IBM Microchannel Sound Card: M-ACPA REV C. Condition is 'Used'. Shipped with USPS First Class. This is from my collection of sound cards. I no longer have MCA machines so Im letting it go. Welcome to the HelpDrivers, driver for sound IBM. HelpDrivers offers drivers that support both currently shipping and obsolete sound, which are only available from this site. On this page we place a list of printers manufacturers. To find and download the printers drivers please choose the appropriate manufacturer from the list above.

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Introduction

I love PC computer sound and music. It takes a lot of effort andpatience to like PC music, to be honest, since every time you actuallyenjoy a warbly arpeggiated simulated chord through the speaker, or acheezy-sounding Adlib FM soundtrack, or a snippet of 1-bit digitized soundforced through the PC speaker like a grape through a straw, people lookat you funny. Real funny. I have great respect for musicians whowrote music (and programmers who wrote playback code) for PCs. It's anart to create a good soundtrack given the medium you have to work with.

And just what was medium? Specifically, what the output like? In thebeginning, all you had was the internal PC speaker, which was a simpletone generator (real simple) without any voice ordynamics control; it could sustain a frequency and that was it. In themid 80's, some better devices found their way into the hands of consumers.Some were extremely well-supported, like the PCjr/Tandy 3-voice soundchip and the Adlib music synthesizer card.

I created this section of Oldskool.org in the hopes that people will notonly learn about the many different techniques and devices that softwaredevelopers used to create music on early PCs, but also take a closer lookat the sound/music itself and maybe appreciate it a bit more.

Sound Devices and Techniques

(The following is currently reprinted from Life Before Demos, but will be rewritten andexpanded upon at a later date. I am ashamed to admit this shortcut,but I needed something here as a placeholder because I was runningbehind schedule for the opening day of Oldskool.org. If you'vealready read this in Life Before Demos, skip ahead to the Taste Test,since new information begins there.)

Ibm Sound Cards & Media Devices Drivers

1981-1982

The PC speaker, driven by a chip that could only produce a simpletone at a fixed volume, was the only thing that kept us company.If it weren't for BASICA, we'd live in silence. BASICA had a PLAY statement thattook real notes and octaves; you could bang out a melody relativelyquickly, although itwas loud and harsh. You could fake a chord by quickly alternatingbetween different notes at the same time (an arpeggio), but this sounded artificialand bubbly. (If you didn't have a love for computer music, itwould quickly drive you crazy.) Pianoman by Neil J. Rubenking was amusic composition program that did this; you could compose each voiceseparately, and then combine them into an arpeggio. A gentler trickwas to adjust the pitch up and down very finely, simulating vibrato.One voice, but at least it wasn't so harsh.

1983

The PCjr is released, and Tandy follows suit a year later with theTandy 1000, which was a clone of the PCjr. One of the enhancements inthe PCjr was the addition of a 3-voice sound chip that gave multiplechannels, noise generation, tone envelopes, and volume control to thebuilt-in speaker. Now we had something to play with.The BASICA that came with the PCjr and Tandy supported a 3-voice PLAYstatement, which, if you played your cards right, could produce somefairly nice sound. One thing Idiscovered was that the Tandy chip had a hidden strength in low chord layering.

1984

Music Construction Set, programmed by Will Harvey, came out for the PCin 1984 from Electronic Arts. It had a real staff, with treble and bassclefs, and had a neato 'construction set' motif--you could drag'n'dropnotes onto the staff before 'drag'n'drop' was a common catch phrase.Best of all, not only did it support the native sound chip of thePCjr/Tandy, but it could play four voices through the normal built-inspeaker! (Granted, it was difficult to discern between the voices, butit was possible to hear the overall chord you were going for.) Youcould even print out the staff on your printer, although it was one longstaff down the side of the page, and not nicely formatted sheet music.:-)

1986

Mindscape publishes Bank Street Music Writer, the first program Iever bought that came with its own hardware if you didn't own a Tandy orPCjr. The 'Mindscape Music Board' was a 6 voice sound card which turnedout to be a sine or square wave generator with simple attack, sustain,and delay parameters. Not exactly FastTracker 2 envelopes, but it was astart. :-) Plus, it attempted to print out real sheet music, and youcould follow your voices on-screen as they played. I went nuts withthis board, sometimes spending hours arranging the tunes my school choirwas practicing. Although it was very good at producing solid chords (itwas a tone generator, right?), it never took off,because the price was a bit high ($110) and it didsound a bit... 'plinky'. (Come to think of it, Music Construction Setfor the Apple supported a similar board called the Mockingboard, butthat never took off either.)

I'm fairly certain that I saw the Covox Speech Thing around this timeas well. The Speech Thing was a simple digital-to-analog converter thatyou could connect to your parallel port to hear digitized sound. Itsold for about $70, even though the parts cost about$15--including the speaker. :-)

1987

Adlib. :-) This famous boardused a chip from Yamaha that produced Frequency-Modulated (FM) soundsynthesis through 2 operators and a variety of parameters. You couldutilize 9 melodic voices, or 6 melodic and 5 percussion. Armed with theodd Visual Composer, you could compose on a piano roll instead of amusical staff. It wasn't bad at all; in fact, it sounded pretty damngood. If programmed correctly, it could layer voices well, producedecent bass, and fairly full sounds. I still believe that the Adlib was(and still is) underused by the majority of people who composed for it.

While I didn't purchase my Adlib until 1989, the board was actuallyselling in 1987, and games started supporting it in 1988. Taito'sarcade conversions done by Banana Development supported it passably, butit wasn't until 1990 that I heard simply beautiful music through it froma game called Continuum from Infogramme. The game consisted of jumpingfrom platform to platform to reach a certain object, but the music wasso good that I booted it up just for the music. (It also supported theTandy sound chip, but since the music was composed for the Adlib, it wasnowhere near the same quality.)

The great former C64 demogroup Vibrants also did some excellent musiccomposed specifically for the Adlib board, but this wasn't until muchlater, in 1993, when they composed music for a few games. Theircomposition program, Edlib, is still freely available. Ever hear technoon an Adlib? :-) (Their true strength was jazz, which is what theyusually composed.)

IBM Music Feature Card. This board was released from IBM in 1987 in aneffort to draw MIDI musicians over to the IBM. Itcost $495 at introduction, and played 8 FM voices. The quality of the FM was somewhat better than Adlib because it used a 4-operator FM chip(also from Yamaha) instead of Adlib's 2-operator chip, and had over 100built-in instrument parameters. It also had a MIDI port.This board was, essentially, a Yahama FB-01 on a card.Trivia: You could put two of these boards in your PC at the same timeto get a total of 16 simultaneous voices.

1988

Creative Music Systems (the name they had before they changed it toCreative Labs) came out with the Game Blaster around this time, and itoffered 12 channels, with each channel producing either a single sinewave of a given frequency and magnitude (in stereo), or noise. Thesound quality was obviously worse than the Adlib--the board simplycouldn't do much of anything. You can still purchase CMS chips to putinside your Sound Blaster 1.x and 2.0, but it's really not worth it.The only game I know of that supported the CMS Game Blaster with decentmusic was was Times of Lore by Origin.

Digitized sound! Around this time, game companieshad finally started to use digitized sound for music.(It had been used on the PC for sound effects as early as1983, in Castle Wolfenstein/Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, and in 1987, inthe PC version of Dark Castle.) While I had speculated that you couldrecord bits of music and then rearrange them cleverly, a French gamecompany called Loriciels beat me to it, with theexcellent games Mach 3(1987) and Space Racer (1988) (they also did a then-popularPong/Breakout/Arkanoid clone called PopCorn). These games had a reallycool (for a PC at the time) musical intro at the beginning, which waspieced together from small sound snippets that were arranged on the flyto form a longer piece of music. (You can think of this as a .MOD filewith only one channel and all instruments/samples played at C#3.)And it played through the PC speaker! Coming from a PC that had asimple tone generator as a sound device, this just blew me away. CrazyCars by Titus also had a snippet ofdigitized sound at the beginning, but this was just a 64K samplethat looped once. The same went for Wizball by Mindscape. (Wizball wasa fabulous game, IMHO.) Finally, games like Bop'n'Wrestle used it forthe counts and body-slamming noises.

1989

The Sound Blaster hits the scene, and game companies start supportingit. It's essentially an Adlib clone, but it has the ability to recordand playback digitized sound, allowing for speech and decent soundeffects. (This information was essentially provided for people whodon't know what a Sound Blaster is. I probably shouldn't have evenwritten this paragraph, since the (in)famous Sound Blaster doesn't needmentioning, but I've done it already, so... whatever. :-)

1990

True Mixing. While many remember TrakBlaster being the first program toplay MOD files on the PC, a couple of people were mixing before then,most notably PSI / Future Crew. He had created and marketed ScreamTracker in 1990 as shareware, and it could mix and play up to fourvoices in real-time on an 8MHz (or faster) computer. The early versionsof Scream Tracker supported a mode of operation similar to the oldSoundTracker on Amiga--you could save the song data and instrumentsseparately. This allowed you to compose over 20 songs and fit them onthe same disk, because you use the same set of instruments with eachsong. EGA Megademo / SpacePigs did this--they had four different songsthat used the same instruments, so the whole thing fit onto asingle 360K disk.

Take the PC Sound Standard Taste Test

IBM Sound Cards & Media Devices Driver

All of the above is interesting, I agree, but it's 'falling on deaf ears'(bwaahaa! I'm so damn funny!) if you can't get an idea for what thedarn things sounded like. How was the Tandy/PCjr sound chip betterthan the PC speaker? Why did game manufacturers go through the troubleto provide sound support for the Roland MT-32? And just how good didPC speaker multi-voice attempts really sound?

Take the PC Sound Standard Taste Test! The following sound clips arenot only examples of what each device/technique sounded like, but eachcategory is specifically constructed from the same piece of music.This allows for easy comparison.

In the middle to late 1980's, software developers discovered that youcould play digitized sound through the PC speaker without additionalhardware by utilizing Pulse-Width-Modulation, which toggles thePC's internal speaker faster than it can physically move to simulatepositions between fully on and fully off. (How's thatfor a clever hack?) Since you could get reasonable output of 6-bitdigitized sound this way, some game developers decided to make use of it,either for sound effects (which was common) or for title music (whichwas rare). Some of these title 'soundtracks' were original pieces ofmusic composed specifically for the game, and many were extremely goodfor their time!

I've always been a fan of digitized title music in PC games. When allyou've heard in your games are simple 'beeps and boops' for a couple ofyears, the first time you hear real sound through yourspeaker, it floors you. It certainly left an impression on me, anyway.What also contributed to that impression was the uncommon qualityof the music--it was usually well composed or thought out, which wasnot something you expected for a 4-color CGA game runningon a 4.77MHz 8088 in 1987.

They were also cool from a technical standpoint: The programmer hadsuccessfully figured out how to output digitized sound through a devicethat was not designed to support such an action. How they discoveredthe technique of toggling the PC's internal speaker faster than it canphysically move is beyond me. (Who was the first person to think oftrying that?) Plus, the musicians themselves pulled some clever tricks,such as dynamic compression (in the sense of making quiet sounds louder,not the 'pkzip' variety) and repeating sections, to not only make thetitle music better audible through the speaker, but also to make itlonger. Space Racer is an excellent example of this: the actual audiodata is 128K, but the entire title music (if saved into the same format)is much larger than that due to sections of music that can be 'reused'.

Sadly, most digitized title music of this nature has never been heard,since: 1. In most cases the game came out only for the PC before there wassupport for more conventional digitized output, such as the Sound Blasteror Covox Speech Thing, and 2. Most clone PCs had crappy psezio-electric'tweeter' speakers that resulted in barely audible or inaudible sound,instead of the large honkin' 3' speaker of the original PC. (The onlyexception to this is probably most Access titles, since they spent alot of time creating and enhancing RealSound, their system of playingdigitized sound on the PC, and eventually offered playback through theSound Blaster and other devices.)

This section of oldskool.org is here to remedy that situation. In thefollowing table, you'll find Sun/NeXT .au (u-law) sound clips of thetitle music of several games made during 1987-1989, which you can easilylisten to right from your web browser through your sound device.While the sound is certainly not as polished as today's modern game music,the musical ideas and composition are certainly comparable. (Not to mention that,geez, this came out of your PC's speaker without additional hardware!Come on, isn't that cool as hell?)

Remember, these are not 'mods' or 'tracked music'; these are cleverlyarranged, sometimes-repeating, single-channel sound samples. Enjoy!

Crazy Cars	Titus	1987	~64K	Hard rock for a fast 'muscle cars' racing game.
Offshore Warrior	Titus	1987	~128K	A very cool 'sly spy' piece, suggesting mystery and intrique. The only problem is, it has nothing to do with the game! This is a high-speed boat racing game...!
Mach 3	Loriciels	1987	~64K	'Get ready for Mach 3,' the woman says suggestively, and then the euro-rock track starts. Cool.
Cobra	Loriciels	1987	~195K	How to compress a TV show's theme into memory? Use 4-bit samples and a lot of repetition.
Fire and Forget	Titus	1988	~128K	A suitable track for the game, suggesting a post-apocalyptic world where people still have electric guitars. Kind-of like the music in Le Dernier Combat if LDC hadn't all been experimental jazz.
Space Racer	Loriciels	1988	~128K	One of the very best digitized title tracks I've ever heard; a hard-hitting energetic intro to a fast game, this title track really sets the mood well.
Purple Saturn Day	Exxos	1988	~64K	Creative and weird, just like the game. :)
Turbo Cup	Loriciels	1988	~128K	The ultimate best digitized title track from Loriciels. This one pulls out all the stops, by pre-mixing some sections into slightly different ones for more variety. It's not quite a .MOD player (all premixing is done before the game starts) but it's long and impressive!
Galactic Conqueror	Titus	1988	64K	Short and sweet. The game itself is a very nice-looking fast 3rd-person shoot'em up.
Aspar GP Master	Dinamic	1989	~96K	One of the very best digitized title tracks I've ever heard; repeating sequences are folded into the piece well; upbeat and happy.
Mean Streets	Access	1989	~128K	I heard this song on a late-night 976 number commercial!! So either the commercial copied the game, or the game's music was just some stock audio they used :-(
Fire!	New Deal Productions	1989	~224K	Notable for sounding an awful lot like a modplayer, but is in fact just the first 40 seconds of a .mod rendered out to 6KHz audio, which then loops.
Crime Wave	Access	1990	~128K	A fitting tune for the nature of the game; vaguely futuristic, almost zen-like. And, sadly, a rip-off of a Pink Floyd tune.
Countdown	Access	1990	~128K	Hard-hitting music for a hard-hitting international espionage game.
Links	Access	1990	~128K	A classical-style tune perfectly suitable for a sophisticated golf game like Links.
Spellcasting 101	Legend	1990	~192K	If there was ever a tune about college life and spellcasting, this would be the tune. The game actually has Adlib support for a longer version of this tune, but then again, you don't hear the electric guitar in the Adlib version. :-)

Technical Notes

The Sun/NeXT .au format was chosen for these clips since, at the default8000Hz sample rate, it reproduces all of the technical quality of theoriginal sound, while at the same time being very cross-platform, easyto play, and has very low CPU requirements. RealAudio and MPEG Layer 3were specifically not considered because their benefits(high audio clarity) were outweighted by their disadvantages (RealAudiois not as cross-platform as I would like, and MPEG Layer 3 has heavy CPUrequirements during decompression). Besides, their additional claritywould not have represented the sound better anyway.

These clips were constructed from the original sound data whereverpossible, which means that I took the raw PCM data files, cut and pastedthem to match the output, then saved them into .au files. When that wasn'tpossible, they were recorded directly from the hardware through the useof 1/8th inch plug (sound card) to 'alligator clips' (speaker) cable.While these are easy to make (Mean Streets even provides instructionsin the README file), I just went out and bought one to savethe trouble. The cable I purchased was less than four bucks from RadioShack, Cat. No. 42-2421, description 'Shielded 6-FT. (1.8m) AUDIOCABLE; For Speciality/replacement audio connections; 1/8' mini plug toalligator clips', and it works quite well; I didn't need to splice acapacitor into the cable because I was recording with my sound card,which was able to raise the input level. I attached the ground clip(the one attached to the copper shielding) to the case and the otherclip to one of the speaker terminals. It works great, IMO.

The only drawback to recording sound from old PCs via this method is thatyou usually have to do so with the cover off, and old PCs were hardlyFCC Class A certified, let alone Class B. The result? If you're lucky,you get only a small amount of noise during the silence portions that canbe removed with a simple noise gate. If you're unlucky, however, you'llget a noise or static that's audible during the non-silent portions.If you're cursed and/or improperly grounded, you'll get a nasty 60Hzline hum from the wall AC. Post-processing with a good set of softwarefilters is the only way to remove noise/distortions like that, but ifyou don't have a good set of software filters, you can always simplyresample your original digitized recording down to about 8000Hz--thiswill get rid of mostly everything except the 60Hz AC hum.

Similar Pages

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MegaMan_X'sSoundcard Hall of Fame has some nice pictures of sound cards, aswell as some additional information.