Reply 60 of 74, by FeedingDragon
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- Oldbie
Well, my budget (and working space for that matter,) just took a giant sideways step on me. I just found out that on June 1st I'm going to have to move 🙁 Not spending another penny till after that. After I get settled a couple of things will probably have changed. One - I'm definitely rearranging my work area, so I might be able to squeeze an external module or 2 (is there a quick and easy way to switch between external modules?) into my work area. Ok, lets be honest, my play area 😀 I also will have a different amount of disposable income each month. The amount coming in won't change (that's fixed,) but my expenses will probably change.
As for my off computers. With 2 monitors and my KVM's I usually have any 2 or 3 of them up at any given time. It depends on my mood. My main PC is pretty much on 24/7. Right now, I have my 128D up with a game going. An hour ago I was fooling around with my A4000 (still not completely familiar with OS3.9 - just upgraded that a couple of months ago.) I'm still playing around with my TI and moving some things from tape to floppy. And of course there are games I love that will not run on the A2000, and that's what I have the 500 for (Archon is the main culprit there.)
I've never been exceptionally worried about period accurate HW. If something is that picky about HW I say the heck with it and use DOSBox or another emulator (Virtual PC for the most part, playing around with PCem right now as well.) I'm not worried about being 100% accurate, I just want it to sound good to me and not require any fancy loading routines (still hate U7 for that - it's one that has gotten pretty much perma-moved to DOSBox.) I don't mind a couple of different boots that are tweaked a little, but not going the 8 entry boot menu route again.
This all started because I was setting up to re-build my off system, came across a reference to Wave Blaster when reading on the drivers for my AWE32. Thought, real MIDI (well Wave Table MIDI,) without that blasted buggy driver? Yeah, I want that. Again, not seeking perfection, just better MIDI music. Yes, I made things a bit more complicated than I really needed too. But, I like complicated, it allows me to gather more facts and make a more informed decision. After the first 5 or so responses, I knew that this could also get expensive. Not too worried about that either (well a little more worried now until I find out where I'm going to end up.)
Right now, when I get my off system put back together (since I'm holding off on buying anything until after the move,) I'll probably give SoftMPU a try. Can't be worse than AWEUtil. I'll still be looking for a DB, and I'll probably still be toying with getting a 401 compatible card at some point. As long as the DB sounds good, I'll probably just stick with that. Right now my list of 401 compatible cards is limited. Really only two, that I have found so far, that have a DB header (the 401At and the Magic Midia Midicard.) There are also 2 that have decent Wave Tables built on (Yamaha SW60XG and Midiatrix Audiotrix 3DXG.) I wasn't counting the LAPC-I because everyone seems to on to me about the cost, not sure I want to pay $600+ for this anyways. I was actually planning to spend between $200 and $400 on this (all total.)
If you haven't guess from my earlier posts, I tend to build my off system all at once and at max expansion for the current MB in it. My off system is built for native environment and not native HW. So, it will have DOS 6.22/Win 3.1 and Windows 98 installed on it, but the HW will be a little more advance than most people building old game systems might build. I just want the old OS's for the most part, anything that is extremely HW picky tends to get moved to emulation (that's where I play Ultima 1 - 7 for example.) Underworld and Ultima 8, not being so picky, gets played on my off system.
I "might" be moving all my MIDI work to my off system in the near future. I've actually been considering moving it to my A4000. Still looking into the SW/HW requirements for that. I first started with an A2000 (same keyboard actually, but I don't have the HW interface any more,) and Music Construction set. Liked the PC version better, though, because it allowed me to work with more voices for each chord. Also, when I worked on the A2000, there was an extra step involved. On the PC I could set the instruments at build time. On the Amiga, I had to tap in the notes and build the basic MIDI there, then copy it to my PC and set all the instruments there for the entire piece before I had anything close to a finished product.
edit: Forgot to mention :edit
If I have room, the output from a second card will probably go through a new (well used, but new to me,) equalizer. I'm hoping I can make room (and can afford,) one that has 8+ inputs (one for all 8 eventual systems, plus 1 for the MIDI if I go that route.) So, I could use that to adjust the music volume if necessary. Ideally, I can get on that isn't too expensive that allows for digital signals and upgrading (so the analog signal from my Amiga could work with digital speakers.) This would allow me to remove that extra cable currently running from the "back" speakers port of my sound card to the speakers. That one single cable makes keeping things balanced a real hassle (because it bypassed the equalizer.) OK, now that I'm typing this, I guess (if it's has enough inputs,) I could just use a second line for the back speakers. I can't do that now because this one only has 4 inputs.
Feeding Dragon