"...and relief that is almost tidal in scope washes over me in an awesome wave" 🪓😌

ExplodingLemur wrote on 2023-05-01, 15:00:

I just bought an L440GX+ off eBay and I've got a YMF744 sound card to test with. I'll give it a try when the motherboard arrives.

Just a little heads-up, have you received the board already?

hard1k wrote on 2023-06-26, 20:09:

Just a little heads-up, have you received the board already?

Yeah, haven't been able to do anything with it other than mount it to a test stand though 😒 Travel, then COVID, then more travel...will see if I can get it done this weekend.

Great, thanks!

Well, crud 😒 The board is dead. At first it was starting the PSU the moment I applied power but no beep codes or POST activity on a POST card. After swapping some hardware around (RAM, CPU, removing other PCI cards, etc) it won't turn on at all. The power supply is confirmed good with a PSU tester though. Sorry 🙁

Ohhhh that's bad.
We have bad news here too. Both chips don't function properly in any of their legacy modes (despite working perfectly fine natively in Win9x), no SB emulation, no FM, no MPU output, neither in pure DOS, nor in DOS in Windows. I believe it's due to some misconfiguration of the bridge, maybe some registers are set wrong, I don't know. As we don't have any skilled low-level programmer, we're desperately looking for one. We can ship the prototype board anywhere in the world. Help Me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're My Only Hope.

My hypothesis is that the legacy DOS functionality of these chips needs a bridge that supports subtractive decode to work properly.

I admit I'm no expert though, so I could be wrong.