I have unearthed a few old articles typed during my adolescence, between 1996 and 1998. Unremarkable at the time, they now read, three decades later, as a chronicle of a vanished era.¹

The word “blog” does not exist yet. Wikipedia has yet to come. Google has not been born. AltaVista reigns over searches, while already struggling to keep up with the rapidly growing web.² To meet someone, you had to agree in advance and prepare your route on paper maps. 🗺️

The web is taking off. The CSS specification has just emerged, HTML tables still serve for page layout. Cookies and advertising banners are making their appearance. Pages start embedding music and videos, forcing browsers to support plugins. Netscape Navigator holds 86% of the market, but Windows 95 now bundles Internet Explorer to quickly catch up. In response, Netscape open-sources its browser.

France falls behind. Outside universities, Internet access remains expensive and laborious. Minitel still reigns, offering a phone directory, train tickets, remote shopping. This was not yet possible with the Internet: buying a CD online was a pipe dream. Encryption suffers from inappropriate regulation: the DES algorithm is capped at 40 bits and cracked in a few seconds.

These pages bear the trace of the web’s adolescence. Thirty years have passed. The same battles continue: data selling, advertising, monopolies.

Recently, I have been gathering old hardware at my parents’ house, notably PC extension cards. They do not take much room and make a nice display. Unfortunately, I never cared much about keeping things around. Of all the hardware I acquired over the years, only a few pieces remain.

Tseng Labs ET4000AX (1989)

This SVGA graphics card was installed in a PC powered by a 386SX CPU running at 16 MHz. It was a good card for its time: pretty fast. It did not feature 2D acceleration, unlike the later ET4000/W32. This version features only 512 KB of RAM. It can display 1024×768 images with 16 colors or 800×600 with 256 colors. It also supported CGA, EGA, VGA, MDA, and Hercules modes. No contemporary games used the SVGA modes, but the higher resolutions proved useful with Windows 3. Tseng Labs manufactured this card directly.

AdLib clone (1992)

My first sound card was an AdLib. My parents bought it in Canada during the summer holidays in 1992. It uses a Yamaha OPL2 chip to produce sound via FM synthesis. The first game I tried was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I think I gave this AdLib to a friend once I upgraded my PC with a Sound Blaster Pro 2. Recently, I needed one for a side project, but they are rare and expensive on eBay. Someone mentioned a cheap clone on Vogons, so I bought it. Sun Moon Star sold it in 1992 and shipped it with a CD-ROM of Doom shareware.

On this topic, take a look at “OPL2LPT: an AdLib sound card for the parallel port” and “OPL2 Audio Board: an AdLib sound card for Arduino.” The first article includes a more exact copy of an AdLib clone.

Sound Blaster Pro 2 (1992)

Later, I replaced the AdLib with a Sound Blaster Pro 2. It features an OPL3 chip and can also output digital samples. At the time, this was a welcome addition, but less important than the FM synthesis the AdLib introduced.

Promise EIDE 2300 Plus (1995)

I bought this card mostly for the serial port. I was using a 486DX2 running at 66 MHz with a Creatix LC 288 FC external modem. The serial port used an 8250 UART with no buffer. Thanks to Terminate, I could connect to BBSes from DOS, but not from Windows 3 or OS/2. I needed one of these fancy new cards with a 16550 UART, featuring a 16-byte buffer. At the time, finding one in France was difficult. During a holiday trip, I convinced my parents to detour from Los Angeles to San Diego to buy this Promise EIDE 2300 Plus controller card at a shop I found through an advertisement in a local magazine!

The card also features an EIDE controller with multi-word DMA mode 2 support. In contrast with the older PIO modes, the CPU did not have to copy data from disk to memory.

3dfx Voodoo2 Magic 3D II (1998)

The 3dfx Voodoo2 was one of the first add-in graphics cards to implement hardware acceleration of 3D graphics. I bought it from a friend along with his Pentium II box in 1999. It marked a big step in PC gaming: games became more beautiful and fluid. 2D still required a traditional video controller. A pass-through VGA cable daisy-chained the video controller to the Voodoo, which was itself connected to the monitor.

3Com 3C905C-TX-M “Tornado” (1999)

In the early 2000s, in college, a student association provided the campus Internet connection through a 100 Mbps Ethernet cable. If you wanted to reach the maximum speed, the 3Com 3C905C-TX-M PCI network adapter, nicknamed “Tornado,” was the card you needed. We bought them second-hand by the dozen and sold them to other students for around €30.

In a previous article, I presented the OPL2LPT, a sound card for the parallel port featuring a Yamaha YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2—the chip of the AdLib sound card. The OPL2 Audio Board for Arduino is another indie sound card using this chip. However, instead of relying on a parallel port, it uses a serial interface, which can be driven from an Arduino board or a Raspberry Pi. While the OPL2LPT targets retrogamers with real hardware, the OPL2 Audio Board cannot be used in the same way. Nonetheless, it can also be operated from ScummVM and DOSBox!

Unboxing

The OPL2 Audio Board can be purchased on Tindie, either as a kit or fully assembled. I have paired it with a cheap clone of the Arduino Nano. A library to drive the board is available on GitHub, along with some examples.

One of them is DemoTune.ino. It plays a short tune on three channels. It can be compiled and uploaded to the Arduino with PlatformIO—installable with pip install platformio—using the following command:¹

$ platformio ci \
>   --board nanoatmega328 \
>   --lib ../../src \
>   --project-option="targets=upload" \
>   --project-option="upload_port=/dev/ttyUSB0" \
>   DemoTune.ino
[…]
PLATFORM: Atmel AVR > Arduino Nano ATmega328
SYSTEM: ATMEGA328P 16MHz 2KB RAM (30KB Flash)
Converting DemoTune.ino
[…]
Configuring upload protocol...
AVAILABLE: arduino
CURRENT: upload_protocol = arduino
Looking for upload port...
Use manually specified: /dev/ttyUSB0
Uploading .pioenvs/nanoatmega328/firmware.hex
[…]
avrdude: 6618 bytes of flash written
[…]
===== [SUCCESS] Took 5.94 seconds =====

Immediately after the upload, the Arduino plays the tune. 🎶

The next interesting example is SerialIface.ino. It turns the audio board into a sound card over serial port. Once the code has been pushed to the Arduino, you can use the play.py program in the same directory to play VGM files. They are a sample-accurate sound format for many sound chips. They log the exact commands sent. There are many of them on VGMRips. Be sure to choose the ones for the YM3812/OPL2! Here is a small selection:

• 0:00, Railroad Story from the demo songs shipped with the AdLib sound card (1987)
• 1:04, the opening of Star Wars: X-Wing (1993)
• 2:19, the opening of The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)
• 3:58, the opening of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

Usage with DOSBox & ScummVM

When the Arduino is flashed with SerialIface.ino, the board can be driven through a simple protocol over the serial port. By patching DOSBox and ScummVM, we can make them use this unusual sound card. Here are some examples of games:

• 0:00, with DOSBox, the first level of Doom 🎮 (1993)
• 1:06, with DOSBox, the introduction of Loom 🎼 (1990)
• 2:38, with DOSBox, the first level of Lemmings 🐹 (1991)
• 3:32, with DOSBox, the introduction of Legend of Kyrandia 🃏 (1992)
• 6:47, with ScummVM, the introduction of Day of the Tentacle ☢️ (1993)
• 11:10, with DOSBox, the introduction of Another World 🐅 (1991)

Another World (also known as Out of This World), designed by Éric Chahi, is using sampled sounds at 5 kHz or 10 kHz. With a serial port operating at 115,200 bits/s, the 5 kHz option is just within our reach. However, I have no idea if the rendering is faithful.

DOSBox

The serial protocol is described in the SerialIface.ino file:

/*
 * A very simple serial protocol is used.
 *
 * - Initial 3-way handshake to overcome reset delay / serial noise issues.
 * - 5-byte binary commands to write registers.
 *   - (uint8)  OPL2 register address
 *   - (uint8)  OPL2 register data
 *   - (int16)  delay (milliseconds); negative -> pre-delay; positive -> post-delay
 *   - (uint8)  delay (microseconds / 4)
 *
 * Example session:
 *
 * Arduino: HLO!
 * PC:      BUF?
 * Arduino: 256 (switches to binary mode)
 * PC:      0xb80a014f02 (write OPL register and delay)
 * Arduino: k
 *
 * A variant of this protocol is available without the delays. In this
 * case, the BUF? command should be sent as B0F? The binary protocol
 * is now using 2-byte binary commands:
 *   - (uint8)  OPL2 register address
 *   - (uint8)  OPL2 register data
 */

Adding support for this protocol in DOSBox is relatively simple (patch). For best performance, we use the 2-byte variant (5000 ops/s). The binary commands are pipelined and a dedicated thread collects the acknowledgments. A semaphore captures the number of free slots in the receive buffer. As it is not possible to read registers, we rely on DOSBox to emulate the timers, which are mostly used to let the various games detect the OPL2.

The patch is tested only on Linux but should work on any POSIX system—not Windows. To test it, you need to build DOSBox from source:

$ sudo apt build-dep dosbox
$ git clone https://github.com/vincentbernat/dosbox.git -b feature/opl2audioboard
$ cd dosbox
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure && make

Replace the sblaster section of ~/.dosbox/dosbox-SVN.conf:

[sblaster]
sbtype=none
oplmode=opl2
oplrate=49716
oplemu=opl2arduino
opl2arduino=/dev/ttyUSB0

Then, run DOSBox with ./src/dosbox. That’s it!

You will likely get the “OPL2Arduino: too slow, consider increasing buffer” message a lot. To fix this, you need to recompile SerialIface.ino with a bigger receive buffer:

$ platformio ci \
>   --board nanoatmega328 \
>   --lib ../../src \
>   --project-option="targets=upload" \
>   --project-option="upload_port=/dev/ttyUSB0" \
>   --project-option="build_flags=-DSERIAL_RX_BUFFER_SIZE=512" \
>   SerialIface.ino

ScummVM

The same code can be adapted for ScummVM (patch). To test, build it from source:

$ sudo apt build-dep scummvm
$ git clone https://github.com/vincentbernat/scummvm.git -b feature/opl2audioboard
$ cd scummvm
$ ./configure --disable-all-engines --enable-engine=scumm && make

Then, you can start ScummVM with ./scummvm. Select “AdLib Emulator” as the music device and “OPL2 Arduino” as the AdLib emulator.² Like for DOSBox, watch the console to check if you need a larger receive buffer.

Enjoy! 🎶

The AdLib sound card was the first popular sound card for IBM PC—before that, we were pampered by the sound of the PC speaker. Connected to an 8-bit ISA slot, it is powered by a Yamaha YM3812 chip, also known as OPL2. This chip can drive 9 sound channels whose characteristics can be fine-tuned through 244 write-only registers.

I had one but I am unable to locate it anymore. Models on eBay are quite rare and expensive. It is possible to build one yourself (either Sergey’s one or this faithful reproduction). However, you still need an ISA port. The limitless imagination of some hackers can still help here. For example, you can combine Sergey’s Xi 8088 processor board, with his ISA 8-bit backplane, his Super VGA card, and his XT-CF-Lite card to get your very own modernish IBM PC compatible. Alternatively, you can look at the AdLib sound card on a parallel port from Raphaël Assénat.

The OPL2LPT sound card

Recently, the 8-Bit Guy released a video about an AdLib sound card for the parallel port, the OPL2LPT. While current motherboards don’t have a parallel port anymore, it’s easy to add a PCI-Express one. I bought a pre-soldered OPL2LPT and a few days later, it was in my milk box:

Update (2018-03)

You can also buy a 3D-printed enclosure for the OPL2LPT. After writing this article, I have been offered one:

The expected mode of operation for such a device is to plug it into an ISA parallel port (accessible through I/O port 0x378), load a DOS driver to intercept calls to AdLib’s address, and run some AdLib-compatible game. While correctly supported by Linux, the PCI-Express parallel port doesn’t operate like an ISA one. QEMU comes with a parallel port emulation but, due to timing issues, cannot correctly drive the OPL2LPT. However, VirtualBox emulation is good enough.¹

On Linux, the OPL2LPT can be programmed almost like an actual AdLib. The following code writes a value to a register:

static void lpt_write(uint8_t data, uint8_t ctrl) {
  ieee1284_write_data(port, data);
  ieee1284_write_control(port, (ctrl | C1284_NINIT) ^ C1284_INVERTED);
  ieee1284_write_control(port,  ctrl                ^ C1284_INVERTED);
  ieee1284_write_control(port, (ctrl | C1284_NINIT) ^ C1284_INVERTED);
}

void opl_write(uint8_t reg, uint8_t value) {
  lpt_write(reg, C1284_NSELECTIN | C1284_NSTROBE);
  usleep(4); // 3.3 microseconds

  lpt_write(value, C1284_NSELECTIN);
  usleep(23);
}

To “natively” use the OPL2LPT, I have modified the following applications:

• ScummVM, an emulator for classic point-and-click adventure games, including many Lucas­Arts games—patch²
• QEMU, a quick generic emulator—patch with a minimal emulation for timers and hard-coded sleep delays 🙄
• DOSBox, an x86 emulator bundled with DOS—patch with a complete emulation for timers and a dedicated working thread³

You can compare the results in the following video, with the introduction of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, released in 1989:⁴

• 0:00, DOSBox with an emulated PC speaker
• 0:58, DOSBox with an emulated AdLib
• 1:51, VirtualBox with the OPL2LPT (on an emulated parallel port)
• 2:42, patched ScummVM with the OPL2LPT (native)
• 3:33, patched QEMU with the OPL2LPT (native)
• 4:24, patched DOSBox with the OPL2LPT (native)
• 5:17, patched DOSBox with an improved OPL3 emulator (Nuked OPL3)
• 6:10, ScummVM with the CD track (FM Towns version)

I let you judge how good each option is! There are two ways to buy an OPL2LPT OPL3LPT: in Europe, from Serdashop or in North America, from The 8-Bit Guy.

Addendum

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

Here is another video featuring Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, released in 1992, running in DOSBox with the OPL2LPT. It’s the second game using the iMUSE sound system: music is synchronized with actions and transitions are done seamlessly. Quite a feat at the time!

Monkey Island 2

The first game featuring iMUSE is Monkey Island 2, released in 1991. The video below displays the first minutes of the game, running in DOSBox with the OPL2LPT.

Notably, at 5:33, when Guybrush is in Woodtick, a small town on Scabb Island, the music plays around a variation of a basic theme with a different instrument for each place without any interruption.

How the videos were recorded

With a VGA adapter, many games use Mode 13h, a 256-color mode with a 320×200 resolution. On a 4:3 display, this mode doesn’t feature square pixels: they are stretched vertically by a factor of 1.2.

The above videos were recorded with FFmpeg (and edited with Blender). It packs a lot of useful filters making it easy to automate video capture. Here is an example:

FONT="font=Monkey Island 1991 refined:
      fontcolor=OrangeRed:
      fontsize=16:
      x=w-text_w-10"
ffmpeg -y \
  -thread_queue_size 64 \
  -f x11grab -draw_mouse 0 -r 30 -s 640x400 -i :0+844,102 \
  -thread_queue_size 64 \
  -f pulse -ac 1 -i default \
  -filter_complex "[0:v]pad=854:400:0:0,
       drawtext=${FONT}:y= 10:text=Indiana Jones 3,
       drawtext=${FONT}:y= 34:text=Intro,
       drawtext=${FONT}:y=100:text=DOSBox,
       drawtext=${FONT}:y=124:text=VGA,
       drawtext=${FONT}:y=148:text=PC speaker,
       scale=854:480:flags=neighbor[game];
       [1:a]volumedetect;
       [1:a]showwaves=s=214x100:colors=OrangeRed:scale=lin[waves];
       [1:a]showcqt=s=214x100[spectrum];
       [waves][spectrum]vstack[vis];
       [game][vis]overlay=x=640:y=280" \
  -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -qp 0 -preset ultrafast \
  indy3-dosbox-pcspkr.mkv

The interesting part is the filter_complex argument. The input video is padded from 640×400 to 854×400 as a first step to a 16:9 aspect ratio.⁵ Using The Secret Font of Monkey Island, some text is added to the right of the video. The result is then scaled to 854×480 to get the final aspect ratio while stretching pixels to the expected 1.2 factor. The video up to this point is sent to a stream named game. As a second step, from the input audio, we build two visualizations: a waveform and a spectrum. They are stacked vertically and the result is a stream named vis. The last step is to overlay the visualization stream over the gameplay stream.

The scenario is classic: you buy a modem, get an Internet subscription, surf for a month or more without a care, and then comes the France Télécom bill with a total amount spanning at least 4 digits. The charm is then broken and the conclusion is obvious: surfing is expensive. Yet there must be a way to reduce this bill while continuing to surf normally. There are indeed many ways to achieve this goal. Here are most of them.

Choosing your provider

This seems obvious, but it deserves clarification for beginners in modem telecommunications: you must choose your provider above all based on where it is located. Today, most providers offer access points scattered throughout France. This access point is what you will call to connect to the Internet, and the price of the call will depend on the distance separating you from this point. So choose a provider that offers an access point in your local or extended local area.

What is this area? A consultation of the directory will show you. If you call your provider outside this area, chances are that the gigantic bill you received comes from there.

Some providers offer IP Kiosk. This is a service that allows you to call anywhere in France for the price of a local call. The number is the same for everyone. However, be careful, only take this solution as a last resort, indeed, the IP Kiosk has several drawbacks: it is slow (except in version 2, available only at certain providers including Wanadoo), often saturated (this will cost you several telephone units) and does not allow you to benefit from certain advantages (local package, primaliste, temporalis).

Choosing your connection hours

Second technique to save several hundred French francs on the bill: choose your connection hours. If you were connecting at any time, you can undoubtedly significantly reduce your bill by following these tips. By calling during certain time slots, you can benefit from significant reductions.

At red rate (or normal), you pay one telephone unit (1 UT = FF 0.742 including VAT or FF 0.65 excluding VAT) every 3 minutes. At blue night rate, you pay one telephone unit every 9 minutes, which is a 200% reduction! Here is the table summarizing the different time slots:

• $$$$ (Red): 1 UT every 3 minutes
• $$$ (White): 1 UT every 4 and a half minutes
• $$ (Blue): 1 UT every 6 minutes
• $ (Blue night): 1 UT every 9 minutes

In short, wait a little bit before connecting, it can save you a few francs. Do long transfers earlier in the morning or later in the evening, as the case may be.

Timing

Now, you need to monitor each telephone unit. Any unit you start, you pay for. So you might as well consume it entirely.

Two solutions are available to you: a watch, a pencil and a little patience, or software that replaces all that. The goal is to time precisely how long you have been connected since the remote modem picked up. This way, you can fully enjoy the unit and avoid hanging up when a new unit has just started.

Dedicated software like PTime or TarifCom is much more practical. They do all this automatically: calculate what you spent, track how long you stayed online, and warn you a few seconds before the end of the unit. Set this warning to around 25 seconds. This avoids having to abruptly cut the call or seeing the next unit pass during a hard disk swap. You will be able to fully enjoy the unit and also plan your connection sessions. You can estimate if you can afford to connect today. This helps avoid surprises when the bill arrives.

Local package, Primaliste, Temporalis

Can we still save money? Yes! Get the local package right now without hesitation, as long as you spend more than 6 hours on the phone after 6 PM every month. For FF 30 per month, it offers you 6 free hours after 6 PM. In other words, for 6 hours, you get the blue night rate after 6 PM. Be careful however: the package actually covers 12 hours every two months. You can spend all your package during the first month. Also note that billing happens almost to the second. The minimum unit is the minute, then the second. If you connect for 54 seconds, one minute gets deducted from the package. If you connect for 1 minute and 16 seconds, that exact time gets deducted.

Now, you need to choose between Primaliste and Temporalis. Primaliste offers 15% discount on 6 chosen numbers and on calls of more than one minute. Temporalis offers a duration-based discount. You can get up to 30% discount on a phone call lasting more than 30 minutes. These two offers are not cumulative. You need to choose the one that suits you best: Primaliste for fairly short calls, Temporalis if you stay online for a long time. Your FT agency should be able to tell you which service is most profitable by examining your last bill.

These promotions are not applicable to IP Kiosk—except the local package!

A matter of organization

We have seen the best ways to save on an FT bill. There are others whose results are more difficult to assess. You can write down on a piece of paper everything you need to do once connected. Then only connect when the paper is full enough, during a favorable time slot.

You can also try to automate as many things as possible. Launch several services automatically (email retrieval, news, etc.). Use tools to capture Web pages to view them offline and save online time. Read and write news offline. Do the same for mail. Also avoid IRC, as it costs a lot! 🙂 Launch multiple browsers to take advantage of all the bandwidth. Save what interests you to read it comfortably once disconnected. In short, automate!

And in the future?

France Télécom wants to develop telecommunications in France and make us love the year 2000. They decided to simplify the grid of time slots. Good news? No. The white rate, and especially the blue night rate, will be eliminated! During the week, the blue rate will take effect around 6 PM. In short, at night, the hour will go from FF 5 to FF 7 (approximately). France Télécom has promised to study an offer for Internet users. Will we pay double what others pay?

At the start of the school year, we will also see the switch to per-second billing. Good news? Maybe. We have to see the conditions and especially the rates offered. One last thing: 1998 will be the year of deregulation of telecommunications in France. Competition will be able to propose offers that can only be cheaper. However, companies will mainly benefit. We still have a long way to go to have free local calls (or at one unit, regardless of duration) as is done in the United States or Canada.