monitor had an issue.
@@e1woqf last time I saw something like this it was my graphics card dying, so I was a bit worried
Yeah, sorry about that. I didn't notice until it was too late to fix it. Something is messed up with my rendering PC
I have also noticed them, thought it was my computer but it's not.
@@Epictronics1 I had something like this happen back when I still used Adobe Premiere Pro. I eventually had to just remove CS from the computer and reinstall.
I absolutely adore the Mel Brooks-style component silkscreen descriptions!
Are flickering artifacts in the video visible to anyone else or are they just visible to me?
Nope, I'm seeing them here too
I see them as well
I see them too.
I thought it was my video card!!
Sorry about that. I didn't notice until it was too late to fix it. Something is messed up with my rendering PC
You made it slightly more difficult than it really is. When programming cplds the standard way to power it for programming is just plug the board or device in and power it normally from the slot or power jack. The chips are designed for in-circuit programming. The 3.3v will go from the 3.3v regulator automatically to the programming header and chip. There's no need to use a bench psu to supply the voltage for jtag programming. If you are concerned about plugging in the board and blowing it up due to a soldering mistake, program with jtag at the beginning.... mount the cpld and regulator then plug it in and program it. Or do what I do..... put only the regulator on the board then plug it in and measure the voltage on the jtag header and the chip vcc pins. If it's 3.3v then mount the cpld, plug the board into the slot and program it in-circuit. Then remove the board and solder the remaining components.
Ok, good to know, thanks
Interesting trivia: If you look closely you'll notice the VLB slot and 16-bit MCA slot are the exact same connector (obviously the pinout is very different). Since the MCA bus never took off there were a lot of extra MCA slots laying around made for boards that were never sold and manufactures decided to repurpose them as VLB slots.
Yeah, I read that somewhere else too. I wonder if IBM had licensed the MCA bus for less, maybe it would have become the standard
@@Epictronics1or made It free!! There was no EISA even which, of course works very very similar to ibm MCA bus
On a similar note: AMD's Slot A connector for Athlon CPUs is the same as Intel's Slot 1 connector for PII/PIII CPUs.
@@eDoc2020 The same? I mean the same pinout?
@@asanjuas The pinout is different, and the heastink goes on the opposite side of the card. This provides very rudimentary keying: in _most_ boards you'll hit VRM components or the back panel IO connectors if you try to insert the wrong brand CPU.
I don't mean to panic you but be careful with "noctua" fans! They're great but the airflow is also what it is. I replaced the fan of my NAS PSU some time ago with a nice Noctua, 2 years later I realised the airflow was so low the thing was running at stupid temperatures and I baked it. The original fan was probably overkilled for the system but make sure it still gets enough airflow!
VERY nice card, I still need to sort out my PS/2 I am so lazy...
You're not lazy Tony. You made a great video this week as always. Thanks for the warning. I didn't check the datasheet of the fan in this PS/2. However, I checked and compared when I replaced the fan in my PS/1 and the noctua was quite a bit more efficient. I'll make a habit of checking every time, thanks
This really needs to be said more. Everyone likes to replace loud fans with Noctua, and -- not always, but usually -- there's no thought given to _why_ the original fan was so loud. Sometimes it truly is just because... it's old, aerodynamic and bearing design wasn't what it is now, and manufacturers erred on the side of thermal margin rather than acoustics. But, sometimes the engineers knew what they were doing, and didn't spec a fan that slow because the thermal design couldn't sustain itself with a fan that slow. And that really is the #1 correlation -- more speed is more CFM is more noise. Pesky physics...
My very first family computer was a PS2 tower my father brought home from work. He spent a lot of money on a color monitor and other peripherals. We played a ton of games together on that machine. Great work on preserving these computers.
Thank you. There will be a restoration video of a tower PS/2 on this channel too eventually. The model 80
@@Epictronics1in that time i had an 8595 PS/2 with a scsi CD-ROM and for the sound card oh yeahh complicated times. The only things you may encounter IS the ethernet or token ring MCA bus cards.
Love those beige machines, just the site of them even on the RUclips video, make me reminisce about good old times 😊
I had one of these Model 50s back in the day. This is nostalgia at its best :)
@@Epictronics1 Those sound cards were fantastic as well, I remember when I used mine with Windows, it was like magical, having to increase the volume using the volume icon and mixer, and then increase the volume physically on the sound card. Your videos are like Time Machine, keeping our children hood memories alive🙏🏾👍🏾👌🏾
@@thabophadi Thanks :)
The silkscreen descriptions are the best!!!!!
That is definitely a nice satisfying bass tone.
There's just nothing like FM synthesis coming out of an IBM PS/2 :)
I love the Adlib soundboard. It's so enjoyable to hear some soundtrack in Adlib like The Incredible Machine 1 and 2, Monkey Island, Wolfenstein 3D and mostly Wing Commander 1 & 2.
Great project, love seeing the PS/2s get some proper sound card love. Looking forward to PCJR overclocking too
Thanks. A bit surreal to hear Ad Lib sounds coming out of a PS/2 :)
i whish that these cards exist6ed back in the 90's
MCA was also plug and play before plug and play.
This was an enjoyable experience and video ❤
Thank you : )
Someone REALLY needs to build a modern SB-AWE32 clone, with working stereo in pro2/16 mode.. With off-the-shelf, still-produced, parts and on the relatively cheap..
There should also be an open-source design and implementation, following the same rules as above, of both a Voodoo2 and an ISA Tseng ET4000, just to cover all the bases.
Retro motherboards are available by the truckload if you do even just a LITTLE bit of hunting (large cities often have electronics stores that deal in vintage/retro hardware, there's a GREAT one in Houston TX called "Electronic Parts Outlet"- Can't tell you how many times I've come across 5170s, Tandys, Ataris, even spotted a never-opened Commodore VIC-20 there for $250), and CPUs and RAM are even more common and can be had a dime a dozen, especially the 486 era (SX20s up through DX4-120s) and the Pentium-1 socket7 stuff.
But the holy grail for most vintage builders parts lists almost always comes down to two things; a REAL sound-blaster (most aim for pro2, sb16, or awe32) and the highest-performing ISA VGA card is the Tseng ET4000 .. If you want your eyes to bulge, look up the price of an ISA-VLB ET4000-powered video card.
So an open-source implementation of both the early ISA sound-blaster and two video cards, the et4000 and voodoo2, would make retro machines muuuuuch easier to attain for the ley person, not only for scarcity nowadays, but even just in price.
Totally agree. Let's hope someone makes clones. I'll be the first to build an ET4k VLB card
I agree a sbawe64 for PCI with opl2 was an amazing dream.
Would love to see a repro EMU8K, but that's a tall order. Although, if we have a GUS on FPGA, we're not _that_ far off. So maybe eventually. Ditto Voodoo -- that's a big ask. But so is the N64, and that's a reality now (no pun intended.) Hopefully some day.
However, I really think the ET4000 is tarted up to be way more than it actually is. It's... fine, I guess... but it doesn't live up to the hype.
For ISA, the bus is your biggest bottleneck. There are PLENTY of chipsets that can saturate ISA. The only real benefit of any given late-era VGA chipset is Windows acceleration, if you even care about that. For DOS, brute transfer rate wins, and well.. if your kink is 320x240, adventure games, don't worry about it. If you want to play Doom, use a Pentium with PCI.
For VLB, there are plenty of boards that perform as well, better, or at least "as fast as it matters" -- and cost a lot less, since they aren't hoisted up on a pedestal like the Tseng.
I got one of each (ISA and VLB), tested them, and immediately felt bad that I spent that much on a mediocre card that I had no sentimental attachment to. Just my PSA -- if you don't have one, you aren't missing much.
Sometimes you get away with a low noise adapter for the Noctua, to make it even less noisy.
Great job you did. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands
Thank you!
I have the Resound OPL3 card in my 8573 (P70) and it definately makes the PS/2 experience wonderful. Nothing for these machines is cheap, never has been!
Nice, P70 luggable goodness restoration coming up. Probably be early next year
@@Epictronics1 yay! Love P70 goodness. Let me know if you need anything. I have some spares laying around... somewhere.
I'm so tempted to build one of these for my model 50s! Perhaps one day I'll finally get around to fixing them up.
I think you should, It's a fun project and a great upgrade to any PS/2
anybody else getting horizontal lines of interference? Very cool project. My 486 is EISA, must get it out one day.
It's a level 3 project as visible on the envelope at 1:42 😅
Ha! Love the silkscreen on this board! :D
Shame the socket being the wrong way round ruined the whole thing :P haha! :)
Very refreshing :)
Sounds great! And super nice work on the build! I’m going to need to do one for my Model 80.
Thanks, the card sounds amazing. I'm definitely going to put one in the Model 80 too
@@Epictronics1 its better idea to build snark blaster!!
@@asanjuas We'll get there, be patient :)
Flippin awesome
Always EPIC!!!
:)
I was about to ask why IBM just never open-sourced the MCA bus, but I checked and they still use MCA in their RS/6000 unix and AS/400 line. Interestingly MCA was a 10mhz bus compared with the 8mhz AT bus, but the big difference was burst mode (which made it a lot faster), and any card could take over the bus to talk to any other peripheral on the MCA bus without CPU intervention.
Is AS/400 still alive? Wow, I used it 25! years ago
@@Epictronics1 Still kicking like the mainframes. There are small business who can't afford to move away from them.
In fact, IBM's hardware lineup in the 21st century is based on pricing that doesn't make it cost-effective to switch.
The whole point of MCA was to be deliberately proprietary. IBM thought they could force the clone makers to license their MCA bus so they could continue to be "IBM compatible", but the clone makers ended up creating their own standards in the form of EISA, VLB, and eventually PCI. In the end IBM abandoned MCA for their PCs because they wanted to compete in the same market as their competitors (until they didn't and sold out to lenovo). Evidently IBM couldn't let go of that need hold onto their proprietary technologies, hence they never open-sauced it. Maybe someday someone else will license MCA ... [wistfully stares off into the distance]
@@UpLateGeek That was 70% it, the other part was even at the time, the AT bus was simply too slow.
Two things about MCA that are frustrating:
1) The major technical thing wrong with MCA was the you needed those pesky feature disk to make the card active. Why not just have ROM on the card that would allow the card to self-configure? Even the Amiga could do it and it was released around the same time.
2) The patents for MCA didn't even come through until after the PCI bus had replaced MCA in the market.
@@teekay_1 The feature disks sound like they could be a precursor to the init programs that accompanied various PnP cards.
Very cool project. I would love to build a Adlib card too.
Yeah, before TubeTime reverse-engineered these cards it was pretty much impossible to get Ad Lib sounds out of a PS/2.
is that morse code?........I think it says........we're trying to reach you about your channel's extended warranty. LMAO It's all good dude. Hopefully you'll get it fixed next week.
😆
Surely at some point someone will figure out a way to use Modern parts to replace the DAC. It can't possibly be that different to parts being manufactured now The OPL2 for sure needs to be an original part but a dac should not be something that is a problem for a reproduction soundcard
I was just thinking the same thing!
I'm curious if even the OPL2 really needs to be genuine. I haven't tested any cores myself, but we've got to be getting pretty close to near-perfect reproductions now. I'm curious if any of them have gotten to the point where you could send the same commands to the core and real IC, and get the same bitstream back.
I've not seen PCBs you described at 9:25... My dad used bread boards so that's interesting
If I can get all the stuff needed without spending silly money, I'll make a video
It's never a good sign for a bus's adoption, when it requires an expensive big honking ASIC just to do all the arbitration to hook up 8-bit legacy parallel devices (that's the C&T 82C611 in the bottom left of the card.)
nice video.
Thanks, and thank you for making the card. It was great to finally hear Ad Lib sounds from a PS/2
I'm starting to distrust WIMA capacitors... I was testing an early 90s TV (which I am currently watching this video on) when it blew...
Oh wow! I better get that darn thing out of my PSU :o
Great vid! What PCB holder are you using?
Thanks! It's a ProsKit SN-390
nice
Thanks!
Awesome that this has been made.
What flux are you using in this video?
I use AMTECH NC-559-ASM
@@Epictronics1 awesome thanks!
24:33😍😍😍😍
25:40 Monkey Island😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍
Another great video! I will check that project for my PS2.
@Epictronics, could you do one of these days a video about the possibility of installing an SCSI2SD and/or BlueSCSI to replace the ultra rare scsi drives native to those systems (under 2GB)?
It is poorly documented on the internet!
It would be a nice addition to this series!
Thanks and keep your awesome videos!
Thank you. I probably will. However, I want to try a super cheap alternative first. Coming up next
@@Epictronics1
You are the best!
Can't wait for that!
@@anca30000 Thanks :)
I think you'll find the 3 vias for the caps aren't for 3 legged caps but so you can use either 2.54mm or 5.08 pitch capacitors.
I wonder if engineers back in the day designed their PCBs like that to account for potential part availability?
Thanks for noticing. I just assumed 3 legged caps because they were heavily used by IBM in earlier models. I checked and I think you are right. The pads don't match the polarity of three-legged caps.
There's also the Snark Barker MCA, which is a Sound Blaster MCA clone. I wonder if this was developed by the same person?
Yes, they were. I'm planning to build one some day
Visible for me too.
oh now something happened during the render - there's some strange flickering it seems D:
Yeah, sorry about that. I didn't notice until it was too late to fix it. Something is messed up with my rendering PC
Maybe it would be easier to desolder the board by using a hot air tool to melt all the solder then pull it free. That might melt the solder on the other parts on the board but that can be fixed after the fact if you even care.
I've used a paint stripper to remove parts, but a temperature controlled hot air gun works to remove all the parts by tipping it upside down and taping it. for soldering I find it good to add kapton tape where I don't want solder and to preheat the PCB.
are there any other differences between the isa and mca bus, that makes mca superior (besides the speed)?
looks like some video corruption throughout the video. might need to look into that
Yeah, I didn't notice until it was too late to fix it. I'll fix it before the next video
Is anybody else seeing the visual artifacting ? It's pretty visible @4:58 (middle of screen on the right) though you can see it at other times as well. I've seen it in Green, Red or Blue at various points. I don't get it on any other videos, so I don't think it's just me. ???
Sorry about that. My rendering PC seems to be messed up. I didn't notice until it was too late
@@Epictronics1 It reminded me of the kind of glitching you get when you overclock the RAM on your video card too far. It's a bit too uniform though.
@@ErrorMessageNotFound It's probably a glitch in davinci resolve. I'll do some troubleshooting and fix it before I render the next video
tubetime is impressive smart guy.
also, i dont think the bake part instruction is very relevant to hand soldering anyways. it is important if ur using solder paste and hot air because if theres too much moisture inside the chip package it can explode when heated as moisture vaporizes.
I read somewhere that he reverse-engineered the card just by looking at a picture of the original card
Replacing the big old 6V Lithium Battery with 2 CR2032 will not last for long.
Unfortunately, I don't think my multimeter can measure such a low current flow as we are dealing with here. I'll get back with some feedback when it runs out. Although it could be a long wait. If I understood the weird date code correctly on the original battery in this machine, It had the original battery for as long as it was in service.
Yeah talk about a downgrade in capacity. I really wish modern retro enthusiasts would stop trying to shoehorn coin cells into everything.
@@heilong108 Indeed. A massive downgrade. The NVRAM of a PS/2 ist not to be compared to normal CMOS so the large Batteries might be needed. I think thi one is a 2CR55 with ~1600mAh compared to the 110mAh of a CR2032.
@@heilong108 Sorry about that. I really hate sourcing all the various different kinds of cells everything uses.
What's the purpose of the CPLD? I suspect it's replacing an older part that's harder to find.
CPLDs are programmable logic chips that can you can use to replicate the function of discrete chips. In this case it replaces the roughly half dozen "glue logic" chips on the ISA version that take care of address decoding and latching. It also implements the POS (programmable option select) that allows you to configure the device from the reference disk.
It replaces the P82C611. They are not hard to find but the CPLD version works with faster PS/2. The original P82C611 version only works with the Model 50 and 60 Afaik
@@sa230e I know what a CPLD is, I just didn't know what it was used for in this case. At first I thought it was replacing the OPL chip, but then he added an OPL chip.
@@Epictronics1 ah ok that makes sense
Is there corruption in the video sometimes or is my video card going bad?
Sorry about that. My rendering PC seems to be messed up. I didn't notice until it was too late
hehe I guess an OPL2LPT might be easier, but what about the fun of your video?
If you use paper towel together with a brush, you don't have to clean it.
Paper towels shed like crazy. I use a toothbrush. :-)