My little brother made one of these when he was 9 years old or so out of parts he found around the house. I only remember playing StarCon 2 with it, and some mod files. It was just a torn apart parallel cable and a bunch of resistors held together by electrical tape, as far as I remember... lol. Not nearly as fancy as the one in the video.
@JonteP0nte Yes, it's a big strain on the CPU. That's why I had to play the songs at something like 11khz. You can achieve higher rates the faster the CPU is.
oh dear, ms dos 5...the memories. i think i even have the installation floppies somewhere. cant forget those qbasic game examples like nibbles and gorillas. ive spent so much time with them.
My guess as to why Wolfenstein 3D is not working with the self made Covox is because the Disney Sound Source required additional [DAC bytes] to be sent to an additional control port in order to operate properly. However i'm pretty sure some self made Covox devices emulate Disney Sound Source to get those games to produce sound properly without the need of a Disney Sound Source, though I could be wrong.
Whats neat, is the Disney Sound Source was only $14 and had rudimentary filtering circuitry.
Angry bird at 26:26 , you make the best videos on the internet of this variety. Other videos can be too short, and not in detail without the hosts opinion. and you actually have a sense of humor, too.
I own a DSS - you can run all Covox stuff on it AFAIK, but not the other way around, because the DSS isn't just a Covox, it's a Covox + some extra logic that DSS-coded games can/do use (which is why a few DSS games do work on a plain Covox, they weren't using the DSS featureset).
One Tip, with the [ and ] keys, you can somehow change the quality while playing! i dont know what it does, but repeadeatly pressing it, increases the quality.
That MOD file! I must have it! I've heard it before in a homebrew game I had on DS and I loved it so much! The game itself was terrible, but that song was so great I couldn't stop playing it.
Man the music in Pinball Fantasies blew my ass off! It was even pretty good on PC Speaker. Yeah good old MOD music I had a MOD player for DOS back in the day on my 486 that could play MOD files on PC Speaker. It must have been CPU intensive I tried it on my 286 but it was too slow and sounded like garbage. But yeah this thing sounded great! Way better then I was imagining from looking at it!
This thing is seriously great. Such a simple, dare I say crude (not in a bad sense) device that allowed for such great sound! People must've flipped out back then hearing it. Flipped right out! Well, maybe not, but it is still cool. And it plugs into the parallel port! Awesome!!
This thing is seriously great. Such a simple, dare I say crude (not in a bad sense) device that allowed for such great sound! People must've flipped out back then hearing it. Flipped right out! Well, maybe not, but it is still cool. And it plugs into the parallel port! Awesome!!
I suppose I don't get why playing back MOD files created by the demoscene on the Covox Speech Thing during the mid 90's is so amazing. By that point, it had become somewhat pointless IMO due to the likes of the SoundBlaster 16. Now, back when it was released, those same MOD files would've sounded INSANE since, if I'm correct, the only PC-compatible device which could match it was the Disney Sound Source.
@Expack3 The Disney Sound Source was a Speech Thing, just with a software activated On/Off switch. The main reason they had support for these devices was no everyone could afford a Soundblaster, and why should you when 10$ could get you the parts to build one of these, and that's for one of the stereo designs!
There's sort of a fizzy sound to it... the closest I got to reproducing a sound like it was reducing foobar down to 4 bit DAC. I don't recall the Amiga having that fizzy sound and that was the same tech as this and used 8 bit sampling.
Also, I noticed the MOD you played at the end had 4 voices, was it an Amiga MOD track?
@phreakindee That would be my fault - I used resistor values that weren't quite right, so I added a couple of filter capacitors to take the distorted high end off the sound which unfortunately had the side effect of sounding like the treble was all the way down.
@GeoNeilUK For some reason I find MOD and S3M files played through Scream Tracker 3 with Gravis Ultrasound Emulation in DOSBox to have a better sound then through OpenMPT using my modern on board sound.
Could it just be me or is the Ultrasound built in a way that it filters the effects in such a way that it sounds filled?
@Dakkiller1 I think it's that hardware from the 90s is actually designed to make the best of tracker files from that era, they're kind of obsolete formats nowadays (even MIDI is becoming an obsolete format) so newer hardware isn't really designed to play those older formats at their best, they're designed with MP3 and the like in mind. As for emulating older hardware in Dosbox... that shows the quality of the emulation :)
ahh cool mod music, kinda forgot about it. amazing what you could do with only 4 channels of sound. thinking about the amiga mainly. Keep on the good work phreakindee
@Dirik619 dude.....if yr not interested dont watch the vid and bitch about it......its a free world, u are free to do yr own things.....but dont ruin what others want to do....gezz
@Dirik619 your are of course if u read my comment...but dude seriously......dnt watch the vid if u dnt want to....its not like Clint wanted u to watch it......-_-
holy crap, I was expecting really bad chiptunes out of such a simple device. For something you can make yourself, this is unbelievably impressive. Thank you so much for sharing this.
That really is the most basic PCM sound card, write out a bunch of samples to the parallel port and use a bunch of registers to convert it into sound.
@phreakindee .epic game, "another world" had the support of covox too. I did not think that the sound of the PC 286 can be such a "live":). in the 90s I can only compare with homemade zx-128, with its three-way Yamaha synthesis (which is certainly not the same)
@phreakindee "not compatible"? - its work! (with small resident) because that is the different implementations of the same-DAC. (it says wiki. I unfortunately did not look at the hardware disney sound source).
love to c and hear your thought's on the sound blaster 16, it pretty much dominated gaming for ages but I would be interested in a review by yourself keep the vids coming. That dac is a little odd but the sound is really very clear shame they could not find a way to limit the draw on the processor.
@5kogur High CPU demands due to lack of DMA, low publisher and developer support, and internal cards like the AdLib (and soon, Sound Blaster) coming along shortly after its release that were more versatile. Those are the biggest reasons I can think of.
I have a Disney SoundSource somewhere. It actually came with a win 3.1 driver to play .wav files. It worked ok, for something so cheap to make it's a huge improvement over the pc speaker!
@naomikimpenu My review: meatheads with chainsaw guns grunt a lot, shoot creatures, gibs fly, trilogy ends. Ooh look, a lady! Let's trade her for bacon.
@naomikimpenu No, that's literally something that happens in the game. They have this chick Gear now and someone tries to trade her for bacon as part of the story. I didn't even know you were female.
As far as it and other obscure sound devices gaining more support during the '90s, the use of third-party sound libraries became common in games then. To help sell the sound libraries, the makers tried to support as many devices as possible as a feature (X sound devices supported!).
The reason the Doom source release didn't have music is because id used a third-party package for it originally.
You've probably have also noticed that most games have near identical sound menus.
of course, since all it was really doing was pushing bytes to the parallel port, games that used it had to do all the mixing in software, and everything had to be precisely timed to make sure that it would play at the right speed.
Of course it did sound effects. It was basically a sound card. It could play anything.
But I take it, because it used interrupts, I take it that a 486 or even a early Pentium would be better than a 386 at this.
I gotta say this thing is fascinating that something like this even exists i never heard of it till today, if I ever seen one I'll pick it up, would be pretty cool to own!
I'm not really amazed by Pinball Fantasies with the Covox Speech thing. And that's NOT because of how it sounded, because it sounded AWESOME. I just mean to say that Pinball Fantasies even had a GREAT sound through the PC Speaker. I had A LASER 80386SX/3 computer back in the day with an awesome PC Speaker that sounded great if it was used properly (as in Pinball Fantasies or Mach 3 (anyone knows that game? Can't remember the developer, sadly)...
@HarryMatic Thanks, man! I just couldn't dig it up any more… Mind you, it was way back in the beginning of the nineties that I played the game. I remember it had a title screen on which a female voice said 'Welcome to Mach 3' and then there was (AWEsome) music. I also remember the CGA 3 (or 4 if you count black) colour graphics very well. Anyway, it was the first game I remember that made GOOD use of my PC Speaker…
Could the mid 90s support possibly be due to the popularity of MIles Sound System in titles of the period? Looking forward to the Gravis episode. Will keep fingers crossed that the MPU-401/MT-32 or LAPC1 will get some love from LGR Oddware eventually.
Love this kind of "primitive" engineering where somebody wires a couple of resistors together and suddenly we're in another galaxy (compared to the PC-speaker). An A/B test would have been fun, just to illustrate the dramatic difference; straight from PC-speaker to COVOX on Pinball Fantasies :)
Sounds better than my shitty R-2R DAC I built on a breadboard on a boring evening, that's for sure. I should build a better one to play them sweet chiptunes. Acidjazzed Evening FTW!
Also kudos for getting a 4:3 oldschool CRT monitor for filming your old computers, flicker and all. Watching your 386 on a 16:9 flatscreen always felt kind of wrong to me. I love my 1080p LCD but I sometimes miss a good, sharp CRT which looks awesome at any resolution.
The sound on that thing is very impressive. You also played my favorite pinball game growing up. Pinball Fantasies. Which I played on my SNES growing up. But yeah really, the sound thing should have gotten more sound releases for games. Sounded really cool. Also that submarine game looks sucky.
You know, I was tempted to get one of these things for my PS/2 since MCA cards are impossible to find. I used to play Pinball Arcade (a RARE compo of Digital illusion's pinball games) using a Backpack parallel port CD-ROM and the PC speaker for sound on a PS/2 Model 50Z...just because....and it actually worked pretty well.
Nice, I heard that MOD a while ago. I have it on here, and it's a good one. If you haven't heard it find 2nd_pm.s3m, it's from some demo scene thing called second reality.
Also, if you have a linux system and want to mess with PC speaker audio on a modern computer, I've written a sort of PC speaker music composition utility. Find it on github as pcspkrplay. It's reasonably well documented, and I could use some testers. :D
Slightly disappointed it wasn't a real Covox Speech Thing, which came with some interesting software (like 8:1 compression of 8-bit PCM speech -- seriously -- and speech synthesis). But you did Pinball Fantasies and Inertia Player so you're off the hook :-)
@MobyGamer Hehe, I wish I had a real Speech Thing to show! The software in particular interests me, and I've seen the box in that video you uploaded a while back. It looks awesome, I'd love to see the contents.
@phreakindee The time will come. While MindCandy is still not yet finished, it will be soon, so I started semi-serious preproduction work on my "soundcard museum". The entire contents of a box will be scanned and copied and available for download.
Quick fanboi note: You're doing a fantastic job. Your reviews are fair and, at times, humorous. You give some nice attention to yesteryear nuggets. Your videos include flyouts and stills where applicable. Keep doing what you're doing.
Also probably the first time anyone played "Acid Jazzed Evening" on a Covox, although I did hear some distortion on that MOD, maybe due to the aforementioned resistors.
Ok, I'm only 8:40 into the video and right when the music started for Pinball Fantasies my mind was blown. Are you serious thats coming out of that little DAC?! I must find one!
@opticburn It's that little DAC only, I swear! Craziness, isn't it? I couldn't believe it myself when I first heard it, it's just insane how awesome it sounds for such a dinky little LPT device.
Great video. I have a question. Since the covox speech thing does not require any drivers, would it be possible to use it on a windows 7 machine that had a parallel port?
@surfingthechaos Well, what I meant was that you don't have to install any drivers. It still needs a driver as far as I know, which the games that utilized it often came with. COVOX.DRV or something like that is in the game directory, chosen via the game setup.
So for Windows, you do need a driver. I have some drivers for Windows 3.x, but I'm not sure if they would work on Win7 or not. That would be freaking sweet if they did, and I'd test it myself but my modern PC doesn't have a parallel port.
@phreakindee Would it be possible to use that little DAC thing on my laptop? It has a printer port, being made in 2002, but it has windows XP, so that's why i'm wondering.
@Robloxian182 You could likely use it with a Widows driver to play back WAV files and such, but I'm not sure what else. I have a Windows driver for the thing, PM me if you want it. I haven't tried the Speech Thing with Windows yet, but questions like yours have made me curious!
@phreakindee Unfortunately you'll never be able to use it on any version of Windows past Windows 98, as the Covox drivers floating around use the 'VxD' driver format for which support was dropped in Windows 2000
Probably the first time in history anyone has used a parallel port DAC with a subwoofer! I do remember seeing circuit schematics for building your own DAC, as well as a parallel port ADC, for digitizing and recording your own sounds, in all their gritty, metallic 8-bit glory.
I have one of this contructed by my self 23 resistors and 1 capacitator all soldered to db25 plug one of the games who have a great sound was 688 attack sub , other thing with the first sound blaster you can conect also the convox and have stereo sound in playtrackers to listen amiga mod files in the pc. Thats very cool you remember this item, i have also an adapter similar to conect to a COMport and connected to a walkman you can save tapes to the spectrum emulator on the pc. Regards nice video
@serginietor Yes, primarily playing and making MOD-type music on a variety of software. Everyone made their own, and it was hundreds of times cheaper than a real soundcard then. If you could handle a soldering iron, that is.
The soundsource just isn't the same as a covox, the soundforce has a fixed sampling rate of i think 7khz and a 16byte fifo buffer. So you can use a much lower interrupt rate and burst feed it a bunch of bytes at once. Wwolf3d runs the sound at like a 700hz timer rate if i enable debugging in dosbox when running the soundsource
Very interesting stuff. I have a suggestion, what about making a video on the Gravis Gamepad? It might not be that odd, but it's surely forgotten. All the cool games used it back in the days. I remember wanting one to play Jazz Jackrabbit.
@rastaxp I'll go one better: I'm currently working on a pretty lengthy video about Jazz Jackrabbit, its history, its gameplay, its relation to the Gravis Gamepad, and a review of each version of the original game. How's that sound?
My little brother made one of these when he was 9 years old or so out of parts he found around the house. I only remember playing StarCon 2 with it, and some mod files. It was just a torn apart parallel cable and a bunch of resistors held together by electrical tape, as far as I remember... lol. Not nearly as fancy as the one in the video.
tzankich 2 days ago in playlist Uploaded videos
I was really active in the Amiga / Demo scene back in the 90's I'm surprised I never heard about this. Makes that PC sounds like an Amiga.
Good job making this video.
AnalogX64 1 week ago
This thing must be pretty CPU-intense, is that true? Seeing as it must be software-based.
Nevertheless, pretty damn cool device!
JonteP0nte 2 weeks ago
@JonteP0nte Yes, it's a big strain on the CPU. That's why I had to play the songs at something like 11khz. You can achieve higher rates the faster the CPU is.
phreakindee 2 weeks ago
oh dear, ms dos 5...the memories. i think i even have the installation floppies somewhere. cant forget those qbasic game examples like nibbles and gorillas. ive spent so much time with them.
Blackerer 3 weeks ago
@Blackerer wait what?!?! pinball fantasies!!! i loved that game!
Blackerer 3 weeks ago
for anyone intrested in the updated version of space debris, go here /watch?v=bsapsOqc7UI&feature=related
its been redone for the game rochard
Clearstarsummer 1 month ago
My guess as to why Wolfenstein 3D is not working with the self made Covox is because the Disney Sound Source required additional [DAC bytes] to be sent to an additional control port in order to operate properly. However i'm pretty sure some self made Covox devices emulate Disney Sound Source to get those games to produce sound properly without the need of a Disney Sound Source, though I could be wrong.
Whats neat, is the Disney Sound Source was only $14 and had rudimentary filtering circuitry.
Chaniyth 1 month ago in playlist LGR Hardware Reviews
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It sounds very reminiscent of Amiga MOD tunes in general. Love it, it's amazing how simple of a device can produce such nice rich sampled sounds.
Chaniyth 1 month ago in playlist LGR Hardware Reviews
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Chaniyth 1 month ago in playlist LGR Hardware Reviews
New favorite reviewer.
generik88 2 months ago
Whats the name of the Inertia Player song that starts at 19:00?
thelaserman999 2 months ago in playlist More videos from phreakindee
@thelaserman999 Space Debris by Captain
slackbuster 4 weeks ago
Angry bird at 26:26 , you make the best videos on the internet of this variety. Other videos can be too short, and not in detail without the hosts opinion. and you actually have a sense of humor, too.
IamFat32 3 months ago
VERY surprising for being such a tiny device. And no need of runnings drivers or whatevers.
G9King 4 months ago
688 looks like a crappy version of 688i witch is much better.
thecooldude9999 4 months ago
I own a DSS - you can run all Covox stuff on it AFAIK, but not the other way around, because the DSS isn't just a Covox, it's a Covox + some extra logic that DSS-coded games can/do use (which is why a few DSS games do work on a plain Covox, they weren't using the DSS featureset).
yushatak 4 months ago
Spacedebris.mod by captain lol. .. I run it in one of my play mod on A1200 videos :)
cv643d 5 months ago
One Tip, with the [ and ] keys, you can somehow change the quality while playing!
tbsys31061 5 months ago
One Tip, with the [ and ] keys, you can somehow change the quality while playing! i dont know what it does, but repeadeatly pressing it, increases the quality.
tbsys31061 5 months ago
Acidjazzed Evening is by far one of my favorite c64 tunes. the mod version is pretty sweet too.
my4trackmachine 5 months ago
I am stunned that this music is coming out of a printer port.
Think about it. This is a printer port. Making music. Great music. Wow.
Whoever invented this is a genius.
Whoever complained about the low sound quality - THIS IS A PRINTER PORT!!!
c0ldb33r 5 months ago 2
I love your oddware reviews! Keep up the good work!
TheTallGuy1985 5 months ago
Digital illutions = Dice = Battlefield 3 studio...correct me if i'm wrong.
souls666 5 months ago
@souls666 Yes, you're correct.
pHr33kAcHu 5 months ago
9:16 "Freaking awesome!". Loved how you said it!
svenneri 5 months ago
Two people are hung up on adlib.
svenneri 5 months ago
I played StarControl 2 with it , it was freakin awesome
Nice reviews dude!
AxelFua 5 months ago
That MOD file! I must have it! I've heard it before in a homebrew game I had on DS and I loved it so much! The game itself was terrible, but that song was so great I couldn't stop playing it.
WalrusRockGod 5 months ago
@WalrusRockGod Found it on the interwebz!
WalrusRockGod 5 months ago
HOLY CRAP A GIANT SPIDER !!!!!!!
MaGuss0909 5 months ago in playlist Más vídeos de phreakindee
Man the music in Pinball Fantasies blew my ass off! It was even pretty good on PC Speaker. Yeah good old MOD music I had a MOD player for DOS back in the day on my 486 that could play MOD files on PC Speaker. It must have been CPU intensive I tried it on my 286 but it was too slow and sounded like garbage. But yeah this thing sounded great! Way better then I was imagining from looking at it!
MN12BIRD 5 months ago
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This thing is seriously great. Such a simple, dare I say crude (not in a bad sense) device that allowed for such great sound! People must've flipped out back then hearing it. Flipped right out! Well, maybe not, but it is still cool. And it plugs into the parallel port! Awesome!!
niceandgames 5 months ago
This thing is seriously great. Such a simple, dare I say crude (not in a bad sense) device that allowed for such great sound! People must've flipped out back then hearing it. Flipped right out! Well, maybe not, but it is still cool. And it plugs into the parallel port! Awesome!!
niceandgames 5 months ago
Every time he makes a software video, i listen to all of it and never understand what he says
stargazer209 5 months ago
I suppose I don't get why playing back MOD files created by the demoscene on the Covox Speech Thing during the mid 90's is so amazing. By that point, it had become somewhat pointless IMO due to the likes of the SoundBlaster 16. Now, back when it was released, those same MOD files would've sounded INSANE since, if I'm correct, the only PC-compatible device which could match it was the Disney Sound Source.
Expack3 5 months ago
@Expack3 The Disney Sound Source was a Speech Thing, just with a software activated On/Off switch. The main reason they had support for these devices was no everyone could afford a Soundblaster, and why should you when 10$ could get you the parts to build one of these, and that's for one of the stereo designs!
Dant2142 5 months ago
There's sort of a fizzy sound to it... the closest I got to reproducing a sound like it was reducing foobar down to 4 bit DAC. I don't recall the Amiga having that fizzy sound and that was the same tech as this and used 8 bit sampling.
Also, I noticed the MOD you played at the end had 4 voices, was it an Amiga MOD track?
GeoNeilUK 5 months ago
@GeoNeilUK It may have been, I'm actually not sure. I know a lot of the MOD files I have were originally created for the Amiga.
phreakindee 5 months ago
@phreakindee That would be my fault - I used resistor values that weren't quite right, so I added a couple of filter capacitors to take the distorted high end off the sound which unfortunately had the side effect of sounding like the treble was all the way down.
HarryMatic 5 months ago
@GeoNeilUK For some reason I find MOD and S3M files played through Scream Tracker 3 with Gravis Ultrasound Emulation in DOSBox to have a better sound then through OpenMPT using my modern on board sound.
Could it just be me or is the Ultrasound built in a way that it filters the effects in such a way that it sounds filled?
Dakkiller1 3 months ago
@Dakkiller1 I think it's that hardware from the 90s is actually designed to make the best of tracker files from that era, they're kind of obsolete formats nowadays (even MIDI is becoming an obsolete format) so newer hardware isn't really designed to play those older formats at their best, they're designed with MP3 and the like in mind. As for emulating older hardware in Dosbox... that shows the quality of the emulation :)
GeoNeilUK 3 months ago
This is great Clint! I wonder what it sounds like if you try to print to it?
SiliconClassics 5 months ago
@SiliconClassics It sounds horrible. Just a load of screeching noise.
HarryMatic 5 months ago
ahh cool mod music, kinda forgot about it. amazing what you could do with only 4 channels of sound. thinking about the amiga mainly. Keep on the good work phreakindee
deaczorz 5 months ago
Comment removed
deaczorz 5 months ago
I really like these sound hardware videos.
I would like to see a Covox driver for Windows 3.1 on your 486. Barely any videos of that.
Really, there's almost no videos of this hardware at all.
kargaroc386 5 months ago
I think it was sounding great. Especially in pinball fantasies. Wonder what made the Disney one so different. :-/
jescis0 5 months ago
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pls no more soundware reviews , its boring watching reviews about sound and shit
Dirik619 5 months ago
@Dirik619 Thing is, a lot of other people are enjoying these. And I enjoy making them. If you don't like them, don't watch. Problem solved.
phreakindee 5 months ago 24
@phreakindee wow thx for the solution bro , not watching it really helped :) best day ever when i subbed to u ^^
Dirik619 5 months ago
@Dirik619 Happy to be of service!
phreakindee 5 months ago 3
@Dirik619 dude.....if yr not interested dont watch the vid and bitch about it......its a free world, u are free to do yr own things.....but dont ruin what others want to do....gezz
vaughn4lif 5 months ago
@vaughn4lif whos bitching
Dirik619 5 months ago
@Dirik619 your are of course if u read my comment...but dude seriously......dnt watch the vid if u dnt want to....its not like Clint wanted u to watch it......-_-
vaughn4lif 5 months ago
@vaughn4lif i didnt watch it ^
Dirik619 5 months ago
@Dirik619 then why did u comment?
vaughn4lif 5 months ago
@vaughn4lif dont worry that comment wasnt for you anyways , it was towards the author of the video .
Dirik619 5 months ago
@Dirik619 but even so i am speaking for the author of the vid
vaughn4lif 5 months ago
@vaughn4lif dont...he can speak for himself , he did actually , so end of conversation
Dirik619 5 months ago
holy crap, I was expecting really bad chiptunes out of such a simple device. For something you can make yourself, this is unbelievably impressive. Thank you so much for sharing this.
shorty1k 5 months ago
That really is the most basic PCM sound card, write out a bunch of samples to the parallel port and use a bunch of registers to convert it into sound.
shaurz 5 months ago
@shaurz Umm I mean resistors not registers
shaurz 5 months ago
9:15 nooo =( I was gonna .mp3 all that of Pinball
Well, sweet half hour upload dude !!
mistamontiel 5 months ago
@mistamontiel You can hear the whole song here: watch?v=wTLhWXv2I4A
phreakindee 5 months ago
LGR you are Awesome!
MikeyStop 5 months ago
@phreakindee .epic game, "another world" had the support of covox too. I did not think that the sound of the PC 286 can be such a "live":). in the 90s I can only compare with homemade zx-128, with its three-way Yamaha synthesis (which is certainly not the same)
ff5x2 5 months ago
@ff5x2 Out of This World/Another World supports the Disney Sound Source, which is rather similar to the Speech Thing, but it is not compatible.
phreakindee 5 months ago 3
@phreakindee "not compatible"? - its work! (with small resident) because that is the different implementations of the same-DAC. (it says wiki. I unfortunately did not look at the hardware disney sound source).
ff5x2 5 months ago
love to c and hear your thought's on the sound blaster 16, it pretty much dominated gaming for ages but I would be interested in a review by yourself keep the vids coming. That dac is a little odd but the sound is really very clear shame they could not find a way to limit the draw on the processor.
MadDingo800 5 months ago
I get mine new in Retrocables for 6€
Regards
acserosemisero 5 months ago
It's incredible sound so good. I have one, and I use whith the sound blaster emulator driver for use with windows an another games.
acserosemisero 5 months ago
Im confused, why wasn't it popular? It was stupidly easy to install!
5kogur 5 months ago
@5kogur High CPU demands due to lack of DMA, low publisher and developer support, and internal cards like the AdLib (and soon, Sound Blaster) coming along shortly after its release that were more versatile. Those are the biggest reasons I can think of.
phreakindee 5 months ago 5
Awesome video-games music should return to video-games!!!
svenneri 5 months ago
I have a Disney SoundSource somewhere. It actually came with a win 3.1 driver to play .wav files. It worked ok, for something so cheap to make it's a huge improvement over the pc speaker!
compu85 5 months ago
man you should review myst!
maajkemii 5 months ago
make a review on gears of war 3!
naomikimpenu 5 months ago
@naomikimpenu My review: meatheads with chainsaw guns grunt a lot, shoot creatures, gibs fly, trilogy ends. Ooh look, a lady! Let's trade her for bacon.
phreakindee 5 months ago 19
@phreakindee that made my day
Shinkokyuu4 5 months ago
@phreakindee wow, just wanted a review on the game now u want to trade me for bacon.
=why cant girls be gamers?=
naomikimpenu 5 months ago
@naomikimpenu No, that's literally something that happens in the game. They have this chick Gear now and someone tries to trade her for bacon as part of the story. I didn't even know you were female.
phreakindee 5 months ago 7
@phreakindee okaaaaaaaaaaaaay then lol x
naomikimpenu 5 months ago
I can't believe how good some of the stuff actually sounds. Great review, thanks.
wabba67 5 months ago
Awesome review (again)! Are you planning to review the Mantis at some point?
Magnumi 5 months ago
Acidjazzed Evening FTW!
deathbysushi 5 months ago
I miss your old intro...
StrawberryGuy86 5 months ago
As far as it and other obscure sound devices gaining more support during the '90s, the use of third-party sound libraries became common in games then. To help sell the sound libraries, the makers tried to support as many devices as possible as a feature (X sound devices supported!).
The reason the Doom source release didn't have music is because id used a third-party package for it originally.
You've probably have also noticed that most games have near identical sound menus.
tom611 5 months ago
of course, since all it was really doing was pushing bytes to the parallel port, games that used it had to do all the mixing in software, and everything had to be precisely timed to make sure that it would play at the right speed.
Of course it did sound effects. It was basically a sound card. It could play anything.
But I take it, because it used interrupts, I take it that a 486 or even a early Pentium would be better than a 386 at this.
kargaroc386 5 months ago
Ahhh the good old Inertia Modplayer, good old days :)
Vantazzy 5 months ago
I gotta say this thing is fascinating that something like this even exists i never heard of it till today, if I ever seen one I'll pick it up, would be pretty cool to own!
DylanMayhew 5 months ago
I'm not really amazed by Pinball Fantasies with the Covox Speech thing. And that's NOT because of how it sounded, because it sounded AWESOME. I just mean to say that Pinball Fantasies even had a GREAT sound through the PC Speaker. I had A LASER 80386SX/3 computer back in the day with an awesome PC Speaker that sounded great if it was used properly (as in Pinball Fantasies or Mach 3 (anyone knows that game? Can't remember the developer, sadly)...
slashtiger1 5 months ago
@slashtiger1 That game was by the French company Loriciel, who also made 'Space Racer' which also had extremely good PC beeper sound.
HarryMatic 5 months ago
@HarryMatic Thanks, man! I just couldn't dig it up any more… Mind you, it was way back in the beginning of the nineties that I played the game. I remember it had a title screen on which a female voice said 'Welcome to Mach 3' and then there was (AWEsome) music. I also remember the CGA 3 (or 4 if you count black) colour graphics very well. Anyway, it was the first game I remember that made GOOD use of my PC Speaker…
slashtiger1 5 months ago
Saving this for later. 32 minues? That is far from lazy! :D
tossabaddle 5 months ago
Could the mid 90s support possibly be due to the popularity of MIles Sound System in titles of the period? Looking forward to the Gravis episode. Will keep fingers crossed that the MPU-401/MT-32 or LAPC1 will get some love from LGR Oddware eventually.
csoloist 5 months ago
I use my OC'd i7 2600k with dual GTX 580s to play mod files, bitches! What?! :P
opticburn 5 months ago
Try those wonderful Pinball games on the Amiga to get the same awesomeness.
slaxor 5 months ago
Love this kind of "primitive" engineering where somebody wires a couple of resistors together and suddenly we're in another galaxy (compared to the PC-speaker). An A/B test would have been fun, just to illustrate the dramatic difference; straight from PC-speaker to COVOX on Pinball Fantasies :)
asgerms 5 months ago
Sounds better than my shitty R-2R DAC I built on a breadboard on a boring evening, that's for sure. I should build a better one to play them sweet chiptunes. Acidjazzed Evening FTW!
Also kudos for getting a 4:3 oldschool CRT monitor for filming your old computers, flicker and all. Watching your 386 on a 16:9 flatscreen always felt kind of wrong to me. I love my 1080p LCD but I sometimes miss a good, sharp CRT which looks awesome at any resolution.
133MHzz 5 months ago
Man it brigs back such memories :) I had a 486 SX25Mhz overclocked to 33Mhz I remember when I`ve bought GUS Max to use wih fasttracker 2
sahalin12345 5 months ago
The sound on that thing is very impressive. You also played my favorite pinball game growing up. Pinball Fantasies. Which I played on my SNES growing up. But yeah really, the sound thing should have gotten more sound releases for games. Sounded really cool. Also that submarine game looks sucky.
GX2Productions 5 months ago
You know, I was tempted to get one of these things for my PS/2 since MCA cards are impossible to find. I used to play Pinball Arcade (a RARE compo of Digital illusion's pinball games) using a Backpack parallel port CD-ROM and the PC speaker for sound on a PS/2 Model 50Z...just because....and it actually worked pretty well.
NJRoadfan 5 months ago
Nice, I heard that MOD a while ago. I have it on here, and it's a good one. If you haven't heard it find 2nd_pm.s3m, it's from some demo scene thing called second reality.
Also, if you have a linux system and want to mess with PC speaker audio on a modern computer, I've written a sort of PC speaker music composition utility. Find it on github as pcspkrplay. It's reasonably well documented, and I could use some testers. :D
Aeduo 5 months ago
@Aeduo "some demo scene thing called second reality"? Man, I feel really sorry for you if you don't know about Future Crew's Second Reality demo :(
presola88 5 months ago
Mod, you mean tracker? Anyway, I must say, for a parallel port audio device, it's pretty good. (I never had one, back then.)
eMGeeGFX 5 months ago
MOAR LIEK THIS!
plopkinggamer 5 months ago
Educational stuff is awesome. They should make a school class designed just for you to teach
ladawg81 5 months ago
acidjazzed evening ;)
h0peIs 5 months ago
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TheTundraTerror 5 months ago
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TheTundraTerror 5 months ago
Ah, HarryMatic! He's awesome; he has a Roland MT-32 synthesizer that he plays MIDI files with and records them for YouTube.
thevisualboy37 5 months ago 11
Why did Disney make one??
Evansmustard 5 months ago
Ughh I have the biggest crush on you lol @phreakindee
ajackfig 5 months ago 2
is hard to believe such a small thing coudl create wonders...well even in in 1994 we were still using pc speaker on our ibm thinkpad.
GeorgesVI 5 months ago
I love how it plays back Pinball Fantasies' MOD files exactly like the legendary A500 version :)
Dragondraikk 5 months ago
Oops just misclicked dislike, now im too lazy to change it to like. Oh well.
DJTrololol 5 months ago
@DJTrololol you suck
TheManidunno 5 months ago 2
@TheManidunno cool
DJTrololol 5 months ago
Slightly disappointed it wasn't a real Covox Speech Thing, which came with some interesting software (like 8:1 compression of 8-bit PCM speech -- seriously -- and speech synthesis). But you did Pinball Fantasies and Inertia Player so you're off the hook :-)
MobyGamer 5 months ago
@MobyGamer Hehe, I wish I had a real Speech Thing to show! The software in particular interests me, and I've seen the box in that video you uploaded a while back. It looks awesome, I'd love to see the contents.
phreakindee 5 months ago
@phreakindee The time will come. While MindCandy is still not yet finished, it will be soon, so I started semi-serious preproduction work on my "soundcard museum". The entire contents of a box will be scanned and copied and available for download.
Quick fanboi note: You're doing a fantastic job. Your reviews are fair and, at times, humorous. You give some nice attention to yesteryear nuggets. Your videos include flyouts and stills where applicable. Keep doing what you're doing.
MobyGamer 5 months ago
Also probably the first time anyone played "Acid Jazzed Evening" on a Covox, although I did hear some distortion on that MOD, maybe due to the aforementioned resistors.
vwestlife 5 months ago
Ok, I'm only 8:40 into the video and right when the music started for Pinball Fantasies my mind was blown. Are you serious thats coming out of that little DAC?! I must find one!
opticburn 5 months ago 3
@opticburn It's that little DAC only, I swear! Craziness, isn't it? I couldn't believe it myself when I first heard it, it's just insane how awesome it sounds for such a dinky little LPT device.
phreakindee 5 months ago
Great video. I have a question. Since the covox speech thing does not require any drivers, would it be possible to use it on a windows 7 machine that had a parallel port?
surfingthechaos 5 months ago
@surfingthechaos Well, what I meant was that you don't have to install any drivers. It still needs a driver as far as I know, which the games that utilized it often came with. COVOX.DRV or something like that is in the game directory, chosen via the game setup.
So for Windows, you do need a driver. I have some drivers for Windows 3.x, but I'm not sure if they would work on Win7 or not. That would be freaking sweet if they did, and I'd test it myself but my modern PC doesn't have a parallel port.
phreakindee 5 months ago
@phreakindee Would it be possible to use that little DAC thing on my laptop? It has a printer port, being made in 2002, but it has windows XP, so that's why i'm wondering.
Robloxian182 5 months ago
@Robloxian182 You could likely use it with a Widows driver to play back WAV files and such, but I'm not sure what else. I have a Windows driver for the thing, PM me if you want it. I haven't tried the Speech Thing with Windows yet, but questions like yours have made me curious!
phreakindee 5 months ago
@phreakindee Unfortunately you'll never be able to use it on any version of Windows past Windows 98, as the Covox drivers floating around use the 'VxD' driver format for which support was dropped in Windows 2000
HarryMatic 5 months ago
@HarryMatic Good to know, thank you!
phreakindee 5 months ago
Im loving this "oddware" series.
zxz1997 5 months ago
thumbs up if you were rocking out to those mod files!!!!!!
80085word69 5 months ago
Oh wow. Haha, you should have said DICE. I would have never guessed they made old pinball games.
PvtHudson6 5 months ago
Probably the first time in history anyone has used a parallel port DAC with a subwoofer! I do remember seeing circuit schematics for building your own DAC, as well as a parallel port ADC, for digitizing and recording your own sounds, in all their gritty, metallic 8-bit glory.
vwestlife 5 months ago
I have one of this contructed by my self 23 resistors and 1 capacitator all soldered to db25 plug one of the games who have a great sound was 688 attack sub , other thing with the first sound blaster you can conect also the convox and have stereo sound in playtrackers to listen amiga mod files in the pc. Thats very cool you remember this item, i have also an adapter similar to conect to a COMport and connected to a walkman you can save tapes to the spectrum emulator on the pc. Regards nice video
Mocas2003 5 months ago
Sound device reviews makes me a very happy YouTuber. Thank you again, sir.
RetardicA 5 months ago
Wow, when you started Pinball Fantasies, my eyes got all watery.
Such an awesome game.
PeturHinrik 5 months ago
what's the mod file that starts at 19 mins?
waymuu 5 months ago in playlist More videos from phreakindee
@waymuu "Space Debris" by Captain is the first MOD, "What Is Funk?" is the second MOD, "Acidjazzed Evening" is the third MOD.
phreakindee 5 months ago
@phreakindee thanks!
waymuu 5 months ago
Wikipedia speaks of a Soundblaster emulator for Covox. Have you tried it?
Psyke89PT 5 months ago
@Psyke89PT Sounds awesome! Haven't tried it yet, but I certainly will soon.
phreakindee 5 months ago
pinball fantasies I love it to death, played it on a 286sx with sbpro... priceless
but this covox thing is amazing!
kinmanyuen 5 months ago
you are awesome... great stuff!
kinmanyuen 5 months ago
where can we find the song tracks played at the end?
they are really awesome!
can you rip them and post it somewhere?
thanks!
Clearstarsummer 5 months ago
@Clearstarsummer They're listed in the video description. You can just download and play the MOD files using the links provided.
phreakindee 5 months ago
@phreakindee thanks!
I cant believe I didn't click on the description. Music entranced me ;)
Clearstarsummer 5 months ago
Speech thing makes it sound line old arcade games to me. But that's just me.
Anthoric 5 months ago
Stuff that's obsolete?
Are you gonna review the PS3?
shurdi3 5 months ago
@shurdi3 Screw you, PS3 is a pile of shit.
TeamRocketReviews 5 months ago
@TeamRocketReviews Uhmmm... that's what I was implying there dude
shurdi3 5 months ago
@shurdi3 I thought you were commenting that this was obsolete, and then asking for Clint to review the PS3.
TeamRocketReviews 5 months ago
holy jeez, it does sound great!
how come it wasn't somewhat successful?
serginietor 5 months ago
@serginietor It was. Outside gaming and outside America.
JMfanboy 5 months ago
@JMfanboy weird, I live in Europe and I had never heard of it.. do you know any other uses it was given apart from gaming?
musical production maybe?
serginietor 5 months ago
@serginietor I know it was big in the computer music demo scene, as shown in this video with the MOD files and all that.
phreakindee 5 months ago
@serginietor Yes, primarily playing and making MOD-type music on a variety of software. Everyone made their own, and it was hundreds of times cheaper than a real soundcard then. If you could handle a soldering iron, that is.
JMfanboy 5 months ago
I'm looking for a 386 PC, anyone got recommendations?
TeamRocketReviews 5 months ago
I'm playing Ultima V on Virtual Apple II right now.
TeamRocketReviews 5 months ago
Hey! That's Acidjazzed Evening at 26:47!!
goodtimesfreegrog 5 months ago
The soundsource just isn't the same as a covox, the soundforce has a fixed sampling rate of i think 7khz and a 16byte fifo buffer. So you can use a much lower interrupt rate and burst feed it a bunch of bytes at once. Wwolf3d runs the sound at like a 700hz timer rate if i enable debugging in dosbox when running the soundsource
Harekiet 5 months ago
I Had that pinball game. I loved to play it hard. A Pinball like no others. That Covox sound device makes it even more epic.
Is this only me or the speech thing uses the same pallete of music sounds as Jazz Jackrabbit?
If so...then I just instantly love it :D
*Demo goes on* omg, YESS it does! xD
PituDitu 5 months ago
love your voice and vids :D
betsie01 5 months ago
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PituDitu 5 months ago
24:02 assassins creed doll wtf? lol :p
ufoafterlight 5 months ago
What is the model of that ibm monitor?
Bikeman1010 5 months ago
@Bikeman1010 6332-4HN /B
phreakindee 5 months ago
Very interesting stuff. I have a suggestion, what about making a video on the Gravis Gamepad? It might not be that odd, but it's surely forgotten. All the cool games used it back in the days. I remember wanting one to play Jazz Jackrabbit.
rastaxp 5 months ago 12
@rastaxp I'll go one better: I'm currently working on a pretty lengthy video about Jazz Jackrabbit, its history, its gameplay, its relation to the Gravis Gamepad, and a review of each version of the original game. How's that sound?
phreakindee 5 months ago 24
@phreakindee Sweet. :D
RJTamm93 5 months ago