Acknowledgments

No man is an island, if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants, and all the rest. This project would not have been possible without the people and efforts of the following communities and organizations:

The Ad Lib Music Synthesizer Card Programming Guide by Tero Töttö: This is the guide that should have come in the box with every AdLib card sold.
bitsavers.org: Provided complete (and legible!) scans of many old publications, including the Turbo C/Turbo Assembler 2.0 manuals.
Catacomb Games: For preserving and hosting the source code of Id Software’s Catacomb 3-D.
The DOS Game Modding Wiki: In the early stages of disassembly, the pages on this wiki were indispensable for assigning meaning to the contextless numeric values I encountered. The information on EGA planar storage was also helpful in finally making sense of the graphical assets.
Flat Rock Software: For preserving and hosting the source code of Id Software’s Hovertank 3-D.
The Internet Archive: Houses a veritable treasure trove of scanned computer magazine articles from the 1980s and 90s.
minus zero degrees: Provided reference manuals for the original IBM PC hardware.
Nikolai Wuttke-Hohendorf: Figured out how the parallax scrolling functions actually worked, and contributed a number of helpful comments¹ ² back to the Cosmore project.
Nuked OPL3: This, as well as all of the research it was built on, provided a huge amount of insight into the nuts and bolts of the Yamaha OPL2/3 chip. The oply Python port was also immensely useful for quick prototyping and experimentation.
Ralf Brown’s Interrupt List (Indexed HTML Version): A treasure trove of DOS facts, including header information for MZ EXE files, INT 21h behaviors, and IBM PC I/O port information.
Retrocomputing Stack Exchange: For the most part, patient and informative answers to what may have been dumb questions on my part.
The Starman’s Realm: Shed some light on the various BIOS reserved memory areas.
VGMaps.com: Provided complete and well-made images of every map in the game.
The Video Game Music Preservation Foundation Wiki: The titles of the AdLib music tracks were collected from the pages of this wiki.
Wikipedia: Primarily used to explore unfamiliar concepts, as well as to gut-check my understanding of some historical topics.
WinWorld: Hosted archival copies of the original Borland Turbo C and Turbo Assembler floppies. Without the .H and .LIB files in particular, I’m not sure I could have fully completed the analysis.
Every eBay seller who shipped me a musty old book or piece of vintage hardware during the course of this project. A+++ feedback for all.

Site Colophon

The layout of this site was inspired by the Hugo Book theme by Alex Shpak, heavily stripped down and reworked. The display fonts are Roboto by Christian Robertson and Cousine by Ascender Fonts. Diagrams were created using Inkscape.

Content management is handled by Hugo, and the pages are served by nginx on Debian.

AI Pledge

Nothing on this site was produced through the use of AI. All of the text content, images, sounds, and software code that went into this project was conceived and executed by a human’s brain.