update news...

"ANOTHER -- 😦 -- TWO OTHER MONSTERS HAVE ARRIVED!"

One Monster Sound MX300 came today in a neat little white box package. Very clean and in good form. Very cheap too at $5 ($14 total shipping from Northport, NY). Great item, great seller.

Along with the former Monster, a Monster 3D II 12MB came in an, um..., envelope, from Berlin. I have to thank everyone in the postage chain who managed to pass it on in a single piece. The card is clean, but not as straight as i would like it to be. Communication with seller did not go too well. Still i'm thankful for the card to come at all.

Anyway both cards are plugged in my P3-450 PC and detected just fine, the V2 card is also finely passing-through the video signal. After i'm done with a couple of drivers i will test it.

I have also won a Roland MT-32, though not "mint" (cracked LCD cover plastic--otherwise looks good) for AU$51 (~US$39), but shipping cost me almost the same as the unit 🙁 (i thought it'd be cheaper shipping from a neighbor country).

5u3 wrote:

I like your approach with the unlocked P2. Please report on how it works out.

Unfortunately the Singaporean seller hasn't replied back to me since i asked for invoice two weeks ago. However at this time i'm not so sure about the effectiveness of an underclocked P2 with disabled L1 cache in real-world game apps as discussed in this page.

A 133MHz-FSB Pentium III (600MHz-1GHz+) system with three-slots ISA mobo + SoftBIOS (at least 66MHz-133MHz FSB, lockable ISA, PCI and AGP clock) + Moslo Deluxe looks like a better choice, even with tricky old games like WC2. If such motherboard didn't exist i'd drop the SoftBIOS for 2-3 ISA slots. If you have any recommendation i'll be glad to listen.

Finally, since Roland SCD-15 / SCB-55 seemed to be rare and SC-55/MkII's are more expensive than MT-32's, at this time i'm aiming for Diamond Monster MIDI ("Not another Monster!" you say? 😅 ) GM/GS daughterboard with 4MB ROM, 64 voices, usually found attached to the MX200 soundcard. Has anyone here ever used it?

Thanks a lot!