Not completely computer related, but today I re-arranged my whole HiFi setup, which now uses an Athlon XP system fitted with Yamaha DSP cards as the main mixing unit, which also allows me to neatly choose what to listen to and where to record to.

Finally soldered my Adlib.. bored at work today. Just have to drill the PCI bracket when I get home, or 3D print one.

it's brand new???

Yes, besides the 2 Yamaha chips.

I spent the past week testing game by game on my HP Vectra, made the ideal boot-up menu with very high compatibility and high amount of free conventional memory.

Today I took on my IBM PC 330 - a Pentium 233 MMX. The old boot disk was a mess of old and new drivers so I streamlined it so I use the most compatible drivers while still having lots of conventional memory left at the end.

It's funny but it's almost therapeutic wringing more memory from a boot disk, stream-lining it, making it all works beautifully in the end.

Started playing Warcraft1 for the first time since mid 90s. With midi music this time, sounds very good 😁

Yesterday, the mailman came by and delivered nice christmas cards to me and my family. Among those christmas cards however, were new parts for my 286 PC. Those parts consisted of a NOS Kraft game port joystick card, and an 80287 XL. Upon opening the package for the Kraft card, I found that the box was still covered in plastic wrap! I felt a bit bad tearing off the plastic wrap and taking out my fresh new card, because it had been sealed in there for 29 years, but the card was only $7, and game port cards are common, so I don't think I destroyed too much history. I'm keeping the box though. Inside the box was just the card and the manual. The configuration of the card was simple enough, requiring me to just flick one DIP switch to get it to work with an 8 MHZ system. I then moved to the 80287 XL, which was housed inside of a nice chip case. I didn't realize how good the XL looked until I finally got one myself. Installing the XL was a chore. To install it, I had to remove all of my expansion cards (due to their orientation they are all over the processor and co processor socket, blocking access to the socket.) After the expansion cards were removed, the installation was very easy and I just popped the chip into it's socket. Installing the game port card took a little bit of effort as it wouldn't go into the slot easily due to it's bracket orientation. With a little bit of force I got the card in there though. With everything installed, I powered it on and it posted as normal. I check the BIOS setup for any options on math co-pro's, and I can't find any. To test the co-pro's functionality, I took an original Intel math co processor diagnostic disk and fired up the diagnostic utility. Unsuprisingly, the chip was recognized and it passed all the checkups a number of times. I then went on to testing the game port joystick card. To test it, I fired up Lotus: The Ultimate Challenge with a untested Quickshot joystick and it worked well. The joystick behaved like crap though and the joystick wouldn't stay up so i'll need to look into fixing it. It wasn't the controller card's fault as I used a game pad later and it was absolutely fine. Using the gamepad and game port joystick card, I had a fun time playing Silpheed and The Simpsons arcade game and everything felt responsive and decently calibrated. The brand new AdLib sounded nice in these games also. After my long DOS gaming session, I fire up Landmark Speed Test and TOPBENCH and they both seem to agree my system preforms close to a 12 MHZ 80286 based machine with a 13 MHZ 80287. I thought that was pretty interesting as I must have a fast 8 MHZ 286 based machine. After benchmarking, I fired up some TurboCAD, to see if the math co-pro was doing anything for preformance, but I have no benchmarks for it without the co-pro so I can't really tell, but it was nice and responsive. Tommorow's upgrades will be the final ones I will probably make on this machine. Tommorow, I will install a 80286 20 MHZ CPU by Harris in the PLCC socket and install an oscilliator socket so I can change out the 16 MHZ CPU clock oscilliator to a 20,24, or 32 MHZ oscilliator to run my CPU at 10,12, or 16 MHZ depending on what my board handles. I know the chipset is rated for 16 MHZ operation, but I have no clue if the faster clocks would mess up the ISA or onboard IDE/serial/paralell controllers. I'm gonna need to practice on soldering and buy a desoldering pump to do the procedure.

Wish me luck on the final upgrade guys!

Old PC Hunter wrote:

Mine did come with the metal bracket. I checked the image out of your replica, and it looks awesome! If possible, you should find a way to put the Adlib logo on that circuit board. Now that would be cool. Also, as far as putting a bracket on yours, I think this bracket from Mouser would do. I know others who made replica Adlibs used this same bracket. You just have to drill the holes for the audio jack and volume knob, and it is ready to go. How is the Adlib doing as a replacement for the ESS688? Are there any particular features you miss about it?

Link to bracket:
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Keystone … AaK7BsRT8JJQ%3D

I will check out the bracket thanks!

The Adlib is fine, and no I am not missing out on anything from the games I play as far as I can tell, but there is one big problem with using the Adlib for me, it kind of requires an external mixer. As I also have a MusicQuest MIDI card in there, I use Adlib for some games and MPi-32. With the ES688 I could mix the MPi-32's audio in the ES688 mixer so regardless of whatever I picked, I could get the mixed audio from the Line Out. Now I have two different Line Outs (Adlib and MPi-32) that I need to either mix elsewhere or keep moving the speaker jack from one to the other, which is a pain in the ass and might actually warrant going back to the ES688, which has a real OPL3 anyway and has good audio quality for a card that old, at least on par with my Adlib clone anyway..

wiretap wrote:

Finally soldered my Adlib.. bored at work today. Just have to drill the PCI bracket when I get home, or 3D print one. […]
Show full quote

Finally soldered my Adlib.. bored at work today. Just have to drill the PCI bracket when I get home, or 3D print one.

Nice 😀 You didn't go for sockets I see?

appiah4 wrote:

Nice 😀 You didn't go for sockets I see?

The Yamaha chips are in sockets. The rest is just very common 74xx glue logic. Kinda of a waste to use sockets on that stuff.

Found an old mic inside a container. Gave it a good cleansing, connected it to a PC, and spoke to it.

It worked just like old times.

Good old cheap Creative mic. Still have mine, too, which came with the SB Pro 2 I bought back then.

kolderman wrote:

Started playing Warcraft1 for the first time since mid 90s. With midi music this time, sounds very good 😁

I played a few levels yesterday and yeah it sounds great with General Midi.

I'm planning to move next year, so I started looking through all my yet-unsorted stuff in order to sort it roughly and pack it into boxes.

It's funny to find things you forgot even owning. Found a couple of CD-ROM drives from 1997/8, incl. this beauty:

Yesterday was a great day. For one thing, I got my 286's CPU upgraded! So far, the operation has been nothing but a success. As me and a friend were going somewhere, I told him about the soldering work I had to do on my motherboard and I how I had very little knowledge on soldering and I would need to practice. Well, he had a soldering station at his house and he let me practice there. I practiced desoldering and soldering on different boards and I think I did a good job. Since I would be practicing the soldering there, I figured we could use his fancy soldering station to do soldering on my 286. So I bring my 286 over to his house. We dissasemble the computer and I teach him lots of stuff about vintage x86 machines as we tear it down together. He said he really enjoyed tearing it down and it intrigued him. The machine is from way before our time, so he had never taken apart a computer this old before. After we get it apart, we take it to the soldering room and pull out the old 8 MHZ AMD 286 chip and plop in a 20 MHZ part from Harris. We then desolder the 16 MHZ clock oscillator. The soldering was a 2 man job, I had to hold up the board and pull on the crystal with pliers, while my friend desoldered it. We had diffuculty melting the solder joints at first, but a little bit of solder wick and patience cleared up the solder joints. We then soldered in a socket for the new oscilliator. After it was all soldered up we popped in the original crystal rated at 16 MHZ and much to my suprise, the computer POSTed!
Then, we decide to step it up a notch and put in the 20 MHZ crystal to get it to run at 10 MHZ. It POSTed again! We then test AdLib Jukebox to see if the sound card is playing correctly because I think the ISA bus is overclocked to 10 mhz. The Jukebox songs played normally and there were no issues. We then test games. We test Stunts, Alone in the Dark, and Wolfenstein 3D and I notice quite decent preformance gains over the 8 MHZ chip. I can now run Wolf3D in almost full screen! Stunts also runs at medium settings in EGA now, and Alone in the Dark ran a little better too. One thing I do have to say though is that some of the audio in Wolf 3D and Stunts sounded slightly off, like some instruments were higher or some notes didn't play. This didn't affect the music much though as it still sounded alright. This didn't happen in all games or music files which was weird. I did notice some speaker crackling, but that might just be my speaker connection as it was crackling before it was even hooked up to the PC! The benchmarks we ran on the system show about a %20-22 percent preformance gain from the upgrade. After we benchmark it, we take a 24 MHZ oscilliator to see if the 286 will run at 12 MHZ and sadly it did not. It gave me a memory parity error at the fast speed. Probably an issue with the ram controller since the higher clockspeed or maybe it is a ram timing issue and I need faster ram or I need to set a wait state. I got 70 ns sticks in there with 0 WS, so this is probably a problem. You can't set any wait states with bios or a jumper though, but on the chipset manual it says you can set one, so I wonder how one would go about doing that. Maybe a setup program like GSETUP? Does anyone know of any setup program that might be able to do that? If so let me know because I would like to get 12 MHZ running if possible. If I can't get it up to 12, I might consider upgrading to faster video, maybe a Tseng ET4000, but I kind of would like to find a card from the 1989-1990 era to use. If anyone knows of a fast VGA card from that era let me know. In conclusion, I have to say this whole procedure was a massive success and was a fun learning experience as well.

Technically this was yesterday's retro activity, but I successfully resistor-modded my ASUS P5A-B to mitigate the well-known K6+ compatibility bug.

I'm not bad at soldering, but I have to admit, taking the iron to my best & only Super 7 board, which I've had since new, was legit terrifying. Fortunately it worked out.

Today I'm doing a few quality-of-life changes to the machine it's in, and running benchmarks on the new hotness K6-2+/550 CPU it now sports. More later.

Scraped a NEAT chipset bios together for my 286 SBC that nobody has a BIOS for, it sorta worked but my RAM crapped out. It also has a fixed disk table that you cant change ugh. so I need to find a newer NEAT chipset bios and cut it into a hi/lo and see how it goes. (after some new ram arrives)

BloodyCactus wrote on 2019-12-28, 12:56:

Scraped a NEAT chipset bios together for my 286 SBC that nobody has a BIOS for, it sorta worked but my RAM crapped out. It also has a fixed disk table that you cant change ugh. so I need to find a newer NEAT chipset bios and cut it into a hi/lo and see how it goes. (after some new ram arrives)

What does the board look like? There are quite a few NEAT 286 BIOS around to pick from.

Cyrix200+ wrote on 2019-12-28, 13:11:

BloodyCactus wrote on 2019-12-28, 12:56:

Scraped a NEAT chipset bios together for my 286 SBC that nobody has a BIOS for, it sorta worked but my RAM crapped out. It also has a fixed disk table that you cant change ugh. so I need to find a newer NEAT chipset bios and cut it into a hi/lo and see how it goes. (after some new ram arrives)

What does the board look like? There are quite a few NEAT 286 BIOS around to pick from.

standard NEAT chipset (5 chip). harris 16mhz 286. 1 com port, 1 para, with headers for extra ports. takes up to 8mb of ram.

Restored an Atari ST mouse to almost pristine condition. Now I finally have an original mouse for every of my three STs.