Reply 20 of 27, by MerrickD
Hi All,
I built one of these cards, so I signed up for the forum here to share my experiences.
The CPLD is the hardest part to solder. It's definitely doable without a hot air station if you use liquid flux, a good chisel tip on the iron, and solder braid to clean up bridges. I was able to program it using a Raspberry Pi and XC3sprog with the GPIO pins. I used a guide found here: https://anastas.io/hardware/2020/09/29/xc9500 … i-xc3sprog.html (not affiliated)
My system is a PS/2 Model 70 486. Its got a 486 DX-2 50mhz, 8MB ram, and also a Buslogic BT640 SCSI card and an IBM XGA-2 display card installed.
I did testing with both Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.11
Adlib games seem to work just fine under DOS. I had no issues whatsoever with several games. Trying to use digitized audio is when I ran into issues.
Doom works with SFX and music using address 220, IRQ 2, DMA 1. All other IRQ settings result in a "Transfer stack overflow" and lock up.
Simcity 2000 (DOS) locks up during installation when detecting the sound card no matter what IRQ settings are used.
Windows 3.11 locks up immediately after the startup sound plays. Only IRQ 3, 5, and 7 are supported by the SB MCA driver (sbmwu.exe) so I can't try IRQ 2 which works for Doom.
I think there is an IRQ conflict but I haven't been able to resolve it so far, even by removing all other MCA cards from the system. I'll continue to troubleshoot and share anything I found out here.
Edit: SBDIAG successfully plays digital audio with IRQ set to 2, 3, 5, and 7 as long as I configure the card to match in the system setup.