YOU HAVE AN MT-32!?!?!?? GIMME!!!! 😉

"Premium" Creative cards (Audigy eX) come with MPU-401 in/out. I've got my synth hooked up to mine right now. Probably a better idea to, like, NOT buy one, though. 😜

Oh, and, NATURAL keyboard? Eeew.

What I currently have:

Case: AOpen HQ-08 Full Tower
Keyboard: Microsoft Internet Keyboard Pro
Monitor: CTX 17" Trinitron
CD-RW: Lite-On 48x12x48
DVD-ROM: Pioneer DVD-117 Tray Load
MPEG-2 Decoder: Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus

What remains to be purchased:

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (I refuse to touch the Pentium 4 with a 10 foot pole. Not only are they absolute garbage, Intel charge too much for them too).
Motherboard: EpoX 8K5A2+
RAM: 512Mb PC2700 DDR
Hard Drive: 120Gb Western Digital Caviar "Special Edition" 8Mb cache
Video Card: Leadtek GF4 Ti4600 128Mb w/ ViVo

Stuff being passed up from previous machine:

Floppy: Mitsubishi LS-120
Speakers: Generic set I bought some 5-6 years ago to complement my then-new AWE64 sound card.
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster Live! Value
OS: Windows XP Professional

It's currently stalled seeing as my drivers licence and car registration are both coming up so I have to find the money for those but since I'm waiting for price drops to occur for most of the components I have yet to get it isn't such a bad thing.

Snover wrote:

"Premium" Creative cards (Audigy eX) come with MPU-401 in/out. I've got my synth hooked up to mine right now. Probably a better idea to, like, NOT buy one, though. 😜

Just about every sound card has a MIDI port on it it's just that Creative actually put proper 5-pin DIN plugs on their premium cards. On the rest its buried in the game port and requires a special cable/breakout box to access. The manufacturers sell them with a huge markup (considering it's only a few optocouplers it really is ridiculous) but if you're handy with a soldering iron then its easy enough to build your own.

Yes, the MT32 is nice.. certainly not for sale.. yet 😀 The sblive! has MIDIin and MIDIout through minidin (!?). Works ok though, but no dos support (BUGGER!). That's no different on an audigy.

I've sold my DVD hollywoord plus.. though i regret that a little, it has superior quality over my TV-out on the Geforce. And u can watch avi files through some sort of hack!

What's wrong with PIV's? I'd rather not touch an AMD.. considering they're so hot. My previous machine was an AMD 1gig, never got as stable as my PIV now is. Mainly because AMD had no decent motherboards (at that time).

And I hate their kind of marketing (An amd 1700 is faster then a pIV 1.7 but it runs at 1.4 GHz. That kinda confuses me)

mini-DIN is just taking the MIDI pins and compressing them into a smaller space. As you'll notice, there are only 5 pins on a MIDI connector and there is a lot of space between those.

You can get output on your MPU-401. You need to set "MIDI Port" as your preferred MIDI device. That, however, only works in a DOS box. In any case, you'd be better off getting an NT system and using VDMSound's MPU-401 routing.

I had a Hollywood Plus in my old Alienware (which, by the way, ran a 700MHz Athlon and was rock solid). Interactive DVD Video program made it no longer work until I reinstalled Windows. That was on Windows 98SE. It was on an MSI mainboard, just like the system I have now. I swear by these boards.

Ofcourse I know that mini-din is the same as the MIDI-din, what confuses me is that creative thinks that mini-din is an creative invention.. Creative keeps dazzling me..

I really wish there was a way to use the midi port as an genuine (did I spell that correct?) mp401 port under dos. I have an roland MPU-401 8 bit isa card, it came with the MT-32 which was distributed by sierra.

Since I now have a really spiffy pIV (ack?) I don't have 8bit ports anymore and VDMsound isn't everything.

Wait i'll record an example.

Buy an old 486/66DX2 like I did. Then, get to know the IS people at your school and ask them to give you hardware they plan on recycling. Problem solved. 😀

Kyl3 wrote:

I've sold my DVD hollywoord plus.. though i regret that a little, it has superior quality over my TV-out on the Geforce. And u can watch avi files through some sort of hack!

heh, I only bought mine because I wanted decent TV-out. Watching movies on a computer monitor sucks donkey balls.

And I hate their kind of marketing (An amd 1700 is faster then a pIV 1.7 but it runs at 1.4 GHz. That kinda confuses me)

Thats not AMDs fault, it's Intels. Intel has everybody believing that clock speed is everything and as such AMD need a way to compete and PR rating their chips is the only way they can do that. The Atlhlon does more in each clock cycle than the P4 and as such, needs less clock cycles to get the same task done as a P4. This is why a slower Athlon can knock spots of P4s that are heaps faster in terms of clock speed.

You're actually quite wrong there 😀, the amd does less.. but way faster, which gives it a huge speed advantage and less compatibility issues.

The same difference between the XT cisc and the newer risc based processors after that...

(edit)

Actually, to confirm my story.. because the pIV can do more in one clockpulse, the output of the calculation turns out to longer... This way when the PIV has to perform a very simple operation like add +1 to register AX, it still has to use the full calculation for this.

With an reduced instruction set, (RISC) a long calculation is segmented over multiple clockpulses.

Thus giving the advantage to speed up simple calculations.. what actually most software do use... sounds ironicly but progress means reduction 😀

again, sorry for my bad english.. i'm quite foreign

This is also the reason never to believe benchmarks on different systems..

So would a P4 2.4Ghz be faster than an Athlon 1800xp?

Yes, but not much. This graph sums up the processor performance (or lack threof 😁 ) of the P4 http://www.haveland.com/index.htm?povbench/graph.php

Granted, this is only one benchmark and you can not effectively show the performance of a processor with one benchmark but this is just about as it is from all of the testing that I have done.

The memory performance of a P4 2.4ghz will be FAR greater than that of an Athlon 1800 but almost all home tasks aren't bandwidth intensive and devoting your money into the P4 for that purpose is just a waste.

My wonderful NForce 2 with Dual-DDR solves the bandwidth problem nicely. (for a while) 😀

The memory performance of a P4 2.4ghz will be FAR greater than that of an Athlon 1800 but almost all home tasks aren't bandwidth intensive and devoting your money into the P4 for that purpose is just a waste.

Wouldn't the only bandwidth only be avialable on P4 systems that used RD-RAM, as opposed to DDR-RAM, which seems to be and increaingly popular thing with P4's?

Someone's been futzing with those statistics:

3 00:41:37 AMD Athlon XP 2000+ 1667 44.62x
4 00:41:43 AMD Athlon XP2000+ 1667 44.52x
34 01:26:27 AMD Athlon XP 2000+ 1667 21.48x

*cough*

Anyway, that site sucks. It made me load fucking Java just to see their stupid logo rotate around. ARRGH!