Hey Clint, thanks for making the video! The built-in diagnostics only work with some IBM hardware, and nothing third party. However, you can go back in with the reference disk, and view or change the configuration, and you will see all of the cards installed. The audio level is more in line with consumer-level audio as to not drive programs like Xargon too loud There is a single 15khz hi-pass filter I have added. This is the same for the new OPL3 ISA card and the SAAYM. The SAA's have a small low-pass, around 50hz. No FM chip can reliably produce anything that high, but no low-pass at all on the MCAs. They always made the bass muddy IMO, so I risk some noise. Thankfully, PS/2 have well filtered supplies. :-)

@LGRBlerbs

3 жыл бұрын

Thanks for the info, makes sense!

@SandwichesANDMilk

3 жыл бұрын

IDK if this comment will do anything but would it be at all possible to make an IDE adapter for the ps2? The HDD format is really weird and hard to come by.

@ian_b

3 жыл бұрын

Have IBM demanded an MCA license fee? :)

@TheTurnipKing

3 жыл бұрын

@@ian_b I wonder if it would be possible to make these cards reversible, so they'd fit in both an ISA or MCA slot? ISA on one edge, MCA on the other? I mean, you'd obviously need a different bracket for each, but aside from that.

@nickwallette6201

3 жыл бұрын

Such a thing exists. Adrian’s Digital Basement just ran across a SCSI card I think, ISA and MCA.

Stunt Driver is one of the very few DOS games that actually use digital sound effects on the Ad-Lib. However, the FM chip wasn't really designed for this, so it's kind of a hack. Sort of like getting digital sound from a SID chip. That's why the volume is low. And your mileage probably varies depending on which FM chip is being used.

@NeilRoy

3 жыл бұрын

"mileage probably varies"... pun alert.

@thepirategamerboy12

3 жыл бұрын

So does Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker and Darkseed.

@Frostfly

3 жыл бұрын

When Clint Dropped into a map on Planet X3 it felt like I was playing Ultima again....

@ojkolsrud1

3 жыл бұрын

Can I just say that PX3 looked extremely nice in this video? I'm quite tempted to buy the image, so that I can play it using DOSBox. I'm not an avid player of strategy games, but I've seen all your development videos and it might be worth getting it just to thank you for those.

@diecarro79

3 жыл бұрын

Elvira was another one, and yes, the volume was also extremely low.

Cool. Commander Keen is my favourite Microsoft franchise.

@LGRBlerbs

3 жыл бұрын

Reality is increasingly bizarre.

@PlutocracyLP

3 жыл бұрын

too soon

@niamaru2

3 жыл бұрын

Too soon

@pastedtomato

3 жыл бұрын

This is indeed a disturbing universe

@linuxstreamer8910

3 жыл бұрын

@@pastedtomato this is indeed the darkest timeline

When I was doing freelance IT stuff 8-10 years ago I'd still see old IBMs like this in service. Usually in auto parts places or other warehouse type applications where all it does is serve as a terminal for punching in SKUs. It's crazy how much heavier those old IBMs are than current computers.

I worked for a company back in the 80's called IDE Associates which made a variety of MCA and ISA expansion boards. It might be worth searching out their olden stock. As for MCA itself, at the time I thought it was the coolest, most awesome advancement in PC architecture up to that point. Anybody who's ever tortured themselves with setting IRQ switches and jumpers manually will appreciate that. MCA did have some downsides of course: If you lost the configuration disks you were totally stuffed, so you had to be rabid about making backups, which of course the customer never did. Otherwise, it was that murderous metal back plate - it was as sharp as a knife. I dreaded removing cards lol.

Just FYI, The "weight" on the ribbon cable is a large ferrite core that's there to choke off RF leakage off the cable. It may be fragile and could crack with a drop on the frame. IBM spared no expense. Which probably partially lead to the high price of these new.

LGR could be talking about the process of paint drying and I'd still watch every minute of it. His videos are just so relaxing and he shows a great perspective on every topic he covers

I love these modern replacement cards. Would be awesome to see modern replacements for motherboards and CPU's.

Wow, finally a video about the now almost forgotten Microchannel architecture! Thanks!

These non-standard PCB colors always catch my attention. Green is great, but white and red are yummy. 💕

@mattetch12

3 жыл бұрын

My favorite is black with gold silk screening.

@fnjesusfreak

3 жыл бұрын

I have a white XTCF in my PS/2.

@adonian

3 жыл бұрын

I used to build pc’s back in the late 90’s early 2000’s and I always used purple and red motherboards 😂 wish they still made them.... I gotta climb my old butt up in my attic and see what I still have 🤣

@mik4k6

3 жыл бұрын

@referral madness Good question. Here's some research on the matter: www.microchip.com/forums/m/tm.aspx?m=1055452&p=1

17:45 The engine noise through the OPL chip sounds like actor comedian Michael Winslow doing an impression of an engine. 😆

@jmslazarus

3 жыл бұрын

the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps

I've been looking for an MCA sound card for 4 years! This is what I need.

@aserta

3 жыл бұрын

Get one. It's a really nice piece of kit.

@piecaruso97

3 жыл бұрын

Wait for the sound blaster 1.0 clone which is in development and will be then open sourced, check tube time on twitter

@1337Shockwav3

3 жыл бұрын

@@piecaruso97 Should also be noted the Plaid Bib clone has been around for half a year.

I can't believe how much better-looking modern PCs can be inside!

Commander Keen was my dad's favourite DOS game when he was younger. He was one of the few in his year group that owned a 386 machine and CK was the series of game that he played the most back then.

New MCA cards. What a time to be alive!

So many memories from this video. I was the first to get the model 90 at my company back in '91. What a cool machine. Before that I was using a model 70 and a 50 before that. I still have my model 50Z with an AOX 386/25 add-on card, but what might interest you most, I have the Soundblaster Pro 2 MCV (CT5330) installed and still use it to play earlier games. Who knew when I purchased it, it would be so rare this many years later. Guess I never really thought about MCA being more used more for business and less for entertainment. Still, my 50Z has been with me since '88.

Thanks for making this channel, really like the more off-the-cuff, behind the scenes type content.

Came home from work at 2am where I am and this is just what I needed 😌

Clint, I've been going through your videos from oldest to newest. You just threw me off track, but it's much appreciated!

Love TexElec -- they keep coming out with really cool stuff!

I never thought I would see a totally new mca sound card today. Awesome!

Thank Heavens (and Clint!) for Blerbs! Getting more LGR content always makes one's day! :)

I remember using QEMM to have upper memory free. Usually, you needed over 600K free.

Worked on these in college circa 1987-88. Worked in the library, spent most my time unjamming dot matrix printers.

I must have DOS memory management PTSD, because I could feel my eye twitch when you were trying to get Xargon to run.

@negirno

3 жыл бұрын

But I assume that that machine can run the original Descent, since it has 32 megs of ram installed :-)

That Keen6 soundtrack on the first level (faster and faster yet!) has been my ringtone for years :)

Best part of my day! Clint playing Duke on a PS/2

I love retrofitted stuff using modern parts

Woah thats so awesome. When i wanted to upgrade my model 55 SX a few years ago, i couldn't even find expansion memory that would work

Great vid mate, Cheers!

And now texelec made a MCA SB 2.0 compatible clone, truly amazing stuff for all the MCA fans out there. They also have an adapter for normal floppy drives to work in the ps/2. An IDE adapter next? We need to help these guys out by getting the word out with more vids!

Thanks for testing PCM emulation! It was indeed very quiet, but at least the functionality is there, so I'd call the card an excellent reproduction.

@LGRBlerbs

3 жыл бұрын

You bet, I appreciate the suggestion 👍

32MB RAM - This machine must have been a beast at its time. Also love how over-built these old machines are. 😍

I have a PS/2 Model 50. I was searching eBay, like I do pretty often, for MCA sound cards. Found the usual MCA SoundBlaster for like $600+. Then I saw the TexElec card! I immediately went to TexElec and bought one! I have an OPL3LPT that I can use on my PS/2, but this should be better! So happy to see this being made and so happy to get one!

Why are add in cards so cool? All these old computers with a bunch of cards look sweet. Its nice that we've consolidated almost everything into the motherboard but there is something special about having a bunch of cards in a machine

@ian_b

3 жыл бұрын

I have a strange nostalgia for the days of configuring IRQs etc...

@Okurka.

3 жыл бұрын

The more add-in cards your PC has the less cool it is.

@manuell3505

3 жыл бұрын

The modular industrial approach is useless when it must run a software monolith... Today we have to "roll out" the whole thing, to support anti-progressive software imperialists. They rather sell you imaginary stuff like a start button or "apps" than actual functionality. Ik think MCA was partially an attempt to prevent this platform hijacking by a universal entity called OS.

@IanC14

3 жыл бұрын

Mine only has room for one PCIE card (my GTXX 1660ti). It has a built in Sound Blaster though (I was surprised to find they are still around, they even still make dedicated sound cards!)

@zacharyouten4525

3 жыл бұрын

@@Okurka. physically speaking yes lol

Got to love that IBM splash screen 🙂

Great option for those beautiful PS/2s!

Finially some love for PS/2s!!!

I swear Yamaha makes the best FM synths. Can't beat that crunch

Funny you posted this. Glad i'm not the only one who has bought one of these. I got one for my PS/2 P70 (8573) machine and plan on doing a video on it too! For refrence, a Creative Labs Soundblaster for MCA right now goes for over $1,000. The IBM M-ACPA (Audio Capture Playback Adapter), assuming you can find one, usually runs $3-400. Those are only cheaper because they aren't 100% soundblaster compatible.

Xargon has one of the best adlib soundtracks out there.

For custom boards, I usually use the reverse of this (black FR4 with ENIG gold plating and white silkscreen), that white board material is soooo clean looking.

Oh wow. We had a model 70. I wanted an mca music card so bad and they were so much more than the Isa ones. And computer stores in the NY area would mock you relentlessly for even asking for one. Really fun to see this video.

I'm a simple man. I'm an old man. I see a Clint video I watch

These videos always take me back to 7th grade, sitting in front of our family's 486 dx2. My Dad opted for 8mb ram instead of the pentium. We had lemmings, prince of persia, Doom, Wolfenstien and windows 3.1 All of this on a WHOPPING 540 mb HD. We thought we'd never fill that HD up!

@desther7975

3 жыл бұрын

I got to upgrade from a Mac LC with a 40 MB hard drive and a pitiful 68020 CPU to a Performa with a 1 GB hard drive and a PowerPC CPU. That was a revolutionary experience!

I just got an ISA 16bit soundblaster ad lib! from a friend yesterday!!!

Oh, i see Starlancer in background, played that. Really liked it.

That white pcb looks super nice

Never knew that music in old games could sound so good.

Where I used to work, we had a PS/2 in use up until about 2007 as it was controlling a machine and the custom controller card was MCA so would not work in any other PC. Was a legacy machine and wasn't used very often and was only taken out of service when the work it used to produce was migrated to a more modern line, deemed obsolete and then scrapped!

Ps/2s are awesome.

Man, those guys at TexElec. You gotta love those guys for what they do for retro machines. Well, they and Serdashop pretty much have you covered for a whole host of things like these. :)

I still have those altec Lansing speakers and they work fine

I always like seeing the CHIPS Technology logo on a chip. It's so redundantly awesome. :)

Man, that's such a flippin' sweet computer...

Great video. I do see the First Aid 95 in the background behind the monitor (and I asked if you would ever review it and needed a copy before. Now I see you don't need one!)

I have the ISA version from these guys in my PS2/30 and I can highly recommend it! Kinda expensive but better build quality than most modern sound cards and that for a adlib card...

Nice! I've been considering getting the four channel version for some experiments

This is so awesome! I've really gotta get one of these for my model 50s. I should also get around to recapping my two faulty units. Pretty sure that's all that's wrong with one, but the other may need more work. And I've only got one working power supply between three machines, so yeah, lots of work. Maybe I'll get some time off work to play with them at Christmas. Anyway, cool video! It'd be interesting to see your take on an Adlib retrospective type video. I always like watching those longer format history lesson and tech review type videos that don't just focus on a single card or whatever, so it'd be cool to see your perspective on it.

Just now realized it's TexElec and not TechSelect.

@jackpijjin4088

3 жыл бұрын

Wordplay! :D

Wish more circuit boards and pc kit in general,came in white.

There's something hilarious about spending $60 on an MCA sound card in 2020. Really is a beautiful bit of PCB though.

I had to work on some of these in high school. It's a great, amazingly IBM, sort of solution. But, if you ever have to troubleshoot it will be awful. Sometimes you have to add or remove a card just to be able to tigger the config screen to fix some other issue.

oh my god you have those altec lansing speakers i used to have on my dell like 10 years ago i miss those speakers

Those old-school mouse and keyboard clicks can double as sound effects in Duke3D just fine! :D

My only experience with MCA was back in the late 90s when I was working at IBM. I was doing internal tech support and some people had Ethernet on their Thinkpads, but the vast majority had Token Ring. I was located at a remote downtown site and we had no way to *test* Ethernet. Linux was still a forbidden backdoor kind of thing, so I installed it on this old hunk of 386 SX PS/2, configured it for bridging and gave it a cross over cable. Slow, loud, but solved the problem... bridging was overkill, but fun! it's hard to imagine anyone doing anything like this today, but we were still in the final days of cowboy shops and servers-under-the-desk. MCA was ok, but it was rare enough to just make solutions harder to find.

Awesome stuff... man, it always takes me back to those times when tweaking music on games were all the rage. Early on, the first sound card I got was a Sound Blaster 8 bit pro gold or something.... and then I skipped the 16 bit era and jumped straight to AWE 32. That huge card that you could shove memory sticks in. For a while, being able to run Roland MT 32 music made all the difference.... xD while most friends were just going with that Creative CD rom kit, I had something to show off. xD

Gotta get this for my 9590!

Struggling to free up conventional RAM! Memories of competing with my friends for the nicest boot disks and multiconfigs.

Love that adlib sound it reminds me of UFO terror from the deep 🙂

Oh! That is a nice co-accident. I recently got one PS/2 with MCA and no sound, which I was planning to talk on my channel about. I was looking at this card just couple of days ago and thought about sound options on this machine :)

The game looks cool

Well, that was a resound-ing success :P.

Please do a full episode concerning Xargon one day, that'd be awesome!

I see Shuttle in the background. Please review it some time Clint, such fond memories of that sim.

I thought I liked black pcb, but white looks nice too!

Cool that it works. Id love to get ahold of an old 486 computer but I think I would rather go with something that doesn't have so many proprietary components. I have a couple of Gravis Ultrasounds, Awe32, and Awe64 would love to put into action again.

2:53. The new card has such a clean design... the old Soundblaster has a plethora of electrolytic capacitors to fail with time.

14:38 Oh I remember that game!! (well I actually remember that music bit), the good old days.

That looks a lot like an old ISA sound card I had 'back in the day' on a 486 DX2-100 system (my first internet box) and one of the things you don't see anymore is it had a little 2watt x 2 amplifier build into it and you could just hook up regular 8 ohm speakers ...... but it also had the old Yamaha OPL chip on it along with an AD-DA converter with a digital hardware mixer built in as well as an interface so you could hook a CDROM drive to play CDs through the computer which was a big deal back then

I see Mantis on your shelf--I had that back in the day!

I have a feeling that this card has a low pass filter to reduce harsh noise, but it's causing stunt driver to be almost silent.

@big0bad0brad

3 жыл бұрын

There's another theory that bus timing might be interfering with the trick used to fake PCM through it - apparently it can depend on starting FM synthesis and freezing it at a precise time, then turning the channel on/off rapidly to send the audio. If it's not frozen at the right moment it won't have the correct output level and there's probably no way for the program to tell that happened.

That really cool a old IBM running Dukenukem but a 90mhz pent class should do it don't guess graphics cards amouted for much back then as far as running a game I sure wouldn't have thought it possible

Oh, GDI... I've been hunting for a sound card for my PS/2 for YEARS, I always miss out on them on eBay. Time to order one for my Model 77! (What's annoying is that mine was originally an "Ultimedia" model with the IBM sound card, but a prior owner removed the sound card.

Cool!

You should build a 486 machine with as many modern hardware like this as possible. I think it would be a really cool project.

I think Rusty would have been pretty cool to try with this. That has very good OPL2 FM audio.

Interesting... Xargon fires from his crotch. Epic was truly ahead of the curve back then.

I also have a boxed copy of SHUTTLE. I spent so many hours playing that on my Amiga. So frustrating when it would crash halfway through a mission that you'd spent hours on. I think the PC version was a little more stable.

Have you heard of Adlib Tracker II? It's a DOS tracker that's specifically designed to make OPL3 music (they also have an old version for OPL2). The download comes with a ton of sample tracks. I've also had success running it from Win98 SE, so you don't even need to boot into DOS mode if you don't want to.

@piecaruso97

3 жыл бұрын

it doesn't run on a 486 unfortunately, i tried that but there are still many tracker and players to try, for opl3 i reccommend giving a try to LLSID and there are things like rad players which can be used on 8088

@dbozan99

3 жыл бұрын

@@piecaruso97 Oh, I totally forgot about the suggested Pentium minimum. I've never heard of LLSID though, that looks cool. When you say "rad players" are you referring to the old versions of Reality Adlib Tracker?

@piecaruso97

3 жыл бұрын

@@dbozan99 i am referring to the track format use by Reality Adlib Trcker, which is used by a bunch of player programs, LLSID is not perfect but definelly cool, try it

Ahh the days of micro channel and reference disk floppies

Dude I have a 55sx and ive been trying to find a soundcard for it! thanks!

Had that 486 with the same monitor. Installed a Soundblaster and Voodoo card to play Wing Commander.

I made the adlib clone from TubeTime. I made mistakes in soldering, ordered some wrong parts, bought a chip programmer that was also somewhat expensive and now that the card is complete and should work,,,it doesn't. Simply waiting for texelec to make one would be a lot easier and cheaper :P

That's awesome news! I have an IBM PS/2 8555 with a 386sx, and can do virtually nothing with it. What I'd really want, though is a drive controller to use a cf card. That would be nice.

Oh man! I was headed for the TexElec website until you said it didn't do sound effects.... Missed it by that much!! :(

Pretty sure it's heresy to use a Packard Bell monitor with a PS/2. You're displaying the best of the best on the worst of the worst! Also, this gives me a proper reason to get a PS/2. I've wanted one ever since I learned about them and found an 8513 monitor at a charity shop, but the lack of sound cards always put me off them. Now though? All bets are off.

@TheTurnipKing

3 жыл бұрын

In this day and age you take what crt you can get

@Ralph-yn3gr

3 жыл бұрын

@@TheTurnipKing I know. I was just trying to be funny (in my defense, he does have several IBM monitors). I have a 9 inch RCA TV from 85 that's doing overtime as a monitor for my 8 bit micros and being the center of a pretty solid retro home theatre system (all it's missing is a Dolby digital-capable laserdisc player). It's also why I'm planning to try and fix the bezel of a Vaio Trinitron that was shattered in shipping instead of trying to replace it (also it matches a Vaio desktop I found a while back).

"I have to try this thing out with Xargon!" Clint, I think that boxed copy of Sargon above the speaker would like to speak with you about that.

Just so you know, you can make your own custom laser cut card holders these days. Dunno about US/NA but i'm 100% sure there's laser cutting services. And all you have to do after they cut the flattened holder, is bend it, which for a card holder, it's easy, you can probably use a steel ruler.

Where was this in 1993!? 😜 Discovering that my Sound Galaxy BXII ISA card wasn't compatible with our PS/2 Model 50z literally ruined my 13th birthday. Although I did get Wing Commander II as well, so it wasn't all bad.