So advanced, yet so crippled at the same time. The lack of Sound Blaster (and Adlib) support made it an interesting footnote in Microchannel history. Its MIDI capabilities were pretty lousy and clearly an afterthought too.
Sound Blaster compatibility couldn’t exist because the ACPA is older. AdLib compatibility could have, but that probably wasn’t even on IBM’s radar. It may not even have occurred to them that anyone might want AdLib on a digital audio board. Same for MIDI, wasn’t a thing when the ACPA was designed (not on PCs, anyway).
So advanced, yet so crippled at the same time. The lack of Sound Blaster (and Adlib) support made it an interesting footnote in Microchannel history. Its MIDI capabilities were pretty lousy and clearly an afterthought too.
Sound Blaster compatibility couldn’t exist because the ACPA is older. AdLib compatibility could have, but that probably wasn’t even on IBM’s radar. It may not even have occurred to them that anyone might want AdLib on a digital audio board. Same for MIDI, wasn’t a thing when the ACPA was designed (not on PCs, anyway).
In a later beta driver, there is actually support for Sound Blaster and according to the documentation, MT32 and LAPC. Not sure how it sounds though.
The newer driver that has the added support is called “Virtual device driver for M-Audio Capture and playback Adapter”
It can be gotten from here: http://ps-2.kev009.com/ohlandl/sound/ACPA.html