Looking good ! what games will you be playing ?

My Pentium game rig is also a 233MMX on an Asus TXP4 - very satisfied with it so far, has worked flawlessly.

I would suggest removing extra 64Mb of RAM, the 430TX chipset can't cache more than 64Mb. The system will run significantly faster!

Either that, or get a K6+ chip with integrated L2 cache to get around the caching limits.

Looking good ! what games will you be playing ?

Old point n' click adventures, DOS glide games, X Wing/Tie fighter 😀 May even play some 640x480 windows games e.g. Starcraft.

I would suggest removing extra 64Mb of RAM, the 430TX chipset can't cache more than 64Mb. The system will run significantly faster!

I knew the TX chipset had this limit, but the bottom 64MB is still cached isn't it? I was under the impression that in DOS it would be OK cause allocations were bottom-up and no games were likely to go above 64MB.

I read that Windows uses top-down allocation so the OS will be uncached but apps will likely be allocated in the bottom 64MB (cached) area. Also uncached memory is still much faster than virtual memory, right?

Let me know if I'm wrong about any of this stuff as I am all for a speedup 😀

You do not need more than 64MB in such a machine. I suggest you remove it and be free of any kind of slow downs.
A K6+ is also awesome and your motherboard supports it with a custom bios that you can acquire here: http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/k6plus.htm

Bit of an update, the project is nearly finished now...

- Reduced RAM to 64MB
- Installed Win98SE
- Killed the heads on the floppy drive with some mouldy disks out of the garage, luckily I had another drive to hand
- Replaced noisy 7200rpm drive with near-silent 4200rpm laptop drive
- Replaced keyboard & mouse with some nicer ones (clicky Viglen keyboard, Logitech 2-button PS/2 mouse)
- Got hold of a Gravis joystick and gamepad

I've always thought it would be nice to have a quiet PC but it's difficult with modern CPUs and performance graphics cards. With this machine it's a lot easier as nothing really puts out much heat. The CPU fan is downvolted to 7v and with the 2.5 hard drive, the only noise is from the PSU fan.

Pics!

Still waiting for the XR385 to arrive, it's the last piece of the puzzle.

Well the XR385 arrived from China! It sounds awesome in Duke 3D, unfortunately I got a hanging note in the second level 🙁 Not entirely unexpected. The daughterboard connector on the SB16 is basically useless because of this, unless you have a noisy DSP 4.05 card...

The Vibra 16S has low noise, real OPL3 and great compatibility so I'd like to keep it and get a second card to act as MPU-401 host only. The intelligent-mode MPU cards are seem both rare and expensive on eBay. Hopefully I can find another card which can be configured not to clash with the Vibra.

Pics!

Wow, you've got some nice progress out there! Do you mind launching SpeedSys 4.7 in pure DOS? Your benchmark result would be useful for Vogons Wiki!

Do you mind launching SpeedSys 4.7 in pure DOS? Your benchmark result would be useful for Vogons Wiki!

Will do! Got hold of a YMF-718 based card courtesy of a very fast seller on eBay.

Strange that it has a wavetable sticker when this card only has OPL3. Maybe it originally came an the OPL4 daughterboard.

I'm planning to use this as host for the XR385 and maybe to connect an MT-32 in future, and carry on using the SB16 for wave/opl/joystick.

This card only has a crappy XG softsynth included with the drivers. And you will not be able to attach the XR385 by means other than building your own cable, because it's not big enough to host normal DBs. Should have done a forum search beforehand 😉

This particular card is wider, and should take any Daughterboard like that. It was on my ebay watch list, not anymore.

I found (modern) laptop harddrives to be the cause of annoying sound precaching slowdowns, and avoid them since.

Pretty nifty, very fine card then. Now the question is why they couldn't make all of them like that...

I found (modern) laptop harddrives to be the cause of annoying sound precaching slowdowns, and avoid them since.

Might be due to their power saving functions e.g. drive unloading heads or spinning down? On this one I wasn't able to disable power saving completely, but I could turn it down to its minimum level (using Hitachi Feature Tool).

Nice build!

Cheap 15-year matured beige AT case (razor-sharp edges)

Indeed, gotta love the retro feeling of having your hands cut open by just casually brushing against the case edges 😀 .. not!

Pretty nifty, very fine card then. Now the question is why they couldn't make all of them like that...

Unfortunately it looks like the card may be faulty. At first I couldn't get any output at all, but it seems it's actually just extremely quiet. I have to turn my speakers up to full to hear anything in either DOS or Windows. The speaker out is slightly louder than the line out but both are still ridiculously quiet, even with the mixer set to max.

Probably just the amp disabled, which is actually a good thing with these cards. But if you want to have it louder nonetheless just set the jumper to on...

This card has seperate line & speaker outs so no jumper. Very very quiet in both and I can't get anything through the wavetable header either, so back to the drawing board. Here's the speedsys results:

Regarding the soundcard, that is strange...
Might be worth a try to run it with my OPL3SA.INI.
Which holds the DOS driver configuration.
uploaded here: The Yamaha OPL YMF718-S chipset.