PCI divider is fixed at 2 so 83Mhz might well be a step too far for the PCI bus. I'm not sure if it overclocks the ISA bus too.

bjt wrote:

PCI divider is fixed at 2 so 83Mhz might well be a step too far for the PCI bus. I'm not sure if it overclocks the ISA bus too.

Either case 66x6 or 75x6 is more than enough speed. Did you notice any problems with your ISA cards with a 75MHz bus?

Seems fine, suprisingly... AWE64 Gold/GUS Classic/Voyetra MPU

bjt wrote:

Seems fine, suprisingly... AWE64 Gold/GUS Classic/Voyetra MPU

Awesome!! I'm not worried then!

Ordered one of these:

And note to self, while i'm in the UK, never order anything via eBay global shipping program. The Zip drive and the TEAC 5.25 inch floppy drive have arrived England a week ago and haven't been delivered yet. Royal Mail is awesome, but these other carriers...

I don't like PBI/global shipping program much. 30 dollars to ship a small 10 dollar PCI card is a bit much. Sometimes they're the only option too, since other sellers don't always have the items I want, or they simply don't ship to Norway. The item must be something I really want for me to even consider buying from USA these days. Global shipping program is just too expensive (Buying from Europe, China, and Australia is much cheaper in my experience).

carlostex wrote:

And note to self, while i'm in the UK, never order anything via eBay global shipping program. The Zip drive and the TEAC 5.25 inch floppy drive have arrived England a week ago and haven't been delivered yet. Royal Mail is awesome, but these other carriers...

Agreed!

And they don't take PO boxes. I tried to order this AT to ATX power adapter with -5V conversion and it ended in me receiving a "no pay" strike because we couldn't agree on posting. The article said nothing about not shipping to PO and the seller wouldn't ship it without the eBay shipping program 🙁

Ya the global shipping program has tested my patience a couple times...first time I won a Voodoo 2 card and had to drive to a truck depot to pick it up because they would not deliver to my box number. Reason is is that Pitney bowes...The 3rd party mail carrier has got the exclusive rights to the global shipping program over a lot of traditional mail services and those mail services as a result will not allow Pitney bowes to deliver through 'their' mailboxes and post offices...Pitney bowes is affiliated with some logistic companies and depends on them and local courier services to get it to a physical address...no wonder it costs so much...it's ridiculous IMO. Every time I order with the global shipping program now I have to drive all the way across the city to the truck depot where they will hold it. At first I wasn't even contacted by the truck company and if I didn't call to find out where my package was, they would have sent it back within 2 days...I almost lost my Voodoo 2 card...and as mentioned by a couple of you here on vogons..they do not even specify that they do not ship to a Po Box in the auction.

Also, all shipping/handling/customs charges are strictly non-refundable under the GSP, even if you raise a dispute and it is found in your favour.

CarlosTex: Are you finding it easier or harder to source parts in the UK than at home?

Most of the UK carriers are OK if you are confident of being around to receive delivery. However, if you're not around it can become a problem. Some of their depots are in the middle of nowhere. In this situation Royal Mail is great because their depots are convenient for collection and they can also deliver to the local Post Office for a small fee.

However Royal Mail gets expensive for heavy stuff and many people use one of the low-cost domestic carriers instead e.g. Hermes or Collect+. These guys are famous for leaving parcels in wheely bins (which then get emptied), throwing them over fences, etc.

When i was in Portugal i had no problem with the GSP. Mainly because when the stuff arrived Portugal it is delivery by express or EMS. I guess they check too if the value is above what must be taxed for custom charges. So i never had anything via GSP stopping on customs.

bjt, to answer your question here on the UK is easier definetely there's loads of stuff i can order with free shipping which is great. I even got my second MT-32 for a very good price! Actually the MT-32 was delivered at by hermes courier at 8pm. Needless to say that the lady that delivered was wearing pajamas. OK, this was a new experience for me... I thought i had seen everything when searching for a new apartment i saw a carpeted bathroom...

All in all here in England stuff is great, it's just this one experience with GSP here that hasn't worked out, tracking says out for delivery since the 3rd and it hasn't arrived yet. Finding a job that suits me has been difficult too, i mean i didn't come to live here to work at Tesco's. Not that there's anything wrong with it but... leaving my country and family behind gotta mean something more.

Sorry to hear about the job search. I don't know the South Coast at all but if it's anything like where I am good employment isn't easy to come by.

FInally some stuff arrived and i was able to move this build further.

Booted fine:

The 4GB Transcend branded CF card was a pain. My motherboard seemed to be unable to find MBR and boot, but some tinkering and patience finally paid off:

Then the scary part flashing the board with improved BIOS. Usually i'm not scared of flashing BIOS'es but this one has a surface mounted PLCC type EEPROM. But all went well and i could now install a K6+ CPU:

Then my favourite bit, installing the sound cards, Gravis Ultrasound Classic, Pro Audio Spectrum Plus, AWE64 Gold and the Yamaha YMF704C/719 card.

The Yamaha card was way to noisy until after a lot of head scratching i found out that the crappy Ymersion 3D stuff was on. So i disabled that crap and now the card actually sounds pretty good. Really good.

Now the PAS card is weird. I can't get it to work well alongside the other cards. Sometimes i can get PCM to work, other times i can only get FM. Most of the times FM is silent. It's weird because only the native PAS part is active, but i guess that the card still fights for other resources. I might try to remove all other cards from the system. Thinking about it i used the PAS16 drivers from VogonsDrivers, i wonder if there are more suitable drivers for the Pro Audio Spectrum Plus? I couldn't find anything specific for this particular card...

Anyway all other cards work just great all together. The SB16 part on the AWE64 is actually disabled, only the EMU8000 synth is to use anyway. The PAS Plus card was supposed to be a temporary thing anyway. What i really want there is the original 8bit dual OPL2 Pro Audio Spectrum. I have a feeling this card will be less of a hassle really. Plus its alot more usable. I love some dual OPL2 renditions on some games.

All in all everything is going well. This system can be very fast and very slow. I could actually make it score 6.8 on 3D Bench. I haven't tried speed sensitive games yet, but i noticed there's tons of diferent speeds i can get with this system.

I'd turn this thing into a early 3D machine.

armankordi wrote:

I'd turn this thing into a early 3D machine.

I will try to find a Voodoo 2 for some early 3DFX DOS games i actually enjoyed playing back in the day. But this is an all rounder DOS machine.

I let my K6-III+ boot at full Speed 400Mz (6x66).
so if I boot Dos, I clock it down to 133(2x66) and if i boot win95 I do not clock it down.

OK, i've been trying to get that Pro Audio Spectrum Plus working, so i tried different MVSOUND.SYS and PAS.EXE versions. Still the same, i can get PCM to work but somehow the OPL3 chip is silent. Tried different IRQ and DMA configurations and it's still the same. There was a point where i could get OPL3 to work but PCM was not. Don't remember exactly what i did... I'm gonna try and screw around with the jumpers on the card, although it seems these are related to the SB part of the PAS which i don't need and i disabled.

I think i'm done with this Pro Audio Spectrum card. Some games i can get to work, others don't work at all. The funniest thing is that for some weird reason i have to run a Microprose game like F-15 Strike Eagle III or Fleet Defender for the card to be properly working with other games.

For instance, after boot i load my mixer settings by typing PAS F5. Then i go to setup Warcraft 2 and the setup program detects the Pro Audio Spectrum with no problems but when i do the test there's no sound at all. Exit and go to Doom. There's no FM music and no PCM, no matter how loud i set the card and my speakers to. So i got to my flight games folder and launch F-15. Setup detects the card fine, i launch the game and not only i hear FM music but PCM as well, loud and clear. So i exit that game and go back to Warcraft 2. Setup detects the card again and i get FM music and on the PCM test i hear: "Your sound card works perfectly". So i try more games, i go to Doom and it works now both FM and PCM. I go to Raptor Call of the Shadows and now it works too.

What the hell is the matter with that card? I have no idea what the Microprose games do but the card won't give any sound at all if i don't run a Microprose game first.

Weirder is that if i try to run Duke Nukem 3D it tanks the PCM portion of the card, it won't work anymore until i reboot. I even try to run F-15 again which gives FM sound but now the PCM part starts popping during the digitized speech parts.

I think the card doesn't get along with the YMF card at all, the YMF card will have its SB Pro PCM distorted if MVSOUND.SYS is present. If i rem MVSOUND.SYS out the YMF card now plays great. I have the Thunderboard chip disabled on the PAS but still it seems the PAS still fights for SB resources.
I tried removing the YMF card from the system but still the PAS native part keeps with the same behaviour.

FYI, I came across this FAQ for the PAS Plus describing many of the issues that you're having - thought it might be useful if you haven't read it:

I have a PAS Plus too, but haven't had the time to install and test it yet.

Thanks for all the info and the document.

Unfortunately my problem seems to go past the PAS card. The motherboard doesn't seem to be that stable. It might be due to the fact i'm using a beta BIOS that gives support to AMD K6+ CPU's.

Sometimes if i try to tamper with caches, some games give like very low pitched FM sound on the YMF card and distorted PCM. What's weird is that a software or even hardware reset does not fix the issue but a CMOS reset does. Weirder is that i can fix it by running SETUPSA manually which will bring the PCM up and running again. FM keeps silent, but if i run a MIcroprose game, like Fleet Defender, FM sound will kick in again. As stupid and random as this sounds it works, and i'm still baffled by it.

Today i got a memory allocation error screen and the whole system froze, this gives me something to think that maybe Write Allocation feature of the K6 is not working properly or giving random problems with this motherboard. I already contacted Jan Steunebrink who made the beta BIOS and i already sent him some data to investigate.

In another note, it would be nice to get the specific version of MVSOUND.SYS for the Pro Audio SPectrum Plus. I have a feeling that even version 3.23 might be too new.

^^ 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.