DOS Days

DOS Days

Avance Logic / Realtek

Avance Logic was a budget sound and graphics card manufacturer who got acquired by Realtek, of Taiwan.

They also sold their board designs to third parties who rebranded them.

Sound Cards

ALS007 / ALS007SP

Introduced: 1996
FM Synthesizer: LS262 (OPL3 clone)
Bus: 16-bit ISA
CD-ROM Interfaces: IDE
Jacks: Line In, Line Out, Mic, Speaker
Wavetable Header: Yes
Plug & Play: Yes
FCC ID: JQDS007AS9543C, MZY3D007S3 or MA5ASOUND

The ALS007 is a Sound Blaster, Pro and Sound Blaster 16-compatible card. For OPL3 music it has an LS262 chip. The game/MIDI port can be used as an MPU-401 interface (UART only), and the card also gets an IDE interface for a CD-ROM which is initialised using a file called CDSETUP.SYS.

ALS007 is a Plug & Play card, so has no jumpers for I/O port, IRQ, or DMA settings. Instead, the installation disk provides a utility, ALCONFIG.EXE to configure the card's settings. The wavetable header is Creative Wave Blaster-compatible.

This ALS007 card was also sold as the Asonic Asound-007/XX, released in 1996, as well as the SoundTrek.

I have seen ALS007 cards with the same FCC ID as the ALS100 and ALS100Plus+ (MA5ASOUND), which is odd.

The ALS007SP is very similar to the ALS007 but is not a Plug & Play card. In all other respects they are the same. A file called ALSINIT.EXE is used to initialise the ALS007SP's sound chip.

According to the installation disk readme file, if you have issues installing under Windows, you should try installing the drivers for each device manually. For reference they are:

Logic Device 0 = Wav Audio Device;
Logic Device 1 = Internal Midi (OPL-3) Device;
Logic Device 2 = Joy Stick/Game Port Device;
Logic Device 3 = External Midi (MPU-401) Device;
Logic Device 4 = IDE CD ROM Controller.

Drivers

DOS / Windows 3.1 / 95 (722 KB Windows self-extracting zip file)
DOS / Windows 3.1 / 95 vA1.60 (757 KB Windows self-extracting zip file)
DOS Production Board Test Program v1.0
Windows 98 (910 KB Windows self-extracting zip file)
NT 3.51 / 4.0 (104 KB Windows self-extracting zip file)
OS/2 4.0 (131 KB Windows self-extracting zip file)

More Images

ALS100 / ALS110

Introduced: 1997
FM Synthesizer: LS262 (OPL3 clone)
Bus: 16-bit ISA
CD-ROM Interfaces: IDE
Jacks: Line Out, Mic, Speaker
Wavetable Header: Yes
Plug & Play: No
FCC ID: MGYPRO16PNP, MA5ASOUND

The ALS100 from Avance Logic was a budget 16-bit sound card, and was the last ALS card to contain a dedicated Yamaha OPL3 clone - the LS262. After this, Avance Logic moved to a more tightly integrated chip (the ALS100+) that used what they called "ALSFM" - an embedded FM synth that was OPL3-compatible (though not a direct clone) and DAC.

ALS100 is *not* a Plug & Play card but there are no jumpers for I/O port, IRQ, or DMA settings. Instead, the card's configuration is stored on the ALS100 chip and is configured via the AWCONFIG.EXE utility (very similar to the earlier ALCONFIG.EXE). Run this after you have run DOSINST.EXE to install the software to your hard disk.

The game/MIDI port can be used as an MPU-401 interface (UART only) which is hanging note bug-free, and the card also gets an IDE interface for a CD-ROM which is initialised using a file called CDSETUP.SYS.

Like the ALS007, what makes this card stand out against its competitors is its support for Sound Blaster 16 in addition to Sound Blaster and Sound Blaster Pro.

The ALS100 was also sold as the Asonic Asound Plus 4, released in 1997. It had an FCC ID of MA5ASOUND. It was also sold as the Wave Melody, with the main chip rebadged as the "3D Melody MF1000".

It is sadly known to be quite a noisy card (audio quality-wise), and does require a TSR driver.

As for main ASIC itself, the ALS100L chip is a low-power version of the ALS100, but is otherwise identical. ALS100M chips have additional support for multiple CD-ROM interfaces from Mitsumi, Sony and Panasonic.

Manuals

ALS100/ALS100L/ALS100M User Manual
ALS100/ALS100L/ALS100M Design Manual