"De-noising" Sound Blaster cards

Posted on 2019-05-06, 19:48

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I'm wondering if there is a way to fix the noise floor and and general noisiness of pre DSP 4.05 Sound Blaster 16 boards. Can certain components be desoldered off the board and then replaced with higher quality ones to enhance output? I'm not terrible experienced here but was wondering if this was a …

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Re: T-04YBSC-A, new YMF71x based sound card + SETYMF utility

Posted on 2019-05-06, 01:52

by

by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Hi Tiido! Your project is very exciting and I hope to see your sound card project come to fruition. I was following someone from Russia who went by the handle zxc64 and was working on a "new and improved" AWE64 Gold card, complete with Wavetable header and an enhanced DSP. Unfortunately, he pulled …

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Re: Issues playing some MIDI files on Sound Blaster Pro

Posted on 2019-01-25, 01:45

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Welp... I just answered my own question. Turns out I needed to change the MIDI Mapper from BASIC FM to EXT FM and it solved the problem for me.

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Issues playing some MIDI files on Sound Blaster Pro

Posted on 2019-01-24, 17:21

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I have Windows 3.0 MME installed in PCem with a variety of period correct hardware to go with it, including the venerable Sound Blaster Pro (ver 1 w/ dual OPL2 chips). I noticed that, although most MIDIs played fine out of the box, I had issues getting MIDI files designed for the original Sound …

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Re: Retro PCI cards in modern motherboards

Posted on 2017-04-04, 21:03

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I start to think the PCIe->PCI Bridge may be the problem. My board has the ITE 8892E bridge. Exactly. To expand upon your point... Native PCI support was ditched, post Ivy Bridge and Panther Point chipsets. All PCI from Haswell on is purely bridged over PCIe, which introduces numerous compatibility …

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Re: "Black Widow" Pentium III Build

Posted on 2017-02-23, 03:15

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

UPDATE: I am finally in receipt of the Aureal Vortex 2 (AU8830) PCI card and got it installed. I used the 2.048 reference drivers, courtesy of Phil's Computer Lab driver archive. Works great and I look forward to playing some A3D titles in the near future. I've opted to not use any DOS drivers for …

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Re: "Black Widow" Pentium III Build

Posted on 2017-02-13, 20:41

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I like the case! nice and basic. One thing I never liked is how towards the end the case front plate had some stupid mould hiding the floppy drive. Give my a standard opening like yours any day of the week. Great build though. Very similar to mine only I've got a Audigy 2 ZS (much more easy to get …

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Re: "Black Widow" Pentium III Build

Posted on 2017-02-11, 21:53

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Hi Tetrium, I'd be more than happy to give your guide a thorough read-through later this evening. Thanks for dropping a link! I always love these retro guides. I've noticed that, with 256 MB or more of installed memory, ME rarely crashed, if it ever did, and boot up times were crazy fast. Although …

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Re: "Black Widow" Pentium III Build

Posted on 2017-02-11, 16:59

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

I personally love the Lian Li case, but I'm biased because I own two of them. How do you like the IDE Disk on Module? I was eying one of those off instead of an SD card adapter, but the ones on ebay are quite pricey. I'm actually a huge fan of my disk on module. It's tiny, quiet, consumes next to …

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Re: "Black Widow" Pentium III Build

Posted on 2017-02-11, 08:55

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

Oh I forgot about the fingerprints on the case lol It's a certain layer of something on the case. If I remember correctly it also made the case a bit more slippery. That CPU is really neat! Too bad I don't have one of those, enjoy it! :D I had forgotten about 98Lite. I did mess around with it for a …

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Re: "Black Widow" Pentium III Build

Posted on 2017-02-10, 18:35

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

To answer you both on the CPU front... yes this is indeed a 100 MHz FSB model Coppermine. SL4KL model to be exact. I only got this sucker to work on the motherboard, because my BIOS revision happened to be right in the desired sweetspot of rev P15. I believe the last update for this board, P17, …

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"Black Widow" Pentium III Build

Posted on 2017-02-10, 06:18

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

After selling my beloved microATX Tualatin build from last year, dubbed " Blade Runner ", I got the itch to scratch and started yet another build. I aimed to stick with a goal of a PC designed primarily for Win9x gaming and digital audio workstation tasks, with DOS gaming as a bonus. However, nearly …

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Re: Aureal Vortex 2

Posted on 2017-02-03, 08:21

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Not to resurrect this thread again, but I wonder what the memory consumption is like for the au30dos.com driver? I'm virtually out of UMBs and I'm hoping the driver either has a low footprint (under 10k) or it can be partially loaded into EMS. Thoughts?

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Re: MPC2 audio cable splitter?

Posted on 2017-02-02, 17:44

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Good suggestions! I might also try running both cards under Windows at the same time, assuming that's even supported. CD audio and DOS software will run through the AWE64 while my Windows apps like Cakewalk as well as games run over the PCI card.

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MPC2 audio cable splitter?

Posted on 2017-02-02, 09:58

by

by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Since I'll be running two sound cards in the foreseeable future, I just arrived at a bit of a conundrum. I want both cards to play CD audio, but I believe only one MPC2 cable can be plugged into the disc drive at any time. Is there a way I can use a splitter in order to feed one cord to two sound …

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EMI protection necessary?

Posted on 2017-02-02, 00:00

by

by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

So I'm considering slapping a second PCI sound card in my Pentium 3 build, and I was thinking of the possibility of EMI that might affect the AWE64 Gold I have currently installed. Has anyone bothered to incorporate EMI shielding on their expansion cards? Is it even worth it?

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Re: My new PIII system is in the post!

Posted on 2017-01-28, 06:07

by

by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Nicely specced system! My motherboard is the same model as yours from the same eBay seller. I guess we all got lucky huh? I have a 1 GHz Coppermine PIII and it works great as long as you don't use the very latest BIOS. Fortunately mine comes with version 15.

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Re: List of motherboards with SB-link (PC/PCI) header

Posted on 2016-12-17, 05:03

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Wow. I must thank all of you for your efforts in providing information on motherboards with SBLink capabilities. I actually did another retro build that is now my daily driver, which uses an Intel SE440BX2 motherboard. It has SBLink, but I use a real ISA SoundBlaster AWE64 instead. That being said …

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Re: Intel SE440-BX2 and EMS memory

Posted on 2016-07-29, 23:02

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by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Instead of EMM386 try to use Jemmex.exe or QEMM97. Jemm (includes jemmex): https://web.archive.org/web/20141011223727/http://www.japheth.de/Jemm.html QEMM97: ftp://yesican.chsoft.biz/pub/dv/qemm97.zip or WinWorldPC No Dice. Seems like I get the same lack in free UMBs on both alternate memory …

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Re: Intel SE440-BX2 and EMS memory

Posted on 2016-07-29, 06:59

by

by mattrock1988

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yes they both run Windows 98 SE. So you think perhaps MS-DOS Mode on Windows 98 is a bit more hoggish on memory than plain Jane MS-DOS?

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