Oddware: Portable Sound Plus parallel port sound card

A sound card that plugs into the parallel printer port, giving you 16-bit stereo sound plus Sound Blaster and AdLib emulation for DOS games.

[LGR]

Dang, that's a surprisingly effective solution. Very cool, I hope I can track one down someday!

[uxwbill]

It works far better than I ever expected. The Sound Blaster compatible audio isn't so bad as to be unlistenable in my view. Whoever did the hardware design must have put a lot of thought into making it work, especially at the data rates needed for 44.1 kHz 16-bit audio.

That "Breeze" song in wave format was also included on a Microsoft Multimedia demo bundle that Packard Bell used to include with some of their computers.

[robertdanielii]

I had one of these as a kid. It works amazingly even with something as slow as an 8088, regardless of what the box says, it works in DOS and with very slow old PC's. The speaker unit was not shielded, and would easily ruin a floppy if you got it close. It was AMAZING but not cheap. About $175 new back in the day.

[Slaypl]

RJ-45 to 3.5mm Jack.
Hear the sounds of the internet!

[compositeguy]

Ow Kevin be careful not to crack the plastic on the LCD screen, heh got a bit nervous when you closed it so roughly ;-)

[zpower]

When I was a kid with a IBM PS/2 386 that had no chance of ever getting a compatible sound card, I would have been stoked for this. I take it you lose your parallel port entirely so if you had a desktop it would mean alot of unplugging and plugging back in if you wanted to use the printer. Oh well - that was life before USB!

[zzoinks]

This video really shows how much technology has progressed in 20+ years.

[TechnologySpotlight]

Back then we cared about sound cards.





Now we care about graphics cards.

[daveb]

PC speaker sounds amazing. I thought when you clicked the button you had a 100 piece orchestra start playing in your basement!

[jusun]

The sample BREEZE.WAV and MID file sounds wonderful. Would you mind to share it or is it available to download it anywhere on the internet?

[Radihed]

A place where I've used to work have had one of these in the office supply drawer. I always borrowed the aux cable it came with to use in company vehicles.

[goodiesguy]

I saw one of these on an episode of Computer Chronicles. I think it was one of the Comdex specials.

[raydeenk]

That is not too shabby! If my old Tandy was still in decent working condition, I'd be looking for one of these. Very cool vid!

[Evansmustard]

These Oddware videos are great. Please keep them coming!

[robertdanielii]

I can confirm that the tiny adapter with the headphone jack and the RJ45 style end is an unamplified output, but is a stereo output. The unit IS very speed sensitive, Turbo functions messed with it and when I moved it from an 8088 to a 386, even the sound files I had recorded played at the wrong speed. The unit does indeed have a microphone in the speaker, very low quality. The windows drivers were buggy at best, and DOS wasn't much better but it worked (mostly). There were a series of updated drivers that helped. The last package I remember getting was a Windows9x package of drivers that had updated DOS drivers as well. I ABSOLUTELY remember the setup did not work. Also the unit WILL stand up (even though it will put a lot of weight on your parallel port) if you push down that little tab that is in the center of the unit below the hinge, on the side that plugs into the PC. You must push it to put it up or down. There are not a lot of these out there.

[NJRoadfan]

Breeze.mid/wav is from the Windows Multimedia Pack. The Soundblaster emulation sounds horrible. Does the emulation driver require EMM386 to be loaded? If so, its using a v86 port trapping API to support emulation. It likely doesn't work with protected mode DOS games either (try anything that uses DOS4/GW like SimCity 2000 or DOOM). Its also likely that the Windows 95 drivers have better SoundBlaster emulation in a DOS box. A friend of mine had one of these back in the day and wasn't impressed too with it.

[Kylefassbinderful]

LGR brought me time that is. General curiosity is what usually brings me here.

[davek]

I had an IBM PCMCIA audio adapter with my 486 laptop. It actually sounded pretty good. My 486 DX-2 50 with 20 MB of RAM just barely wouldn't play a 128 Mb/s mp3 through it with WInAmp.

[CmputrBlu]

hadn't noticed the first time I watched video; but that "Breeze" sample has a Purple Rain vibe in parts :)

[jaykay]

This is what the Covox Speech Thing and Disney Sound Source wanted to be when they grew up! Used to have a ton of old PS/2s and whatnot, I would have loved to have 10 or 12 of these things around back then!