Re: All the truth about FM in ALS100 Plus+ cards (includes facts, tech info and tests)

Posted on 2020-06-20, 09:03

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Great analysis! [*] The ALS100 Plus+ chips DO NOT HAVE an internal FM implementation. Avance Logic CHEATED on the documentation. Okay, now, as shown in ALS100+/ALS200 documentation, this chip has internal FM emulation (nope, cheaters!!). To enable it, without external OPL3 chip mounted, ALS100+ pin …

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Re: 386 Systems and Memory Instability With 4mb SIMMs? (Errors)

Posted on 2020-06-20, 08:22

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Slow refresh cannot be disabled, only set to 15, 30, 60, and 120. One of these all-to-often confusing setup option names. "15" is the settings you would call "disabled". The setting actually seems to mean "refresh interval in microseconds". Industry standard is 15.6 microseconds per row, which …

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Re: Compaq ESS ES1868F with 3 extra ISA pins?

Posted on 2020-06-20, 07:33

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

There are no visible traces going from the pins to any of the components in the card, as far as I can tell from the pictures in the listing. placa-de-sonido-compaq-D_NQ_NP_752042-MLA30329818698_052019-F.jpg This back side picture is of insufficient quality to tell anything about traces to the pins …

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Re: Compaq ESS ES1868F with 3 extra ISA pins?

Posted on 2020-06-20, 07:25

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'm looking for an ISA sound card to install into my secondary P-III build and happened to find a listing for this OEM card. Notice the slot connector at the bottom left. placa-de-sonido-compaq-D_NQ_NP_9.jpg The board I plan to use it with is a Soyo SY-6VBA133 (VIA VT82C693A), which comes with 16- …

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Re: Sound Blaster 16 Clones

Posted on 2020-06-20, 07:19

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

In my oppinion, these drivers are dongle-protected software, where the dongle is the original Creative Labs card. The difference to typical dongle-protected software is that Creative Labs never made the dongle function of the Sound Blaster cards known - they just enjoyed their drivers crashing on " …

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Re: Sound Blaster 16 Clones

Posted on 2020-06-19, 22:12

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

Also, has anyone tried using the SB16 Windows drivers and/or the Creative SB16 DOS mixer with an ALS100 card? Looking at the Linux driver source the card really should be 100% compatible - I'll see if ICU + SB16 mixerset.exe works. I would not put high hopes in using Creative Labs original drivers …

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Re: 386 Systems and Memory Instability With 4mb SIMMs? (Errors)

Posted on 2020-06-19, 21:45

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

2. I ran memtest86+ (can confirm 4.10 is the last version that works on 386's) overnight and completed 6 passes with 0 errors. 3. Sounds like row refresh could be the issue. The BIOS on this machine has options for both "hidden refresh" and "slow refresh", both of which defaulted to disabled. (The …

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Re: 386 Systems and Memory Instability With 4mb SIMMs? (Errors)

Posted on 2020-06-19, 10:42

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

30 pins SIMMs have speed grades. If the board requires -70 RAMs and you put in -80 or slower, then it is possible that they won't be able to keep up. To ensure the RAMs are ok, I usually test and label all my RAMs using this program: memtest86+ . Oh and there are 2 versions, memtest86 is the …

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Re: 386 Systems and Memory Instability With 4mb SIMMs? (Errors)

Posted on 2020-06-19, 10:38

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Since 8mb on a 386 clearly wasn't gonna be enough for me (lol), I bought two more 386 systems that support 4mb SIMMs (32mb total). However, I started getting strange memory errors as soon as I tried to install Windows (95 and 98) on them. Here's what went down: [snipped typical symptoms of memory …

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Re: 486 motherboard won't post - DRAM config?

Posted on 2020-06-18, 21:00

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The PSU is on, it's fan is spinning, but the motherboard won't post, won't beep or anything. The CPU gets slightly warm over time, but not hot, and it's not getting warm fast either. [...] How should I jumper the board, and which RAM slot should I use, if I only want to use a single 16MB 72pin …

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Re: 486 motherboard won't post - DRAM config?

Posted on 2020-06-18, 20:55

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Then I started measuring voltages, and noticed, that the -5V line has -6.80V coming out of the PSU.. so I switched to another, which had the right output voltage, but that just didn't help. -5V level is unlikely to cause any problems as it is only used by less common expansion cards. But might be a …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-06-18, 20:47

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Some stuff from the Bay and Mr. Bezos arrived today. I bought a used ASUS XP55T2P4 Rev.3.x mainboard with 256KB cache onboard and an empty slot for a COAST module. In the package was a, apparently NOS, ASUS P55T2P4 Rev.3.10 mainboard with 512KB cache onboard. I’m trying to contact the seller to …

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Re: K6 or K6-2 Quiz

Posted on 2020-06-18, 20:34

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have a board with a P-166 MMX where I could test it or an Asus P5A with a K6-2 533. But ... I'm afraid that testing it incorrectly might damage the boards. The important question is not "is a K6 or a K6-2". For 233MHz processors, the important question is: Is it a 3.2V (28Watt) or a 2.2V (13.5W) …

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Re: Rebuilding "Bakbeest" (486 Intel Ninja)

Posted on 2020-06-15, 05:46

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

All of your graphics cards are faster than the PCI host of the mainboard. You might want to check if you have options like "PCI write buffer" and/or "PCI burst writes" in the chipset setup, and enable them. Early Intel chipset PCI performance is not the great . I wonder if something like FASTVID …

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Re: Rebuilding "Bakbeest" (486 Intel Ninja)

Posted on 2020-06-14, 22:54

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ System Specs

in Marvin \ System Specs

And took a little time to benchmark some graphics cards. [...] Surprisingly there is almost no difference in performance. All of your graphics cards are faster than the PCI host of the mainboard. You might want to check if you have options like "PCI write buffer" and/or "PCI burst writes" in the …

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Re: Help Identify 486 motherboard with SiS 496/497 chipset

Posted on 2020-06-14, 22:23

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've put a 8Gb HDD and BIOS detected it as ~1.5Gb. However, it does work correctly with my SD card adapter and a 1Gb SD card, so I assumed the limit was somewhere around 1.5Gb. I guess the BIOS has a 2 GiB limit (that is 2 * 2^30) bytes and takes capacity modulo 2GiB. A drive sold as "8 gigabytes" …

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Re: Help me ID this Pentium MB?

Posted on 2020-06-10, 06:57

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well found! And nice board too, populate it with a COAST with extra tag and you can cache all the way up to 512MB How do you know? Did you find the manual for that board, where it says that? I have a Soyo SY-5TF with the Intel 430HX chipset, 256K onboard cache (with a tag ram socket onboard) and a …

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Re: Turbo XT Dumpster Find

Posted on 2020-06-10, 02:42

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

EDIT: Someone noted in the Dumpster Find thread that some later XT BIOS's had support for AT keyboards - figured it was worth a try anyways. Do you have a reference to the post in the Dumpster Find thread? https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=863438#p863438 Thanks. They reference this thread on …

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Re: Turbo XT Dumpster Find

Posted on 2020-06-10, 02:26

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

EDIT: Someone noted in the Dumpster Find thread that some later XT BIOS's had support for AT keyboards - figured it was worth a try anyways. That would be an impressive achievement. The AT keyboard protocol is supposed to be incompatible with the XT keyboard interface. It might still be possible ( …

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Re: Turbo XT Dumpster Find

Posted on 2020-06-10, 02:09

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by mkarcher

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I took the card out of the machine - It was actually counting time on that launch screen with the floppy card not in the machine, which is what worried me. DOS is perfectly able to count time on an PC or XT without a clock card installed. It just looses time and date as soon as you power off the …

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