The 'Snark Barker' Homebrew Soundcard

In this episode I assemble the "Snark Barker" Sound Blaster clone. This card was reverse engineered and created by schlae of tubetime. The same person who also did the AdLib replica which I covered in a previous episode.

The Creative Sound Blaster was the successor to the Creative Music System, which was a commercial failure. The Adlib card was more successful, so the Sound Blaster combined both cards into one. It also added a relabelled Intel 8051 microcontroller as a "DSP" to play digitized samples and speech, and also added a combined MIDI and joystick port. This was what probably made the biggest difference and led to Creative dominating the sound card market for many years. It also led to the ultimate demise of Adlib, a few years down the road.

This project is much larger than anything I have done before. I was thinking about splitting the video in two parts, but due to current time constraints, I opted to make one long half hour video. I hope you still like it.

The whole project is open source and you can download the design files, order the PCBs from your favourite vendor and parts from Mouser, digikey or other component sellers.

The only components that are EOL are the Yamaha ICs YMF3812 (OPL2) and Y3014B, the 558 timer IC, the SAA1099 synth chips and the TEA2025 amp. You can get all of those on eBay from Chinese sellers for small money. You also have to make your own slot bracket, which I did not yet make. This will be covered in a future episode.

Cost for the whole card is about 80-100 USD, depending on the PCB manufacturer you choose.

[theSoundCarddatabase]

Thanks for this!
The inverted microcontroller was a close call, glad you noticed before it fried.

[AdamChristensen]

Very cool project. You have a new subscriber! 😉

[djmips]

15:10 that's an LM324 quad operational amplifier but I'm sure you know that by this time. Not a DAC.

[noth]

Awesome to see it working, thank you for posting this! I ordered some of these boards and am waiting for the components to arrive, but I'm wondering, how did you make the volume wheel? 3dprint?

[azzajohnson]

14:56 - You keep referring to the 4.7K ohm bodge resistor as a capacitor, its a resistor.

[FaSMaN]

Looks like a really fun build, how much did all of the components cost you more or less?

PS subscribed

[visualer]

can you please tell the model of circuit board clamping kit ? sn-390? looks like something bigger

[ButilkaRomm]

Is it compatible with 16 bit IBM clones ?

[mikegravgaard]

You might want to consider round pin sockets in the future.

[geoimpala]

It would be cool if you could design your own isa sound card by a combination of fm chips in the slots

[elamriti]

any one has a tut or guide for this card

[piecaruso]

waiting for you give us feedback and i will start to customize and then build one of those for my machine, i have also schemes for a pc compatibile 8088 pc with isa and full pc support usng a chipset to reduce the ics count, so i am trying to learn easy eda to make an atx 8088 motherboard and then making a complete pc myself from scratch