I like your PIII system. When the powerleap tualatin adapter first came out I tried to take my Abit BF6 PIII system to it maximum potential. In theory it should have made a pretty good machine, but in reality my system became somewhat unstable. I just ended up selling the adapter and getting an i815 based motherboard instead. It is really too bad, because I liked the BX chipset much better. I guess perhaps as my powerleap adapter was the very first revision, it was a little buggy.

Does your system have any options to run the FSB at 133MHzÉ
My BF6 did, but the stupid AGP divider was always a problem. I should have just said screw it and used PCI instead. AGP 1X and 2X were highly overrated anyway.

samudra wrote:

My retro rig: […]
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My retro rig:

Win Tech MV035 Rev. F
AMD 5x85 @ 133mhz
64MB FPM RAM (Siemens)
Diamond Stealth 32 (Tseng ET4000/W32P) 1MB DRAM
Adaptec AHA-2842A
Prolan EN-4300 VLB NIC
Quantum ATLAS II 4550S (4GB) (SCSI)
Plextor 40x CD-Rom (SCSI)
Gravis Ultrasound Max (1MB)
Soundblaster 16 (CT2230) + Yamaha DB-60XG
Roland LAPC-I
Terratec Gold 16/96 (ESS 1868)
3,5 + 5,25 inch floppy drives
Goldstar IO card
Modded SNES gamepad on LPT1

All built into a case designed by Luigi Colani. Vobis (German PC company) sold PCs in cases designed by this man. I can't find a picture of the case I have unfortunately. It is very rounded and organic looking (as are all his designs).

My main rig is also quite old. Feel the need to upgrade soon though with all that HD video content out there.

Asus P2B-F
Powerleap PL-iP3/T running a Pentium III Tualatin @ 1.4ghz
3x 256SDRAM + 1x 128SDRAM PC100
1x 120GB WD (IDE) + 1x 120GB Maxtor (IDE)
Geforce 6200 256MB (Haha!)
Promise Ultra133 TX2
Tekram DC-390F
SoundBlaster Live! Gold
3Com Etherlink XL 10/100
NEC USB 2.0 addon card
Plextor 32x CD-Rom (SCSI)
Plexwriter 12/4/32 (SCSI)
Creative 5x DVD-Rom (IDE)
3,5 inch floppy drive
500GB Western Digital Elements (USB)

Haven't been on this site a long time and although I had the idea of typing up my specs multiple times never took the time to do so.

If you find the specs interesting, thank Amigaz; he reminded me indrectly again of this great forum, hehe.

😉

Great assembly indeed!

I wondered about the Terratec Gold 16/96 - do you use it for SoundblasterPro emulation?
I ask because I own such a card myself. As terratec cards mostly have a better sound quality, I wanted to use it to replace my SB16 Vibra card. But I got difficulties with an attached Roland daughterboard. It simply didn't work - no midi sound (in DOS 6.2) for what reason ever.

As you know, the Gold 16/96 is a pnp card, but I would suggest that your 486board isn't pnp, so you might use ESCFG.EXE to configure it. Does it work for you with a midi-daughterboard attached (i.e. with GM sound in games)? How?

Getting the terratec working with an attached midi board would be a great help for me, as this is one of the few "all-in-one" cards that would fit in my small case. ( my little Midi box )

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I like your PIII system. When the powerleap tualatin adapter first came out I tried to take my Abit BF6 PIII system to it maximum potential. In theory it should have made a pretty good machine, but in reality my system became somewhat unstable. I just ended up selling the adapter and getting an i815 based motherboard instead. It is really too bad, because I liked the BX chipset much better. I guess perhaps as my powerleap adapter was the very first revision, it was a little buggy.

Does your system have any options to run the FSB at 133MHzÉ
My BF6 did, but the stupid AGP divider was always a problem. I should have just said screw it and used PCI instead. AGP 1X and 2X were highly overrated anyway.

Yes, it has actually. The manual shows jumper settings all the way up to a 150mhz FSB.

I have never tried it (I don't have PC133 SDRAM laying around), but on the P2B the AGP speed will be a problem also.

There is only an option to run the AGP at 1:1 (yeah right!) or 2:3 of the FSB. That would surely break it.

The only problem I had with the PL-iP3/T is that Dell apparently has these in OEM form for their own systems and this includes a non standard ATX cable (!). For some reason their systems use exactly the same ATX plug, but the wiring is different.

I hooked it up and it didn't boot. Looked up the ATX pinout and was really glad nothing blew up when I saw how weird their pinout is compared to the standard ATX, haha!

I ended up making my own cable.

I also replaced the "Powerleap" fan with a Spire one that is more silent.

Silent Loon wrote:

Great assembly indeed! […]
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Great assembly indeed!

I wondered about the Terratec Gold 16/96 - do you use it for SoundblasterPro emulation?
I ask because I own such a card myself. As terratec cards mostly have a better sound quality, I wanted to use it to replace my SB16 Vibra card. But I got difficulties with an attached Roland daughterboard. It simply didn't work - no midi sound (in DOS 6.2) for what reason ever.

As you know, the Gold 16/96 is a pnp card, but I would suggest that your 486board isn't pnp, so you might use ESCFG.EXE to configure it. Does it work for you with a midi-daughterboard attached (i.e. with GM sound in games)? How?

Getting the terratec working with an attached midi board would be a great help for me, as this is one of the few "all-in-one" cards that would fit in my small case. ( my little Midi box )

Yes, you have grasped me perfectly.

The motherboard I use has an insane amount of 16-bit ISA slots (8x!) leaving me with one empty slot even with everything I want in there.

I thought of two options:

1) Put in a SB Pro 2 I have laying around.
This would give me a big headache, because the SB Pro is fully jumpered. I would have to use seriously unorthodox settings to have it run in such a full case without conflict making it pretty much unusable.

I could solder switches to the jumpers, but then still it would be a headache. It would mean making different startup configurations for the SB Pro and SB16 and switches connected to the SB16 jumpers to basically switch their ports around.

I can't even remember any SB Pro only games I want to play.

So...

2) Add the Terratec.
Not only is this card fully (100%!) software configurable and SB Pro compatible, it has a wavetable header also!

The choice was easily made.

I seriously didn't know it was a PnP card, haha! I thought it was just software configurable like the GUS MAX.

Have used a PnP IO card once and that was a nightmare on my non PnP system, so since this card works so perfectly I never considered it being PnP.

The DB-60XG daughterboard I have works perfectly on the 16/96. I did some experimenting to see if there were differences running it on the SB-16 or 16/96 and it never gave me problems.

What I do is simpy run ESCFG and enable the MPU and choose a MIDI port (330h).

You say it doesn't work in DOS (I run it only DOS btw), it does work in Windows? Do other MIDI solutions work on the same port in the same system?

Amigaz wrote:

😉

Hehe.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I like your PIII system. When the powerleap tualatin adapter first came out I tried to take my Abit BF6 PIII system to it maximum potential. In theory it should have made a pretty good machine, but in reality my system became somewhat unstable. I just ended up selling the adapter and getting an i815 based motherboard instead. It is really too bad, because I liked the BX chipset much better. I guess perhaps as my powerleap adapter was the very first revision, it was a little buggy.

I have a Upgradeware Slot-T in my Abit BF6 right now. A P3-S 1400 resides in it. And yeah, I too have stability problems, even just at 133/1400. The board itself doesn't seem to like either the FSB clock or perhaps even the CPU clock (EMI/RFI?). It could also be a limitation of the Slot-T, I suppose. Sometimes it works sometimes it reboots.

Could also be capacitors going bad. Every Abit from those days had bad caps. In fact, I've replaced about 6 bursted caps on my BF6 (it was still working even with them tho!) with some that looked ok from a dead Abit BX133. Would be cool to replace all the caps with aluminum solid capacitors. 😀 I've seen about 5 boards with bad caps originating from those years.

http://www.badcaps.net/ (hmm, I think I'll buy that BE6-II kit cuz it's the same board as the BF6 )

GeForce cards don't seem to mind the high AGP speed very much. Voodoo5 doesn't care either. Radeons definitely do, however.

samudra wrote:

What I do is simpy run ESCFG and enable the MPU and choose a MIDI port (330h).

You say it doesn't work in DOS (I run it only DOS btw), it does work in Windows? Do other MIDI solutions work on the same port in the same system?

Well that's what I did too. And I added this line to the autoexec.bat:

C:\GOLD1696\ESSCFG.EXE /A:220 /I:7 /D:1 /E:3 /B:330 /J:E

Annything wrong with this?

Hoever I tested the card with a dos midi file player, called MEGAMID, which you possibly know
(if not: http://home.att.net/~short.stop/freesoft/sound.htm - you have to scroll down a little, it's also good to compare the sound quality of different midi daughterboards).
It should work with every card able to play midi sound, but it didn't work with the 16/96 and an attached Roland SCB-7 daughterboard.
I didn't test it in Windows, I just asked, because some cards have configuration programs, that create a little configuration file when installed in windows, and later use / need this in DOS. So if you've never installed the card in windows, there's no config. file and the card won't find the settings. But that doesn't seem to be the case with this card...
By the way: SoundblasterPro and Adlib emulation work without problems.
Could the midi port be defective?
Anyway thanks for the information, I think I will give the terratec card a second try.

Hmm, perhaps. Mine are a bit different (mind I use the unorthodox settings to have it not interfere with my preferred cards).

ESSCFG.EXE /A:250 /I:10 /D:0 /E:0 /B:300 /J:d

I run it at 300 because I have a LAPC-I on 330, but 330 works also (I tried this once). Joypad support disabled because it is unused. I used a small "d" because /? does not show capital letters, but maybe that doesn't matter.

Yes, Megamid is great. I use it to play all my midi files. What exactly does happen when you run Megamid with the proper address indicated? You mention there is no sound ever in DOS, but what error messages do you get? None?

Did you check the mixer volumes of the card? Maybe the output volume of "midi" is 0, haha!

Or perhaps it is broken, I actually wrote that down in my first message but I wasn't convinced.

I have a Upgradeware Slot-T in my Abit BF6 right now. A P3-S 1400 resides in it. And yeah, I too have stability problems, even just at 133/1400. The board itself doesn't seem to like either the FSB clock or perhaps even the CPU clock (EMI/RFI?). It could also be a limitation of the Slot-T, I suppose. Sometimes it works sometimes it reboots.

No, I don't think it's the bus speed causing the problem. I had a 1.2GHz celeron installed on my tualatin adapter. That one used the 100MHz FSB. I wanted to upgrade to a PIII-S, but since the board was unstable with 100MHz I never bothered.

...and yes, Abit boards definetly had issues with bad capacitors. I think just about every one I had blew the caps at some point or another. I'm still really cautious about buying motherboards, because I heard that these defective capacitors are still in circulation. It would be interesting to replace them with the "solid state" capacitors to see what happens. I may be able to get my BF6 back, so I may try it later.

samudra wrote:

Yes, Megamid is great. I use it to play all my midi files. What exactly does happen when you run Megamid with the proper address indicated? You mention there is no sound ever in DOS, but what error messages do you get? None?

Did you check the mixer volumes of the card? Maybe the output volume of "midi" is 0, haha!

No error message. Megamid seems to play the midifiles (as you can see its graphical animation) but you can't hear them.
There is sound in DOS - but only the Soundblaster and FM emulation.
I checked the volume by using the ESSVOL program and apart of the fact that there is no "midi slider" - I think its called "synthesizer" instead - it seems to be okay.
I'm at a loss somehow, because I can not imagine that only the waveblaster output is broken (as it should be part of the ESS chip).
Which lines in your config.sys and autoexec.bat refer to the GOLD 16/96?

Anonymous Coward wrote:

Does your system have any options to run the FSB at 133MHzÉ
My BF6 did, but the stupid AGP divider was always a problem. I should have just said screw it and used PCI instead. AGP 1X and 2X were highly overrated anyway.

"Luck" has it I found a PC133 SIMM saturday on a fleamarket so I did some testing.

I can get the system only up to 120mhz FSB with the SIMM. Anything higher and the system turns on, but there is no image. I tried a PCI card instead of AGP, but no dice. I also tried feeding the Tualatin a bit more power, but that also didn't work.

So, that's that. Maybe it is the board, maybe it is the ram, maybe it is the IP3T. I never bought PC133 because I don't want to invest in it for an experiment that isn't likely to work. This was a cheap (2 Euro) way to bring some closure and add 256MB extra guaranteed anyway.

The system is running now at 112mhz FSB, with 4x 256MB and the Tualatin @ 1568mhz .

Silent Loon wrote:

No error message. Megamid seems to play the midifiles (as you can see its graphical animation) but you can't hear them. There i […]
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No error message. Megamid seems to play the midifiles (as you can see its graphical animation) but you can't hear them.
There is sound in DOS - but only the Soundblaster and FM emulation.
I checked the volume by using the ESSVOL program and apart of the fact that there is no "midi slider" - I think its called "synthesizer" instead - it seems to be okay.
I'm at a loss somehow, because I can not imagine that only the waveblaster output is broken (as it should be part of the ESS chip).
Which lines in your config.sys and autoexec.bat refer to the GOLD 16/96?

Only the one line I quoted. It can be run from any batch file, there are no config.sys drivers.

Try setting all the volume options using the essvol program at maximum and see what happens. That way you don't have to guess which is which and will be fully sure that is not the problem.

samudra wrote:

Try setting all the volume options using the essvol program at maximum and see what happens. That way you don't have to guess which is which and will be fully sure that is not the problem.

That was the solution! The right volume setting for the wavetable card was the "AuxB" option; I had overseen this! Thank you very much!

Yes, that's the ticket!

I think it is the basis of this solution that is important.

Always remember assumption and "knowing you have found the truth" in one area prevents one to search further.

Actually starting from scratch, forgetting everything one knows, sheds new light on a lot of things.

I think the problem you are having is that you are actually running the CPU way out of spec. If your CPU is locked with 14X multiplier then you'll end up with more than 1800MHz on a 133MHz FSB. If you are serious about running 133MHz FSB you should really use a slower tualatin Celeron or a PIII-S.

You must be correct.

I unfortunately did not try it out with my sights set on running the system on 133mhz. The Tualatin I want to use no matter what, I don't want to use a slower one or buy another cpu. This severely limited the outcome.

On the subject of locked multipliers, how is a slower cpu going to help? If a cpu is locked and n x 100 is the standard frequency it runs at then n x 133 is always going to be 33 times out of spec.

Having a slower CPU can help, because it is very likely that they are capable of more than whatever intel locked them at. It is quite possible that all PIII-S and Celeron-T CPUs are capable of 1.4GHz since they are a late generation PIII with very small dies. However, I would guess that it would be pretty difficult to push any Tualatin farther than 1.5GHz without a pretty hardcore cooling system. If you had a 1.1GHz Celeron-T, overclocking using the 133MHz FSB you would still be in a reasonable speed range, where if you do the same on a Celeron-T with 14X multiplier you are looking at more than 1.8GHz which is pretty ridiculous. The reason for overclocking a Celeron rather than just going with a PIII-S is that they are much cheaper and easier to find.

Aha, so that is the case as well with that generation.

I bought the Powerleap adapter as a whole with the cpu and never put thought in it.

Maybe if one of those slower ships comes in my way I'll pick one up.

I snapped some pics of my box to illustrate my previous description and of the Vesa Local Bus network card since it is so rare. I don't think there is another pic on the web of this particular card.

Index:
http://www.imagebam.com/gallery/dfdda2fe0db7f … 474e3b3c7c2bdb/