Re: Does anyone know if this old AT case has a brand or name?

Posted on 2018-03-30, 18:06

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've been searching for a while for a case that is almost exactly the same, but has square reset and turbo buttons, no LED display, and a keyboard connector on the front. The end goal is a rebuild of the 386 system my family had when I was young.

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Re: HardMPU, anyone?

Posted on 2018-03-13, 14:40

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Found the problem. The way buffer was set up didn't really help anything other than SysEx delay. Anyone who has the ability to program new firmware into the Atmega that wants to try out the beta version, PM me 😁

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Re: HardMPU, anyone?

Posted on 2018-03-12, 23:07

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

According to that chart, the MPU-401 at or above v1.3 has, in UART mode, an MPU Transmit Buffer of 256 bytes, and an MPU Receive Buffer of 1744 bytes. Could the explanation be that simple? Since UART is asynchronous, when bytes are sent too quickly over a gameport, there's data loss, but not via …

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Re: HardMPU, anyone?

Posted on 2018-03-12, 13:42

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Could this mean that the MIF-IPC-B has an unmentioned buffering and rate limiting feature? No, the MIF-IPC is a simple interface to connect the MPU-401 to the ISA bus. Any "magic" is happening in the MPU itself. Since this works with my AWE32 and gameport adapter with the system slowed down, that …

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Re: HardMPU, anyone?

Posted on 2018-03-11, 19:45

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Ok, round 2... I dug out my "Roland DG" MPU401 and MIF-IPC-B card. This creates a bit of a mess on my workbench :lol: Guess what? Monkey Island sounds perfect without slowing the machine down, just like you describe. I'd suspect a problem with HardMPU, but it actually seems to do better than my …

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Re: HardMPU, anyone?

Posted on 2018-03-11, 19:15

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Ok, so I spent some time this morning doing some testing. On my main DOS machine (K6-3+), with a HardMPU, Monkey Island sounds very similar to your "garbled" version. With my AWE32 and a gameport adapter, I just got random notes that didn't even sound like music. If I use SetMul to slow the CPU down …

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Re: Have you opened your SC-55 to check the battery inside?

Posted on 2018-03-11, 17:45

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I opened up mine today and the battery had definitely been leaking. Luckily none of it made it to the board, but it was not a pretty sight anyway. I just removed it.

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Re: HardMPU, anyone?

Posted on 2018-03-11, 01:26

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

It doesn't seem to me that it could have anything to do with the messaging rate between the game's runtime and the MT-32, because I'm using a MIF-IPC-B which is an almost identical replacement for the original Roland MIC-IPC-A. A lot of games load custom patches via SysEx when the game loads, and I …

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Re: HardMPU, anyone?

Posted on 2018-03-11, 01:13

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Here's my recording of the garbled version: http://www.hilbertspace.net/stuff/SoMI_MT-32_malfunction.mp3 Definitely sounds like its playing the wrong instruments. I can think of a few reasons why: - Is SysEx delay enabled? If so, try it without. If not, try turning it on. - Did you play any other …

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Re: What 3.5 inch floppy drive is works with all 3.5 inch disks?

Posted on 2018-03-10, 04:12

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

How stable and reliable are Jazz drives and disks in general? The only time I have seen one in person, was a friend, that bought one back in 1996/97 or 98. He had three media's and one drive. After a couple of month's, one media failed, and the second one killed the drive. It was like that old …

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Re: What 3.5 inch floppy drive is works with all 3.5 inch disks?

Posted on 2018-03-09, 23:56

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

My K6 rig has a 2GB SCSI Jaz drive as its boot medium. This may be a good alternative for you... Hard drive speed, access times, and (almost) reliability, but can still be swapped out. For example I have one disk for DOS stuff, one for Windows 3.1, etc etc.

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2018-03-01, 19:11

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Now that I'm moved and starting to set up my "office" again, I have picked up a few things off eBay, most of which have not shown up yet. - NOS 486 DX4-100 Overdrive chip ($30 and comes boxed? Hell yes!) - XT-IDE (bare board to be built later) - Belkin OmniView Pro 8-port KVM (anyone tried these? …

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Re: post up pics of your "computing area"

Posted on 2018-03-01, 15:51

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

mjnman wrote: ...and some CPUs, from 8088 to Pentium III with some holes and overdrive 😀 ... Nice collection! Missing 8080 and 8085 though 😜

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Re: Glide games will not launch

Posted on 2018-03-01, 15:43

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

For those playing along at home, loading the 3.03 drivers fixed the problem.

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Re: Glide games will not launch

Posted on 2018-02-28, 22:29

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Gamecollector wrote: Voodoo2 W9x drivers are sensitive to the CPU speed. 2 versions of official drivers work on fast PCs - 3.02.02 and 3.03.00b. Others - black screen and freeze or "no 3dfx card detected". Ahh, I knew someone out there would know just what to do here. Thanks!

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Re: Glide games will not launch

Posted on 2018-02-28, 21:26

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Have you tried official voodoo drivers? Even those had their latest versions kinda bugged. Also try using each individual voodoo2 card at a time to see if at least one of them runs ok. If you're using SLI make sure the voodoo2 cards are from the same manufacturer (Diamond, Creative Labs, etc...) …

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Glide games will not launch

Posted on 2018-02-28, 20:29

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

Hey guys, Before I spend too much time troubleshooting, I thought I'd run this by you all and hopefully get some direction. I have trouble running Glide based games or demos on this system: - Athlon XP 2400+ - nForce2-based Asus Motherboard - 512MB DDR RAM - 80GB IDE Hard drive - Radeon 9600XP AGP …

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Re: Next project? AY-3-8910 Sound Card

Posted on 2018-02-09, 21:24

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

If there is interest, nothing wrong with having both an ISA and LPT version. Anyone who programs for it could support both.

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Next project? AY-3-8910 Sound Card

Posted on 2018-02-09, 16:16

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Hey guys, I'm wrapping up some things right now so I'll actually have some free time soon. So I've been thinking about my next project. Would anyone be interested in a AY-3-8910/YM2149 based ISA sound card? I know there aren't any DOS games that support it directly right now, but there's also quite …

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Re: HardMPU, anyone?

Posted on 2018-02-08, 22:00

by

by ab0tj

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

On the subject of an MCA bus board, after some reading I'm not sure how useful it would really be. The main issue being IRQ 9 is used by the hard drive controller in the PS/2 systems, and some games are hardcoded to use IRQ 2/9.

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