[REQUEST] Ad Lib and Sound Blaster programming manuals...

SoftPCMuseum

I'm currently requesting full programming manuals for the Ad Lib and Sound Blaster sound cards, as well as for the OPL2 and OPL3 chips which handle the FM synthesis.

The reason for why I am requesting these manuals is that I am currently planning on adding sound card support into my emulator (which itself is already going to have a major new release at that), yet I haven't found much of anything in the way of sound card-related material on Bitsavers.org.

Another reason is that I would simply prefer to write my own code entirely from the ground up (not counting the general sound-related code that was already reused from PCE for the PC speaker emulation), rather than using an existing sound card emulator such as the OPL3 emulation in DOSBox, which is commonly reused across different emulators, or at least on PCem.

The problem here is that I have tried to find such manuals online, and yet they don't seem to have enough of what I'm looking for. What I'm really looking for is a manual with full programming information for both, the sound card itself (including the support for digitalized audio), as well as for the OPL3 FM synthesis chip. The manuals that I have found have mainly been simple datasheets, manuals with partial information, or general instruction manuals, and not anything near being on the level of the Intel 80386 Programmer's Reference Manual or the IBM PC Technical Reference, meaning that they are not nearly as useful when writing an emulator.

thinkpadman

Did you see this page? Might be a step in the right direction.

http://www.dcee.net/Files/Programm/Sound/

SoftPCMuseum

thinkpadman wrote:

Did you see this page? Might be a step in the right direction.

http://www.dcee.net/Files/Programm/Sound/

I already know about that site, and I even downloaded some manuals from it, but I still need to read through each one to make sure that they actually have all of the programming information.

thinkpadman

Later I found these but I suspect these have been looked at:

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2006/readings/hardware/SoundBlaster.pdf

http://www.phatcode.net/res/244/files/adip301.pdf

SoftPCMuseum

thinkpadman wrote:

Later I found these but I suspect these have been looked at:

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2006/readings/hardware/SoundBlaster.pdf

http://www.phatcode.net/res/244/files/adip301.pdf

Thanks. I'm still looking for manuals relating to the Ad Lib (or at the very least the Yamaha OPL2 as opposed to the OPL3) as well as for the original Sound Blaster, but I'll definitely look at these manuals once I finally start adding in support for sound cards into my emulator. The lack of audio support (aside from the internal PC speaker) is certainly a low point in my emulator, which is also another reason for why I'm going to add in support for sound cards in the next release, since it might gain more interest.