retrofanatic wrote:

Sorry to hear about the Asus TX97-XE...some of us have been there and feel your pain 🤣 (yours truly included), but great to hear that you picked up that QDI board! I am guessing that it accommodate all the same components you had on your Asus board?

Thanks!

The QDI has better layout than the Asus board, and i also like the Speedset BIOS so yeah, i do favor it against the Asus. But the Asus is excellent as well.

This thread has been needing an update for a long time.

I've been using an ASUS SP-97XV instead of the QDI board, in part because the QDI has a weird behaviour with the real time clock. The internal clock, despite the battery being completely new, starts to fall behind in time.

The ASUS SP-97XV on the other hand despite having a worse layout than the ASUS TX-97XE, is slower which can be good for a select number of games. A good example is Test Drive 3. I can get a rather accurate 386DX-25 speed.

However the best recent addition to this build is a card that i was looking for a long time. Thanks to a very generous offer from a very good friend i was pretty dumbstruck when i found that i was going to receive the following card in the mail:

I've been playing Fleet Defender A LOT recently and i've been using the Pro Audio Spectrum exclusively. The games that natively support dual OPL2 sound great. It's awesome to hear the stereo separation of the FM voicings.

Of course this came with its set of issues. While the Pro Audio Spectrum XL worked fine with my Gravis Ultrasound classic the original PAS was conflicting with it. The selected IRQ and DMA were in no way responsible, my PAS is configured for IRQ 3 and DMA 3, while the GUS is IRQ7 and DMA7. My best guess is that somehow the GUS must hog the AdLib port at 388h, which the PAS card might use (besides for AdLib). I thought this might be the reason since Gravis included an AdLib disable jumper on the ACE card, no doubt to enable the ACE to work alongside other cards without issues.

So i brought this from Portugal returning from xmas holidays (not my exact card):

The GUS PnP has been working alongside the PAS with no problems at all, so i'm happy.

The PAS card however has strange behaviour with some games. For instance while setting up some games (Warcraft 2 or DOOM) i usually get either no FM music or PCM. So i tried cranking the volume of the speakers and my mixer and in fact the PCM and music is working, but somehow these games must be manipulating the PAS mixer. I usually go to the mixer and find that the settings are different almost everytime i launch a different game.

I haven't yet found the cause for this, and i'm using the most recent drivers i could find, with the MVSOUND.SYS being version 1.03.

Anyway, i can't complain much. I'm extremely happy.