Oddware: IBM M-ACPA microchannel PS/2 sound card
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- Опубліковано 25 лип 2015
- Your options for adding a sound card to an IBM PS/2 with the MCA bus are limited, but the IBM M-Audio Capture & Playback Adapter (M-ACPA) is somewhat easier to find and less expensive than the rest. It has a few quirks, but once set up properly, it sounds quite good.
M-ACPA Option Diskette and Windows 3.1 & 95 drivers:
tinyurl.com/macpadrivers - Наука та технологія
I wrote some software for the ACPA back in 1991. I was doing an undergrad year at IBM Labs (UK) Hursley Park and I was in the team working on the PM2PM (desktop video conferencing), I was working on the audio capture & playback. The ACPA was a lovely card to work with and the TMS320C25 was quick for its time, even in my inexperienced hands. Good times.
My dad is a Speech Therapist and when I was a kid (4yo) he used to sell Speech Viewer which included the M-AUDIO Capture and Playback. I can clearly remember playing so many midi files.... how can I forget Sockhop.mid?, that's impossible. Then I discovered Diagnostic-disk which included the DEMO... I could spent whole day listening demo songs.
Thank you so much for bringing me so many good memories!!!
PS: I loved that MIDI Wavetable
hmm.. I wonder if anyone is selling these thinking they're PCI sound cards..
vwestlife: the master at making interesting video "intros"
+1912RamblerFan01 Some of the music he finds is just awesome! :D
master of the universe as well,getting by 7by7 with silver Pentiums!!ZzzzzzzXeonzzzz!!!
I thought, I klicked on a LGR video. :)
***** Other people are uploading Oddware videos too: ua-cam.com/video/5oY_WNlqCT4/v-deo.html
Lol, same here. I like this guy too :)
Comforts me to see that I'm not alone 😜
Dorf Schmidt *an
I find it pretty amazing that a late 80's early 90's computer can do such a good job with real 16bit 44.1K audio. I'm sure storage space is a big issue.
Trance88 Indeed, the M-ACPA supported 16-bit audio years before the Sound Blaster 16 and Gravis UltraSound were introduced!
The ACPA could do 88.2kHz mono sampling or 44.1kHz stereo, both 16-bit. I think it might have had other sampling options, I can't recall.
I totally don't need this information... today. But who knows what tomorrow may bring. Very informative. I always enjoy your work.
CANYON.MID sounds like it's not sure whether it wants to be an 80s sitcom theme, or an intro for local nightly news.
EDIT: I'm surprised by its recording quality. Love the O-Town wallpaper! :-D
That card certainly has a unique synthesizer on it. Reminds me of uxwbill's demonstration of his Ultimedia system, with its synth that likes to wildly bend the pitch.
While it was made that way for a legitimate reason, I can't help but have the opinion that requiring to have something plugged into the line input is pretty dumb.
I wonder if that MIDI mapper thing could be why I could never get the AWE64's wavetable synthesizer running in Windows 3.1?
The synthesizer sounds like an FM chip, but not an OPL-3. Or it's a basic analog synthesizer chip.
I'm also curious if the current "M-Audio" brand (currently part of Avid) has its origins in the manufacture of this card.
Nice! The midi sounds more funky to me as compared to what I have stored in my mind as the standard from Roadgeek's videos...
Here it is Feb 2021, and I am still learning from you! Thanks again! The 720k trick is great to know about. I have a disk midi sequencer that takes 720k disks and will use that black tape hack. I used dark blue painters tape!
Same but 2022.
This piece of software really does have it's place in oddware history.
Now there is something I have never enjoyed on a PC soundcard! Monophonic legato play,portamento and deep hardware square and pulse waves like a Casio keyboard! Most modern cards are software rendered emulation and such things are not possible or common as nothing can really emulate hardware until the soft synths came out specifically for remaking analog sounds and of course, your cpu, ram and card all had to be just right! This thing is impressive! midi controlled Casio keyboard pulse synth!
Just snagged one off of ebay thank you for this video on how to set it up!
It's funny, back in those days all the things you're describing seemed so normal. If you got an audiocard you got the drivers on a disc. usually sticking with the ones you got forever. I ran a BBS back in the day so I at least hat some connections to other people but it's all so incredibly easy now. Thinking back though, it seemed easy and logical back then too.
The best quality of the CANYON.MID that I've heard so far.
even my IBM Aptiva from 1994 that is not a PS/2 or Microchannel plays CANYON.MID
These M-ACPA cards in combination with the MicroChanel bus were phenomenal equipment setups. The signal to noise ratio was extremely low; an equivalent fiber optic sound card with similar performance would be about $2,000.
Several years ago a client of mine used a 9590 with a Pentium-66, 32 RAM, & IBM F/W SCSI-2 adaptor to record audio off of audio records for digitizing music. He used this setup recently until the hard disk array finally failed. In order to replace the computer & get something comparable in quality it cost over $7,000! Computers today are so poorly built & low quality.
Classic SCSI-2 was so good, it was a packet-based protocol, so all hardware on the bus could be accessed in realtime without interfering with each other (I used it on the Amiga 3000 and on my first PC, which was a P-90). When the SCSI consortium decided to include burst mode in future standards (to bring transfer rates up to par with IDE), I gave up on SCSI in later PC builds. Because burst mode blocks the bus, just as in IDE.
You confuse rarity with quality.
14:56 Wendy Carlos would be proud
LGR has inspiration from all of us c:
Oh, this bring back memories :)
I really like the new camera video looks really good. Always good to learn something new thank you for the video on the card
Robert Hoellering It's not a new camera, it's just a new way of editing the video. :-) It's the same Canon FS200 that I've been using for most of my videos since late 2009.
Still looks really good
vwestlife Well, 60p is always appreciated.
I'm actually kinda surprised that Olivetti never built a microchannel system with onboard audio (other than PC speaker). In 1993 when they launched their M6 suprema line of PCs, The 486 M6 400 series of computers had onboard audio. The EISA Pentium M6 620 system also had onboard audio. But the M6 500 series of microchannel systems did not have any. That seems like the exact kind of thing they would do, create an MCA PC with onboard audio, but they didn't...
I used to wrap my sound cards with TDK emf insulation. That's like putting a band aid on a shotgun blast but back then I was feeling pretty clever.
Here are the Sound Blaster emulation drivers for the sound card.
ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/sound/macpavdd.zip
A PS/2 deserves OS/2.
Just to clarify general "Option Disk" updating of the Reference Diskette, you need to XCOPY A:\*.ADF and XCOPY A:\*.DGS from the Option Diskette and to the Reference Diskette to do it adequately. Preferably boot the Reference Diskette and select "Copy an Option Diskette" and follow the diskette swap prompts.
I see that you couldn't resist adding a handsome group of boys as your wallpaper. :)
Nice, as usual :)
I remember that demo, playing it my friend was trying to argue the superiority of a real IBM versus other platform bla bla bla, all I wanted back then was a neXT cube or some exotic English things. Sadly I was too young to rob banks.
18:10 Good choice in music my friend. =)
In winimage, you can expand the disk image to 1.44 Meg. This way you don't need a DD or Pseudo-DD disk
I've been wondering for a while if this was possible. Now I know. Thank you.
CANYON..MID Sounds Great on this System :) QC
great video as ever... would be nice to hear the doom game on this card
I felt nostalgic when I watched this video.
Cool
I have a few MCA audio cards and I THINK even a video capture card...
They came out of an old security camera recording PC that was an IBM ps/2 type.
+ElfNet Gaming It isn't a video capture card, its a pass through card.
Those are good
Watching this video brings back lots of memories. My first computer had windows for workgroups v3.11 and when I first got it it had 4MB of ram and a 270MB Hard drive, no sound card, just a beepy PC speaker. Then I upgraded it to 12MB RAM and another 345MB HDD, 2 drives a whopping 700MB of space. I got a multimedia kit CD rom, sound card, speakers of which I think I still have, and a bunch of games and programs all in the kit Playing Doom on it was fun. And can you play MP3 files on this machine on this card?
Hey! I really love your videos ... for no particular reason! :)
Can I ask You to review Windows 10 OS and make a video about it. What are your thoughts and are you going to upgrade? This s a hot topic right now and I really am looking forward to your opinion!
14:56 Wow. This sounds like analog subtractive to me. There is no way that is samples alone. Maybe samples or digital oscillators with analog filter(s)? What the hell? How did I not know about this card?
New Windows have implied backwards too ibm pc,lots of MTU Midi work in windows 98/xp clones of the thens arent the same as these artificially linear implied 'orchard orchestrations'curtesy of apple reversed injun hearings,NY,pony gold rush N.Ypugs?!!
The music synthesis sounds exactly like the music, they had on a german childrens morning show. A show that were about how stuff was made or something like that. I do not remember much, other than there were a lot of spoken lines by children in german language and then these sounds. Hmmmm.... Could it be, that NDR/ARD/ZDF had used such a card for music on that tv-show? And I should not even be able to remember it, because I am from Denmark, and I saw it during the first half of kindergarden class/pre-school grade.
He has the driver on his site for the SB emulation: ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/sound/macpavdd.zip
Can you do a run of onestop.mid through this card, compare it with the previous Windows 3.1 recording you made on your SB16 with the 4-operator voyetra and also compare it to the most commonly heard 2-operator output normally found on youtube in a video sometime soon? I'd be very interested to hear how it comes out.
Onestop wasn't on Windows 3.11.
For my old dos games i prefer the soundblaster awe 32 with isa or the newer pci soundblaster live card. The audigy2 zs is also fine, but not as good as the old ones in my opinion. Modern soundcards often dont hava wavetable inside, the emulated sound is awful, as the microsoft synth from windows :)
need more oddware episodes
Macro-A read those Notes he recites,Y split left and rigjt HP av a Dec ca,lie sence,win doughs,deejay way through Mac finds bin tree azure X window got a bit of a lisp mate,dream,weave,ascii?Ansc-a my crows..Beatles scare repeat MarX?Harp o Groats?..sew??
15:25 reminds me so much of late 80s Namco game music (Xeivious much?).
used on Arcade Hardware
Wow. It sounds like FM synthesis... if it was recorded underwater.
Most educational video! Thanks, vwestlife!
WAV files sound perfectly fine to me!
Did you mention that this computer has a network adapter inside?
So I wonder is it possible to play any Internet radio streams using these two MCA cards within Windows 3.11 environment?
Zankuhaaa! Yes, it should be able to play RealAudio or low-bitrate MP3 audio streams.
First!! Quite facinating, I found a PS/2 at a abandoned hospital, i plugged it in and the Power supply was sparking and smoking as hell
The capacitors in the power supply probably leaked
Composite guy I didn't find the video to be quiet. Try turning on your speakers.
Kevin, it was a resistor that caught on fire lol
***** I hope you are joking, lol
Composite guy Just a bit :D
Man... i need one of these for my ibm model 95...
can you make a soundfont of that card?
Where can I find this sound card? I would pay what was clear.
It turns out that there is one compatible with Adlib but it does NOT have a microphone input so to practice with the BBC English course the grammar well but not the vocabulary or the pronunciation part that a microphone is needed (obviously)
Isn't this the same one Brandon Bishop used to have? (don't know if he still does or not)
Nice card, but soooo many chips and components just for a DAC and ADC ?
I have to kid with ya like most teens these days ;) It can't even play Crysis 3!
thanks for the video. I had a PS/2 back in the day, don't remember the model number, or much about it. I think I could get Wolf3D and Quest for Glory to work on it, but for the life of me couldn't get Windows 3.1 to work for it!
ya,56k modem grand can yawnszzz?
MIDI and my Roland MT-32, AHHHhhhh...*Flash-backs*
Having to config MCA cards thru a machine specific software disk is awful. Disks get lost quite often. I'd have preferred physical switch or jumper configuration like on ISA busses.
You should do a video on your opinion of windows 10!
You can use a soft paint brush to clean the dust off of that card, if you want.
Where did you get that flaws.wav file played in the beginning?
MrMaguire ua-cam.com/video/h05cqXcWq_o/v-deo.html
vwestlife
Synthesizery
Thanks for the upload. Thats a nice little computer youve got there. What song is that at 18:39 and who's singing it?
summer20105707 Connie Smith - "Tiny Blue Transistor Radio"
thanks
So, 7½ years ago, did anybody find the files mentioned towards the end of the video and put them somewhere where you can find them? - And even out of the package, surely you can use General Midi for music so you won't go into a game completely silent, right?
If only it sounded more like a Moog for that Bach.
12:00 The labels on the progress bar stop at 1 minute and 30 seconds...
Where did you got the music at the beginning of this video?
Fujiya & Miyagi - "Flaws"
vwestlife Thanks
The music synthesis demo thing sounds like Soviet Union television stuff
@vwestlife what is the name of the intro track?
+Earl Mapp Already asked and answered... look below.
I thought BBISHOPPCM had one of the SoundBlaster cards in his PS/2, I know he's now got an 8088 PS/2 I think which he's put a sound card in and I believe it's a Sound Blaster Card, but I'm referring to the tower PS/2 he had. And I remember the video you're talking about, the sound that card was making was horrible, it sounded kind of robotic, I've seen a similar sound effect available in some sound editors, I think some people call it as metal robot sound. Are you able to explain in layman's terms why the loopback feature is even there?
Lachlant1984 He has a PS/2 Model 30 with an 8086 CPU, which has regular ISA slots, so a standard Sound Blaster card will work. It's his PS/2 Model 80-386 tower system that has the MCA bus and M-ACPA sound card.
vwestlife Yes, I watched that video about the PS/2 80 after posting my comment. You're right.
Way past the expiration date on this reply, but in case anyone is wondering...
IBM loved to include onboard diagnostics. It’s an engineer’s dream to be able to put hardware into a self-test and report any failures. So this card has a feature that lets it test the audio in and out (DAC / ADC) by looping the audio out back into the audio in. The card can then play test samples and record it back to make sure the audio path is functional.
They included special “switching” jacks that detect the presence of an inserted plug. These jacks are usually used to do things like mute integrated speakers when headphones are plugged in ... that sort of thing. In this case, when there’s nothing plugged in, they connect the out to the in in a “loop back” condition.
Plugging something in to either the input or output is supposed to break this loop and allow the card to work normally - i.e., not in test mode. If the loop is not broken, then some of the output gets mixed back in from the input, but with some delay and phase changes inherent when you introduce reactive components like DC-blocking capacitors. Hence the odd sound.
The sensible thing to do might have been to have the user plug in a test cable (like any ordinary 3.5mm male to male cable) rather than defaulting to looped unless a plug is inserted. Or, use a jumper or software controlled relay to switch to test mode. But IBM didn’t really see the user-experience issue with this. “The manual clearly tells you this will happen, and we included a Y-cable you can plug in to avoid it. What’s the problem? Didn’t you read the manual, cover to cover?”
The video doesnt seem like 720p to me!!!!!
Song of the intro?
Fujiya & Miyagi - "Flaws"
I assume this card is not Sound Blaster compatible at all?
I discussed that in the video.
Can I download some of your videos? I want to do it legally. Is the reason I'm asking.
For your own personal use, sure.
If only there was a way to keep MIDI files sorted.....
It’s a vlc.. 16 bit os all you get
hey vwestlife i found those drivers for sb emulation in a ftp server. downloads.dxing.si/konzola/VHD/ they also seem to be here www.os2site.com/sw/hardware/ibm/ps2/76_77/ but it needs a user for download
What was the name of the song in your intro?
mraiwa1000 Fujiya & Miyagi - "Flaws"
vwestlife Thanks!
@vwestlife I found this emulation driver IBM M-ACPA Sound Card and I put it into zip
and uploaded them here: downloads.dxing.si/konzola/download.php?file=macpavdd.zip
What's the song around 19:09?
MilenniumEdition 56 HomeTown - "Where I Belong"
ua-cam.com/video/UTr-iy3LVok/v-deo.html
Too bad these cards are nearly impossible to find as well.
I have like 4 MCA Sound cards but yea I also paid a lot to get em... I wish there was made more MCA Soundcards so more IBM PS/2's should get real sound.
@@AnagramFoilBalloonFan are you able to pop a list of the model names for the mca sound cards up? My model 95 reaaaaly needs a sound card but i dont know what to search for aside from "mca sound card"
@@Colt45hatchback SoundPiper 16, ChipChat 16, Soundblaster MCV Pro 2. but I sold mine and sold my IBM PS/2 collection.
@@AnagramFoilBalloonFanthankyou.
Aww thats unfortunate. I sold most of my ps2 stuff a while ago (before it was valuable naturally) aswell and just kept my model 95... which to my stupidity, was the only one without a sound card....lol silly me. Could have easily slapped on in from the other computers.. well. Now the hunt begins. Haha
The ReSound MCA card is available new today for about $50
Which camera do you use please ?
Miiick3y Canon FS200
Thanks ! 60fps renders great :)
Miiick3y It is 60i (interlaced) converted to 60p using QTGMC and AVIsynth.
And quality is good for a standard definition camera :)
What operating system is that?
ThatGuyYouKnow It was shown and mentioned in the video.
what's the song at the beginning of the video?
+Bradley Hove ua-cam.com/video/h05cqXcWq_o/v-deo.html
Well dang that was a timely reply if I ever saw one. (You interrupted me watching another one of your videos lol, the QBOS stereo system) anyway, thanks!
+vwestlife where do you find these songs? Some of them are awesome! :D
M-ACPA Sound Blaster emulation driver: ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/sound/macpavdd.zip
...but what about its DOS compatibility?
I mentioned that in the video.
Sorry, I skipped part of it when win3.11 was too much (I'm not into it) but the only DOS related thing I found was a single demo running under DOS. I tried to find more again, it's the same. And at the setup screen I can't see any legacy port (like 220, 388, 530 or similar) nor DMA channel.
I was kind of curious how these PS/2 things worked because I have a MCA SBPro2 which I'll probably never see working but it's so interesting that I kept it when I bumped into it.
wiph
DOS session soundblaster emulation driver: ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/sound/macpavdd.zip
Is it just me or does it sound like that MIDI synthesizer sound like it's fallen off a canyon?!
Isn't ADF a floppy disk image for Amiga's? lol.
James Dalpiaz In this case, it stands for Adapter Description File.
Oh, Alright, that makes sense. As soon as you said ADF my brain registered it as Amiga Disk Format. I have an old Amiga 500 that I play around with from time to time.
i heard that youtube is getting rid of google+
CLONEWARSADVENTURES0 Yup Jon from Jogwheel confirmed it
that's the worst rendition of Canyon I think I've ever heard, that wasn't intentionally borked.
also, is that DOS MIDI demo by Wendy "Walter" Carlos, because it sounds nearly identical to hers
I have the macpavdd driver file needed for sb emulation, if you need it, drop me a message! :D
ghwindows
I'd wager that micro-channel is one of the reasons that the PS/2 line eventually failed. These things were too expensive, didn't offer enough benefit for that price that competitors couldn't match, and used proprietary hardware. I think IBM was just butthurt that the XT/AT expansion bus had become almost universally adopted and they weren't the ones raking in the dough.
Of course. But they did fairly well. I have a PC World from 1992 that I was thumbing through the other day. It mentions the 56 SLC as an upcoming model. It also shows the top 10 selling machines at the time. PS/2s are in the number one and two spots. Maybe #3 as well, I don’t remember for sure.
So. _Somebody_ was buying them!
MCA has a ton of really cool features. It also had some very IBM features, like the whole reference disk thing. Would have been much better if every MCA card had a ROM on it with the ADF and DGS files (well, the content, anyway) stored onboard.
@@nickwallette6201 As they say, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." I wouldn't mind getting my hands on a PS/2, but much like the IBM PC/XT/AT models, they've become semi-collectors items (though I see a couple listings that aren't a bad price right now). Best way to get them for cheap is to look for listings that say "parts/repair" and fix them yourself.
@@BlackEpyon Hah... yeah, I have a Model 30, a Model 30 286, and a Model 70 386. Not a single one of them was turn-key. These things vary from "some maintenance required" to the complete basket-case my M70 turned out to be.
At the very minimum, most of the floppy drives need to be completely disassembled, cleaned, and lubed. The motor board and sometimes the controller PCB need to be recapped. The M30-286 had a Sony drive that seems to be OK, but the M30 720K Alps drive needed to be recapped to get it working right. The Mitsubishi in the M70 ruined the pads on the controller PCB and was in process of ruining the motor PCB. I'm just getting that one back together and am not optimistic that it'll work, at least off the bat.
The 8-bit XT IDE hard drives seem to have capacitor issues as well, and one of mine seems to have almost completely lost head #3 somehow.
The PSU in my model 70 was leaking electrolyte all over the place. That was pleasant to clean up...
I replace all the tantalum caps on the motherboard too, to keep them from popping -- which I can't imagine is kind to the PCB or the PSU. This is not always easy with those three-legged caps, and sometimes the board stuffers were kind enough to bend the legs against the board on the solder side, making them impossible to pull straight out. The 70 in particular was SUCH as PITA. IBM designed that board with several of the caps tied to the inner power planes (of course), and apparently doesn't believe in annular rings around the vias, so getting enough heat into them to melt solder all the way through the board was a challenge, to say the least. The aftermath wasn't pretty, but I think I managed (somehow!) not to dislodge any vias.
These things were proprietary, ill-conceived, butt-ugly, failure-prone junk. And I love them to death.
@@nickwallette6201 One of my current projects is restoring a Hyundai XT clone (Super 16TE), and yeah, similar issues.
I keep hearing that tantalums are superior to electrolytics, but electrolytics usually just "fade" away, where tantalums tend to fail much more... spectacularly. But after replacing the tantalums, the dead Varta, and one of the ISA slots the Varta corroded, I've gotten it mostly working.
The one remaining issue has to do with the memory banks. Banks 1 & 2 are soldered onto the board, but banks 3 & 4 are socketed. Populate bank 3, get 576K, and everything tests fine. Populate bank 4 for 640K, and bank 4 tests fine, but bank 3 stops working. Tried replacing the chips, but I suspect the issue has to do with some of the support logic. And, alas, no technical reference manual to be found. I picked up a lo-tech 1MB RAM card, because I wanted to run with some HI-RAM for loading drivers and whatnot, but it would be nice to get that last bank working. Probably just end up replacing those surrounding logic chips outright, and see if that fixes it.
Haha... yeah, I dunno about electrolytic being better or worse than tantalum. When 'lytics have a bad day, they cause a lot of collateral damage. Tantalums stress out the power delivery, and might damage a nearby component. I think I'd take neither, if I could. :-) But what're you gonna do.
That problem with the RAM does sound like maybe an address decoder has a stuck bit or something. If it's Chip-Enabling something in bank 4 that drives the bus while bank 3 is trying to use it, or something like that. Hope you get it fixed. It's always rewarding to bring something back from the brink of the dead.
Wow I really dislike how midi on this card sounds (nothing to do with your video and I agree with your comments about it)
The MIDI didn't sound very good in my opinion. But hey, maybe that's just me.
IBM music feature card anyone?
Nice job designing this, IBM...
+AIO inc. Mca also looks like a pci express you could say.
+AIO inc. also, what model ps/2 is this?
It is an IBM PS/2 Model 56 SLC.
Jesus, why they made things so complicated.
yea I know right? IBM PS/2's are very complicated... u need a reference disk to get rid of error codes after installing or removing a card. if the floppy drive breaks down its hard to find other floppy drive since it need to be a spiecal floppy drive
what windows menus?
They were blazing trails back then.
First PC to standardize on the 3.5” before it was solidified into the form factor we know now.
MFM/RLL was old tech but IDE wasn’t yet prominent. SCSI was just taking off. ESDI drives, and the 8-bit IDE used in earlier PS/2s were precursors to what everyone knows as IDE.
MCA had a lot of good ideas, but IBM was very much an engineering company. Very little thought into user experience, or even whether the decisions made today will still fit in two to five years.
PS/2s had their strengths, and they made the newest Intel architectures available before anyone could afford them. By the time most of us were using a 386 like this, we were using clones with a couple years of hindsight to learn from IBM’s missteps.
you can download the virtual device driver rar file from here: ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/sound/ACPA.html
If someone needs that driver, it seems it can be downloaded here: ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/sound/