Today we cannot use old sound cards, mainly because the expansion ports they used, ISA and PCI, are no longer found on current motherboards. On the other hand, over time, a good part of these components ended up in the trash or disappeared due to wear and tear. However, Is there a way to recover the old Sound Blaster or another sound card.
The gaming culture of yesteryear can be found not only in the world of consoles, but also on PC. With the particularity that some games were designed to be used with hardware that no longer exists, as is the case with sound cards of yesteryear, and not only Sound Blasters, but also other popular ones such as Gravis Ultrasound , the legendary Roland MT-32 , etc. Moreover, you should not miss them for gaming but also for music production. Well, there’s a less curious way to resurrect them.
Your old Sound Blaster can be resurrected with an FPGA chip
One of the peculiarities of these chips is that their logic gates can be reconfigured so that they have the same behavior as another chip and therefore become an exact copy of it or a set of parts. Since one of the peculiarities of FPGAs is that they allow us to use their different parts for different elements that can work in collaboration or completely separately.
The possibility of implementing it would depend, i.e. on the complexity of the chip and therefore on the number of programmable logic gates. We have cases like the Intel/Altera Cyclone which has the ability to simulate a 486 with a VGA card and Sound Blaster, while others are much simpler. However, this would not be the only limitation, since it would only be in the digital part, due to the fact that the analog circuitry would still be missing.
Another way to do this is to use a Raspberry Pi emulating said graphics cards. One of these projects is called PicoGus, which, among many other classic sound cards, can emulate: Gravis Ultrasound, the Yamaha OPL2 chip from the first Sound Blaster, MPU-401 and many others used in MS- BACK. So you can hear the audio of your favorite games from yesteryear as they originally sounded.
And what about current systems?
As we said at the beginning, the big problem is the communication interface of these peripherals, in any case, many of these components use communication interfaces which today have disappeared and are no longer used, there are so at least one more titanic task. because we would also have to implement this part via VHDL or Verilog code to configure the FPGA this way.
In fact, this is used to resurrect old components, not only in sound cards, but also in graphics cards and such. And that’s something that’s not just limited to the PC world, but also to rebuilding old consoles and even arcade machines of yesteryear that ended up in bad shape without having to depend on spare parts. origin, which in many cases no longer exist. are available.
