First post, by Malik
- Rank
- l33t
Was trying to "beef-up" my system with multiple sound cards. My tests are not fully complete yet.
Running System :
Intel Pentium 133MHz
Unico VE-501 Socket 5 Pentium Motherboard, 256kb Ext. Cache
128MB FPM RAM
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 2MB
Diamond Monster 3D 4MB
Sound Cards:
1. Sound Blaster AWE32 CT2760 A240 I5 P300
2. Sound Blaster 1.5 CT1320 with C/MS Chips A220 I7 P-Disabled
3. Covox Sound Master II A280 I3 P338
4. Music Quest PC MIDI Card ( Fully MPU-401 compliant) I2 P330
The Beast :
As you know most of the AT casings do not have enough vents to let out the air. I wanted to keep better air flow in it. This case is packed with boards! The two smaller fans at the top are two of the fans that I ripped off from a laptop-cooler pad. I opened up the shields which were closing the parallel and serial connector holes to let out all the air. Fortunately the exit points are higher for the hotter air. All the fans are ordinary ones, but selected by me personally for maintaining enough silence.
The cards :
From Left : CT2760 (with Wave Blaster daughterboard),MQ PC MIDI card, CT1320, Covox SM II.
The Covox Sound Master II :
The Mixer Used :
A 3-input mixer.
So far, everything runs smoothly (with some exceptions) :
I tested a Sierra game : Colonel's Bequest - The Adlib sounds seem to be shared between the AWE32 and the SB1.5, since I can still hear the music when I mute either sound source through the mixer.
Colonel's Bequest supports C/MS Game Blaster. Played flawlessly.
Tried Ultima VI : I hear some conflicting hisses and noises when I choose Adlib. Some of the notes seem to be overlapped or missed.
No lockups or hangs, though, so I can be sure of no hardware conflicts.
One thing that keeps nagging me is the FM ports from both the creative cards - Both will be using port 388. This may be the cause of the interference and oddities in Ultima VI. But strangely The Colonel's Bequest has no issues with both cards running at the same time.
I think I should disable the FM port in the AWE32 - perhaps using CTCU?
I have changed the FM port in the Covox card, since there is a jumper on the card to change the port address to 380.
Acknowledgement : Thanks very much to both Jan3sobieski for the Sound Master II card and pianoman72 for the C/MS chips!!