WAV2VGM Plays Audio Via OPL3 Synthesis

Once upon a time, computers didn’t really have enough resources to play back high-quality audio. It took too much RAM and too many CPU cycles and it was just altogether too difficult. Instead…

Recreating The Quadrophonic Sound Of The 70s

For plenty of media center PCs, home theaters, and people with a simple TV and a decent audio system, the standard speaker setup now is 5.1 surround sound. Left and right speakers in the front and …

PicoGUS: For All Your ISA Sound Card Needs

Sound cards used to be a big part of gaming machines in the 90s and 2000s but have largely gone extinct in the wake of powerful CPUs doing the sound themselves. Sound cards were expensive back then…

Ask Hackaday: The Ten Dollar Digital Mixing Desk?

There comes a point in every engineer’s life at which they need a mixing desk, and for me that point is now. But the marketplace for a cheap small mixer just ain’t what it used to be. W…

Emulate Any ISA Card With A Raspberry Pi And An FPGA

One of the reasons the IBM PC platform became the dominant standard for desktop PCs back in the mid-1980s was its open hardware design, based around what would later be called the ISA bus. Any manu…

The STM32 Makes For A Cheap DIY USB Soundcard

Soundcards used to be giant long 8-bit ISA things that would take up a huge amount of real estate inside a desktop computer. These days, for most of us, they’re baked into the motherboard and…

Retro Gaming With Retro Joysticks

One of the biggest reasons for playing older video games on original hardware is that emulators and modern controllers can’t replicate the exact feel of how those games would have been origin…

Your PC Sound Card As A Sensor Input

The commoditised PC is the most versatile tool many of us will own, and since it has been around for a very long time it is also something that can be found for free or very cheaply if the latest c…