AdLib Gold

During financial issues as Creative Labs began to saturate the market with the budget SoundBlaster cards, AdLib regrouped as 'AdLib Multimedia' with a German company. The last 'official' product under Martin Prevel was the AdLib Gold 1000; as the German company eventually took over and released basic sound cards with Crystal Semiconductor ICs, such as CS4236B.

This card is extremely well balanced and offers extensive filtering; but also the stereo Philips amplifier stacks the OPL3 output lending to some very interesting sounding FM music. This Philips amp was not implemented in any other OPL3-based sound cards that I am aware of. The Gold 1000 also sported a few add-on cards allowing SCSI, Telephone, and Surround Sound. However these modules are rarer than the card itself, and I am not sure if the SCSI and Telephone adapters made it to market before the company's demise (potentially as they do exist?).

Downloads

Note: IRQ and other settings are set through software (yeah, the AdLib Gold was one of the more 'modern' designs like 3Com cards which were also software controlled, which personally I'm not a big fan of because you are reliant on there not being a conflict to change it to begin with, in software).

Note #2: Groovekey just seems to be a midi player-- it will undoubtedly work with any OPL3-capable computer.

Note #3: Voyetra released VSPG for free for download before the site was abandoned and closed, this download is a copy of that once freely available download. Kudos to Bobby Prince for sharing the URL when it was still around. It also looks like someone independently mirrored it at vgmpf.

Weird Rumours

Long after the company's demise, some eccentric rumours have appeared:

#1 No MicroChannel (MCA) version of the AdLib Gold 1000 was ever released. AdLib went bankrupt before such a thing could have been released, and no cards physically exist. Had it been released, it would have been even rarer than the ISA cards; but would have offered the cleanest and most unique OPL3 output of any known implementation. There was a MicroChannel version of the original AdLib card released but it appears to be weirdly rarer than the Gold 1000.

#2 Yamaha was not involved with the development of the AdLib Gold 1000. Just look at the circuitry! This was also later ratified by the original engineer who worked on it.

GoldLib Clone

In 2022 the GoldLib was started as a reverse engineering as the AdLib Gold. It does not appear the surround modules were ever sold separately (but to be fair I never reached out when the project was still operational), else I may have been interested in one for my real AdLib Gold. Production ceased after no more ICs required to build them could be sourced. To be honest I am surprised they found as many as they did, some of those ICs were very hard to source when I looked before this project was started.

My AdLib Gold presently resides in my PS/2E, although I may migrate it to a NOS PC 300GL as part of a future project (yeah, it's been sealed new since 1996!)

AdLib Gold 10008-bit ISA Sound Card

AdLib Gold 1000
8-bit ISA Sound Card