alexanrs wrote:

AFAIK the lower the resistance for the mixer, the less sensitive to noise it will be, but the load on the outputs will be lower. I used 10kOhm resistors in my mixer, which is a bit noisier than I'd like but useable, but I've seen projects around the internet using 1kOhm resistors. Also, if all your cards have amplified outputs, they can probably handle lower impedances better. But for two cards on the same computer running a P2-P2 cable from the PCI card's line out to the ISA's line in (and unmuting the line in in the card's mixer) works well.

I think I'll try the passive mixer, as that'll let me deactivate the AWE64 in Windows. If it doesn't work well enough, I'll go with the other suggestion. Putting together that mixer won't take long at all, doesn't really matter if it turns out to be for nothing 😀

The AWE64 doesn't have an amplified output. However, I think it's better to use the line out signal in any case, as line levels and related impedances are somewhat standardized if I've understood it right.

if your PSU and cooling is up to it, I would swap out the Athlon 1200 with a 1400, not a big increase but you may as well get that extra bit of power. For the GPU I would go with that Geforce4, the Geforce5 is more capable, but a bit more power hungry (and that Athlon isn't on a power consumption diet as it is)

kaputnik wrote:

I think I'll try the passive mixer, as that'll let me deactivate the AWE64 in Windows. If it doesn't work well enough, I'll go with the other suggestion. Putting together that mixer won't take long at all, doesn't really matter if it turns out to be for nothing 😀

The AWE64 doesn't have an amplified output. However, I think it's better to use the line out signal in any case, as line levels and related impedances are somewhat standardized if I've understood it right.

Doesn't it have a green "Line Out" and a black "Speaker Out"? At least I think my AWE64 Value has (its stored now and I'm about to get out of the house), and the speaker out is amplified. That being said, its a bit hit and miss: I have sound cards that work perfectly when the Line Out is connected to the mixer and other that behave in weird ways... I have one ESS card that seems to lose all bass when I plug the line out to the mixer, but sounds fine with the speaker out, and anoter card (Aztech? can't really remember which card) that works fine if I set the volume in the mixer up to ~70%, but if I raise a singe notch above a certain level it all becomes a buzzing noise... and, once again, everything works well if I plug the amplified output instead.

Darkman wrote:

if your PSU and cooling is up to it, I would swap out the Athlon 1200 with a 1400, not a big increase but you may as well get that extra bit of power. For the GPU I would go with that Geforce4, the Geforce5 is more capable, but a bit more power hungry (and that Athlon isn't on a power consumption diet as it is)

Looking to replace that Athlon with a late PIII once I get hold of a 440BX/Socket 370 mobo, so there would be no real point in doing that 😀

alexanrs wrote:

kaputnik wrote:

I think I'll try the passive mixer, as that'll let me deactivate the AWE64 in Windows. If it doesn't work well enough, I'll go with the other suggestion. Putting together that mixer won't take long at all, doesn't really matter if it turns out to be for nothing 😀

The AWE64 doesn't have an amplified output. However, I think it's better to use the line out signal in any case, as line levels and related impedances are somewhat standardized if I've understood it right.

Doesn't it have a green "Line Out" and a black "Speaker Out"? At least I think my AWE64 Value has (its stored now and I'm about to get out of the house), and the speaker out is amplified. That being said, its a bit hit and miss: I have sound cards that work perfectly when the Line Out is connected to the mixer and other that behave in weird ways... I have one ESS card that seems to lose all bass when I plug the line out to the mixer, but sounds fine with the speaker out, and anoter card (Aztech? can't really remember which card) that works fine if I set the volume in the mixer up to ~70%, but if I raise a singe notch above a certain level it all becomes a buzzing noise... and, once again, everything works well if I plug the amplified output instead.

Nope, the Awe64 Gold only has one output, a line out one with RCA connectors. No amplified speaker out. The 3.5mm jacks are line in and mic in. Here's how it looks.

Put together a passive mixer now anyways, went with 2k2 ohm resistors. Testing it tomorrow, time for some sleep now 😀

kaputnik wrote:

If there's no risk for hardware conflicts or other drawbacks, and W98SE generally handles multiple sound cards well, it's hard to argue - yeah, why not? It might be a bit inconvenient to move the audio plug every time I want to use the other sound card, but then again, it's easy enough to solder together some kind of switch box if it becomes annoying.

Conflicts: No DMA conflicts (PCI cards don't use ISA-DMA), shouldn't have IO-port conflicts (ports can be configured for both cards), and IRQ-conflicts can be worked around (DOS-games prefer IRQ 5 or 7, in Windows it doesn't matter. Since you can probably disable the serial and parallel ports of the mainboard there should be enough IRQ's anyway.).
I don't know how well W98 handles multiple sound cards, but you could as well disable the AWE64 in Windows (you mention this in a later thread) or uninstall the driver completely. If you run DOS games in Windows those can still access the AWE64 directly. In DOS I just wouldn't install the drivers for the PCI sound card, which are only needed for ISA-SB emulation.

idspispopd wrote:

I don't know how well W98 handles multiple sound cards, but you could as well disable the AWE64 in Windows (you mention this in a later thread) or uninstall the driver completely. If you run DOS games in Windows those can still access the AWE64 directly. In DOS I just wouldn't install the drivers for the PCI sound card, which are only needed for ISA-SB emulation.

You need the AWE64 drivers installed for DOS games to be able to access the card inside Windows.

Been out for a few beers tonight, but not before getting everything up and running! Had some initial problems getting sound from the Live card, but that was just a question of using a wdm driver instead of the vxd driver found on Creative's support page.

The passive mixer cable works like a charm, at least my untrained ears can't hear any distortion. Had to knock up the active speaker's volume a bit, but that is of course as expected when introducing additional impedance between source and load.

Set the SB Live as preferred sound device in Windows, and checked the "Use only preferred devices" checkbox. No need to completely disable the Awe64 in Windows. Only loading the Awe64 driver in DOS. Seems to be enough, everything is working perfectly so far 😀

Onto restoring my old Voodoo 1 card to working order tomorrow! It's a Diamond Monster 3D, almost worth the effort 😀

Turned out the Chaintech 7AJA2 board in the DOS monster supports 133MHz FSB Athlon XP's with the latest BIOS, so decided to upgrade from the original Thunderbird 1200. Got myself a Thoroughbred 2400+ (couldn't justify paying almost 10 times more for a 2600+, which would be the fastest possible CPU), and managed to find the right BIOS image on archive.org, Had some trouble getting it to run at full speed at first, until I found the completely undocumented 100/133 MHz FSB selection jumper. Moved away from my plans to change platform to Socket370/late Pentium III since then, there's just no way I'll get even close to the same performance with that configuration, the possible compatibility gains are just not worth the performance losses.

Also replaced the broken VGA connector on my Voodoo 1 card, and put it in the compatible rig. Even though I found another pass through cable in my stashes, I built a new one, the one I found had a very noticeable impact on image quality.

The next project will be recapping a Chieftec HPC-360-202 PSU for the monster rig, really want some more margins on the +5v rail. Looks like a very well made PSU to me, the capacitor choice excepted. Also thinking of recapping the 7AJA2 mobo while I'm at it. Any general opinions on the NKCON and D.S brands found on that board?

Updated the OP to reflect the changes.