AdLib

» see adlib.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Martin Prevel was a music professor and vice-dean of the music department at Université Laval before he was a hardware man, which explains most of what the company did. Ad Lib, Inc. was founded in Quebec City in 1987 and shipped the AdLib Music Synthesizer Card the same year, at about $220. Inside it was a Yamaha YM3812, the OPL2, doing nine channels of FM synthesis in mono. Before that card, sound on an IBM compatible meant the internal speaker making square waves at you.

Getting a standard adopted is a sales problem rather than an engineering one, and AdLib solved it by going to the people who made the software. Top Star Computer Services pushed the card to game developers, and Sierra's King's Quest IV became the first title to support it. That game did well enough that the card went from a curiosity to a line item, and by 1989 the install screen of a DOS game asked whether you had an AdLib, with the honest alternative being nothing at all.

Creative Labs shipped the Sound Blaster in 1989 and copied the FM half exactly, so everything written for AdLib worked. Then it added a digitized audio channel for sampled sound and speech, plus a joystick port, and undercut the price. That is a straightforward loss. AdLib had built a synthesizer for people who wanted music and Creative had built a card for people who wanted a machine gun noise and somewhere to plug the joystick in.

The company was dead before I ever got to pick a sound option, and the word was not. Those setup screens kept listing AdLib through the whole DOS era and past it, on machines assembled long after the Quebec City company had stopped existing, because the OPL chip on a Sound Blaster was the same part answering to the same name. Plenty of people who typed that word into a configuration menu never knew there had been a company behind it.

~ the record ~

~ the postmortem ~

The answer to the Sound Blaster was the AdLib Gold 1000, and it arrived in 1992, three years late. On paper it won, with the newer Yamaha YMF262 giving it stereo FM on top of twelve bit stereo sampling. In the shop it cost more than a Sound Blaster 16, and its compatibility with the enormous back catalog written for its own predecessor was imperfect enough to matter. It did not sell.

Ad Lib, Inc. filed for bankruptcy in 1992. Enthusiast accounts all give 1 may as the filing date and none of them point at a document, so the year is the part worth trusting. A German company, Binnenalster GmbH, bought the assets, renamed the operation AdLib Multimedia and kept the badge on cards for a while, then sold it on to Softworld in Taiwan in 1994. The name went around the world for another few years attached to nothing in particular.

~ what got buried with it ~

FM synthesis on nine channels is a specific and limited sound, thin in a way that a sampled instrument is not, and for about six years it was the sound of computer games. That timbre is now a genre marker. Emulators reproduce the OPL2 register by register because a large part of the DOS catalog only sounds right through it, and people who were not born when the card shipped can identify it instantly.

The company's real achievement was proving the category existed at all. Nobody in 1986 was certain that PC owners would pay two hundred dollars for a card whose only job was audio. AdLib demonstrated that they would, wrote the compatibility target everyone then aimed at, and got about two years of being right before a better-equipped competitor took the market it had made.

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