AdLib
Encyclopedia
- This page is about the (now defunct) sound card company based in Quebec CityQuebec CityQuebec , also Québec, Quebec City or Québec City is the capital of the Canadian province of Quebec and is located within the Capitale-Nationale region. It is the second most populous city in Quebec after Montreal, which is about to the southwest...
, CanadaCanadaCanada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, named Ad Lib, Inc. — not to be mistaken with the software company Adlib Software or Adlib Information systems http://www.adlibsoft.com. See ad lib for information on the Latin phrase.
Ad Lib, Inc. was a manufacturer of sound card
Sound card
A sound card is an internal computer expansion card that facilitates the input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces that use software to generate sound, as opposed to using hardware...
s and other computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
equipment founded by Martin Prevel, a former professor of music and vice-dean of the music department at the Université Laval
Université Laval
Laval University is the oldest centre of education in Canada and was the first institution in North America to offer higher education in French...
. The company's best known product, the AdLib Music Synthesizer Card (ALMSC), or simply the AdLib as it was called, was the first add-on sound card (on compatible
IBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...
s) to achieve widespread game-developer acceptance, becoming the first de facto
De facto
De facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning fact." In law, it often means "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established." It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or...
standard for audio reproduction.
Today the AdLib's functionality can be recreated with emulators such as AdPlug and VDMSound
VDMSound
VDMSound is an open source emulator of legacy sound card devices, designed to allow video games and other applications written for MS-DOS to run on the Microsoft Windows NT/2000/XP/95/98/Me operating systems...
(the latter is now deprecated but its source code has been incorporated into DOSBox
DOSBox
DOSBox is emulator software that emulates an IBM PC compatible computer running MS-DOS. It is intended especially for use with old PC games. DOSBox is free software....
).
Marketing
After development work on the ALMSC had concluded, Prevel struggled to engage the development community with his company's new product. For example when he handed out development kits at trade shows, with the hopes of having them reach development staff at software companies, the attendees simply used the handouts as personal entertainment, or discarded them outright. Needless to say, the Adlib hardware was not reaching its intended audience, developers with the PC gaming industry.
On the retail-channel side, most retail stores chains and wholesale distributor were selling AdLib sound cards by 1990.
Specifications
The AdLib used Yamaha's YM3812Yamaha YM3812
The Yamaha YM3812 also known as the OPL2 is a sound chip created by Yamaha Corporation in 1985 and famous for its wide use in IBM PC-based sound cards such as the AdLib and Sound Blaster.It is backwards compatible with the OPL aka YM3526, to which it is very similar – in fact, it only adds 3 new...
sound chip
Sound chip
A sound chip is an integrated circuit designed to produce sound . It might be doing this through digital, analog or mixed-mode electronics...
which produces sound via FM synthesis
Frequency modulation synthesis
A 220 Hz carrier tone modulated by a 440 Hz modulating tone with various choices of modulation index, β. The time domain signals are illustrated above, and the corresponding spectra are shown below ....
. The AdLib card consisted of a YM3812 chip with off-the-shelf external glue logic
Glue logic
In electronics, glue logic is the custom logic circuitry used to interface a number of off-the-shelf integrated circuits.This is often achieved using ordinary 7400- or 4000-series components. In more complex cases, programmable logic devices like a CPLD or FPGA might be used...
to plug into a standard PC-compatible ISA 8-bit slot.
PC software generated multitimbral
Multitimbral
Monotimbral is usually used in reference to electronic synthesisers which can produce a single timbre at a given pitch upon pressing a single or multiple keys .An electronic musical instrument may be...
music and sound effects through the AdLib card, although the acoustic quality was distinctly synthesized. Digital audio (PCM) was not supported, a key feature supported by later competition (such as the Creative Labs Sound Blaster.)
The engineers who developed sound cards and software libraries for Ad Lib worked at Lyrtech
Lyrtech
LYRtech inc. is a digital signal processing development company based in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. Its Innovator division, acquired in 2006, for nearly 3M$, was sold back for roughly 300,000$ in late 2007, as part of a restructuring plan designed to save the company...
.
AdLib Gold
Ad Lib planned a wholly new proprietary standard before releasing the 12-bit stereoSTEREO
STEREO is a solar observation mission. Two nearly identical spacecraft were launched into orbits that cause them to respectively pull farther ahead of and fall gradually behind the Earth...
soundcard called the AdLib Gold. The Gold card used a later generation Yamaha YMF262
Yamaha YMF262
The Yamaha YMF262, also known as the OPL3 , is an FM synthesis sound chip. It is an improved version of the Yamaha YM3812 , adding the following features:*twice as many channels...
(OPL3) and 12-bit digital PCM capability while retaining backward compatibility with the original AdLib.
This effort was doomed from the start: Ad Lib was not a technology company and lacked the required skills in-house to design the Gold card. Hence the task was handed over to Ad Lib's component supplier, Yamaha. Creative Labs was already Yamaha's biggest customer for music-based technology, generating a conflict of interest that delayed the Gold's development process.
When the Gold card was finally released, the Sound Blaster series was entrenched as the de-facto PC sound card standard, and priced significantly cheaper than the Adlib Gold. Few PC game developers supported the Gold directly, and fewer gamers bought it.
The AdLib Gold was also produced for the MCA
Micro Channel architecture
Micro Channel Architecture was a proprietary 16- or 32-bit parallel computer bus introduced by IBM in 1987 which was used on PS/2 and other computers through the mid 1990s.- Background :...
-bus, named AdLib Gold MC2000.
Bankruptcy
The success of the AdLib Music Card soon attracted competitors. Not long after its introduction, Creative Labs introduced the competing Sound BlasterSound Blaster
The Sound Blaster family of sound cards was the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible system platform, until the widespread transition to Microsoft Windows 95, which standardized the programming interface at application level , and the evolution in PC design led to onboard...
card. The Sound Blaster was fully compatible with AdLib's hardware, meaning it would play any past, present, and future game written for AdLib's own card. But it also added two key features absent from the Adlib: a PCM audio channel, and a game port. PCM audio could record and play digital-audio recordings, which included dialogue, sound effects, and short musical performances. Although the PCM audio-fidelity was scarcely better than AM radio, it allowed game developers to include realistic sound-effects and speech that could not be reproduced by the Yamaha's FM synthesis, and proved very popular among game developers. Finally, the Sound Blaster's inclusion of a game-port made it a single-card gaming solution.
With a superior product and better marketing, the Sound Blaster quickly displaced AdLib as the de-facto standard in PC-gaming audio. AdLib's slow response, the AdLib Gold, did not sell well enough to sustain the company.
In 1992, Ad Lib filed for bankruptcy while the Sound Blaster family continued to dominate the PC gaming industry.
In 1992, a conglomerate from Germany, Binnenalster
Binnenalster
Binnenalster or Inner Alster Lake is one of two artificial lakes within the city limits of Hamburg, Germany, which are formed by the river Alster . The main annual festival is the Alstervergnügen.The lake has an area of ....
GmbH, purchased the assets of Ad Lib from the Government of Quebec, who had acquired it to prevent Creative Labs from buying it. The company was renamed AdLib Multimedia and launched the AdLib Gold soundcard and many other products.
The German conglomerate sold AdLib Multimedia to a Taiwanese company in 1994.
Timeline
- 1987 - AdLib Card - First mass market PC soundcard for computers released using FM synthesisFrequency modulation synthesisA 220 Hz carrier tone modulated by a 440 Hz modulating tone with various choices of modulation index, β. The time domain signals are illustrated above, and the corresponding spectra are shown below ....
(YM3812Yamaha YM3812The Yamaha YM3812 also known as the OPL2 is a sound chip created by Yamaha Corporation in 1985 and famous for its wide use in IBM PC-based sound cards such as the AdLib and Sound Blaster.It is backwards compatible with the OPL aka YM3526, to which it is very similar – in fact, it only adds 3 new...
chip by Yamaha) - 1988 - Sierra Entertainment'sSierra EntertainmentSierra Entertainment Inc. was an American video-game developer and publisher founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems by Ken and Roberta Williams...
King's Quest IV, the first PC game to support AdLib - 1992 - AdLib Gold released.
- 1992 - Ad Lib filed for bankruptcy on May 1.