j^aws wrote:

^^ Have you tried a stock BIOS, and maybe changing the CPU to an Intel one? If this still persists, try changing the motherboard, especially one with an Intel chipset. I'm assuming you've had all this working correctly before.

I thought about reverting to the latest stock BIOS but i don't have any other Socket 7 CPU's.

And no i had not all working correctly before. I got the motherboard for this build specifically. I have a similar board in mind that i might get in the future if i cannot make this one work.

carlostex wrote:

retrofanatic wrote:

Actually I own an original PAS 8 bit, in the original box but I don't know how to check if it needs the -5v rail. If you need me to check, let me know what to look for and I'll let you know.
Great build btw.

Wow i wish i had one too, if you can check it i would appreciate it. If you take a picture of the back of the card and post it here i could see it.

Sorry about the delay in posting but I did not have my camera until the past weekend...I know it's a borderline necropost, but I think better late than never in this case...

Thanks for your post retrofanatic. Don't worry about "necropost" or whatever some people around here might think it's no good to post on a thread that is way old. I don't see it this way. Do you have relevant info to add to the discussion? Do it, i don't care the thread is 20 years old.

Great pics, from what i can see the original PAS does not seem to have anything conecting to ISA B5, thus there seems to be no -5V requirement for this card. Great! All i need to do is to find one, wwhich seems impossible at the moment due to not only the super rare state of these cards and the super inflated price that will be associated with it.

Thanks again, and feel feel to "necropost" my threads anytime! 😀 😎

carlostex wrote:

Thanks for your post retrofanatic. Don't worry about "necropost" or whatever some people around here might think it's no good to post on a thread that is way old. I don't see it this way. Do you have relevant info to add to the discussion? Do it, i don't care the thread is 20 years old.

Great pics, from what i can see the original PAS does not seem to have anything conecting to ISA B5, thus there seems to be no -5V requirement for this card. Great! All i need to do is to find one, wwhich seems impossible at the moment due to not only the super rare state of these cards and the super inflated price that will be associated with it.

Agree on your view of resurrecting threads, shouldn't matter tbh.

Good luck with getting the card. Also remember you have crazy collectors who will fight for it as well 🙁

vetz wrote:

Agree on your view of resurrecting threads, shouldn't matter tbh.

Good luck with getting the card. Also remember you have crazy collectors who will fight for it as well 🙁

Often people google for something and come to VOGONS. Better to have everything in one big thread 😀

Might as well do an update on the build:

The sound problems are mostly solved, it seems that somehow the WSS part on the YMF-card was causing some conflict. To save some resources WSS can still be set to IRQ 5 (same as SB Pro) but the card seems to like DMA 0 for WSS playback DMA. For WSS record DMA one could set it as DMA 1. Haven't found any troubles with this setting as of now. Some games or programs don't like more than 32MB of memory. Fleet Defender is one of them, Digitized speech will get distorted otherwise. So i tried to active 16MB memory hole on BIOS effectively limiting the memory DOS can see to only 16MB so digitized speech works great again. PAS cards are great when supported natively. I got a Pro Audio Spectrum XL from kixs that behaves differently volume wise when compared to the PAS Plus, probably due to a different/newer mixer chip. The PAS XL has the slight advantage of a wavetable header that can be placed on 330h or 300h.

I had to swap the Yamaha 704C+719 card for a normal Audician 32. The reason is that the GM part will play at the same time the MT-32 will. The GM part is not impressive due to only 1MB memory only, but it's not that bad either. Tell you the truth, sounds better than the first waveblasters by Creative.

Things to do/get:

- Buy 2 male SATA to floppy berg power cables;
- Replace the CPU heatsink fan with a quieter one;
- Get a reset button cable for the system;
- Get a second round IDE cable to connect CDROM and ZIP250 ATAPI devices;
- Get an external GM device (will probably settle with one only);
- Get a Voodoo 2 to play some Glide DOS capable games;

vetz wrote:

carlostex wrote:

Thanks for your post retrofanatic. Don't worry about "necropost" or whatever some people around here might think it's no good to post on a thread that is way old. I don't see it this way. Do you have relevant info to add to the discussion? Do it, i don't care the thread is 20 years old.

Agree on your view of resurrecting threads, shouldn't matter tbh.

You guys would have a completely different viewpoint if you'd ever spent time on forums configured that DIDN'T bump topics when there was a new reply. Yes you can almost always "view active topics" no matter where you go, but still. IMHO Necroing is the fail.

I personally am generally okay if it's anywhere from no time to two or three years old, but much beyond that I start getting edgy and recommend that you start a new thread. We had an eight year old bump this month, on a thread no one paid any attention to now or later, that one pissed me off. There was someone else recently who was complaining about being (IMHO rightfully) harrassed elsewhere for accidentally bumping a decades old thread that the original source of the thread probably turned out to be USENET (I think the new guy was posting onto some web copy of it.) Best netiquette in the world? Start a new thread, but reference the old ones you feel are relevant in links inside your thread. That makes me happiest.

But it's starting to feel like my point of view is being pushed into the minority, not sure why. I guess times change...

Anyhow, this is off-topic. 😀

The QDI board I have is the Titanium 1B+. I think it's the AT version of your board (though it does have an ATX power connector if you want to go hybrid). The problems I was having were related to the BIOS not holding the settings I was manually feeding it. I was especially concerned about the voltage being fed to my K6+ CPU in the event of a malfunction. Even after swapping batteries I was still having this issue. Is it a bad diode or something? The friend I got this board from had to OEM it at least once because of the same problem.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

The QDI board I have is the Titanium 1B+. I think it's the AT version of your board (though it does have an ATX power connector if you want to go hybrid). The problems I was having were related to the BIOS not holding the settings I was manually feeding it. I was especially concerned about the voltage being fed to my K6+ CPU in the event of a malfunction. Even after swapping batteries I was still having this issue. Is it a bad diode or something? The friend I got this board from had to OEM it at least once because of the same problem.

I have a QDI Titanium IB+ and it's my favority AT socket7 motherboard. I never had any issues like the one you describe. Actually this ATX i'm currently using seems to be less stable but it might be in a more "worn" state than my Tatanium IB+. If one has the proper tools, replacing components is a good idea IMO.

A small update:

- The system is temporarily equipped with the Innovation SSI-2001 replica, although this board makes more sense on a 286/386 system, i'm using it to test SID compatible games. Really a pity that the board had so little support;
- I finally got a second IDE round cable to connect the CDROM and ZIP drive;
- Also got the Y splitter cable to power the 2 Floppy drives;
- I have made now QEMM my primary memory manager. I still have EMM386 and HIMEM configurations, but QEMM is default; (special thanks to elianda)

- I should install a new CPU fan that will provide a much quieter operation on the next few days;
- Would like still to acquire a cheap Voodoo 2 to occupy one of my vacant PCI slots; (not a priority)
- An original Pro Audio Spectrum IS the sound card that this build really needs;

I've finally replaced the CPU fan!

Out with the old:

And a brand new super silent fan comes in:

Here it is running. I can guarentee it is virtually silent. In order to hear something you need to put your ear right next to it.

A little breakthough regarding this build is detailed in this post.

As some of you may know, my QDI Titanium IIB just went crazy.

So i had to find an alternative an in good time i did. Pictures to follow, stay tuned. 😀

I promised pictures. Here they are:

Yeah so i got an ASUS TX-97XE, Intel Pentium MMX 233, 128MB SDRAM, Matrox Millenium G220 and an ESS 1869 sound card.

I really like this board, the ATX case connectors placement really suck though, really prevent installing a long ISA card in there even a Sound Blaster Pro 2 won't fit, but at least when i thought my YMF 718 card couldn't be more useful it's the only card that fits in there.

The Matrox card had to be replaced by my S3 Trio 64V+, look at the pictures of Commander Keen, it is clearly visible which ones are Matrox and S3.

Looks great, welcome back to the K6-3 on Intel Triton club 😎

Very nice! I like the 4xISA slots 😁
As always I will recommend a riva128 for this, keen is perfect with one 😉

Any other advantages of Riva 128 vs Trio64 besides better image quality?

My Riva 128 PCI doesn't work with the DOS version of Ultima 7. It loads the intro fine, and crashes at the beginning of the game. Various other NV chipsets do this too, and on different motherboards. Of course, if you don't care for the game, then it's not an issue.

I'd take a Banshee or Voodoo 3 PCI over a Riva 128, or an S3 GX2 in PCI form for DOS. Every GX2 I've tried has significantly better image quality/ brightness than all the Trio64s I've tried.

I used to have a Voodoo 3 AGP in my SS7 build in Portugal and though the image quality was good and fast i couldn't get it to work properly with the game Virtual Pool in SVGA. The Trio64 has native support in that game, and this us one of the really enjoy playing.

But other than that i think that both the Banshee and the 3 Voodoo's are very good cards for DOS, and are the next thing in line right after the Trio.

carlostex wrote:

Any other advantages of Riva 128 vs Trio64 besides better image quality?

It's faster and has a VBE3.0 bios ... haven't faced a problem yet with it even with very old games - U7 runs without crashes for me and there is a patch that fixes the screen-shacking effect. (ofcourse "runs fine" really means it does not crash: we all know the game needs it's own build 🤣 🤣 🤣 )

I always used S3 cards until I found/tested the riva series... it's almost certain that tnt/tnt2 are the same in dos so if you have one just test and decide 😊