I grew up in the age of the Soundblaster soundcard, the reputable brand by Creative which lead the charge in MS-DOS supported audio. In my eyes the fabled Soundblaster Awe 32 with soundfonts was the creme de la creme of soundcards, with its own RAM for the benefit of playing the most deluxe of MIDI sound files for your games and audiophile excitement, back in the day of the ISA standard for add-on boards for your computer system, a standard that lasted for a long while until PCI came along.
Imagine my surprise as I discover someone's made their own Soundblaster 2.0 compatible soundcard:
I love this. With people making their own microcontroller based computers, typically around the z80 (keep an eye out for the rc2014 kit on element14 presents soon) I'd love to be able to sink my time into producing my own computer system.
It appears the Blastarboard comes as a kit for you to make up and solder yourself, while firmware and files are available on the github (https://github.com/labs-lv/blasterboard ) it's not quite open source for you to build/make/create yourself. However I've never known a soundcard to come with firmware that you can flash yourself. That's certainly something that I would wish was possible for the Creative Soundblaster series of cards as they've advanced more as software over the years than hardware.
You can see more about it here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=62&t=61098&sid=afceb6d457c94985ca1481c1438b05f7 and here's a teardown of the kit:
There's an underground market for retro computer systems, as people still look for and seek the '3dfx voodoo' graphics accelerators and build systems around them.
How long until we see people making a graphics card?
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