First post, by pngo
Hello.
Found a Dimension 4100 dumped on the street the other day. Cant say no to free retro cmoputing stuff. Opened it up, cleaned it. It is fully working.
It has a 1ghz p3 and a rage pro 128 in it with 128 meg of ram and what looks like a really cheap"Creative labs AudioPCI 64V'.
At first,I was like "too bad no isa slot in it 🙁" it will be bad for dos games music, and I ended up actually using it only for windows games without even bothering trying it under dos.
The other day, i wanted to run Duke3d on it. Checked at the back of the computer, no midi/joystick port on the board, meaning no external midi emulation goodness, so i was like...okkkkk, lets try sound blaster music just for fun, knowing full well it would be bad, and it was indeed terrible. Adlib is the same.
Last thing I tried was really surprising: as a last resort, without much hope, I tried general midi, just to make sure the internal synth was not working under dos, like it is mostly the case for isa cards according to what I have been experiencing myself.
To my susprise, it worked!!! The onboard GM synth indeed works under real dos. And the music coming out of it is actually very decent.
I would totally recommend this card to people missing an isa slot, you can find them everywhere for dirt cheap, I assume.
