VOGONS


First post, by OasysPCI

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Hello everybody and thank you for existing!!! Pretty cool and knowledgeable community it seems!

So here's the dilemma:

I bought a Korg Oasys PCI from Mr. Andy West bass player and founder of none other but the Dixie Dregs! So that was about 20 years ago on e-bay and it's a really cool piece of hardware for synthesizers sounds. So because of that, because of the price I paid for it and because of its pedigree I've really never wanted to depart from it. I figured the day in which I could install 98-SE in modern gear would come and in preparation for that I purchased some patches that allow 98 to take quite a bit more ram than it was originally designed for to put together an old school digital audio workstation running inside my hackintosh which has 128 GB of ram.

Regarding this card, drivers for XP and above were never developed. I kept my card in the box waiting for the day in which either Virtualbox et al would allow for an easy way to expose the card to the guest OS (likely 98-SE).

I saw the card below for sale for less than $30
BT4IDcf.png

And I was wondering if anyone here might have a recommendation for a virtual machine software that would allow me to expose the PCI card to the guest OS (Windows 98-SE in this case) and if anyone has ever used successfully these PCI-E to PCI adapters and have had Windows happily use them.

Incidentally, I've recently became acquainted with em86 and other projects that would be so purist as to slow down performance to the emulated hardware. I was curious about actually running the thing as fast as it could possibly run it so to achieve the lowest possible latency.

Thanks in advance for your input!

Reply 1 of 2, by Duffman

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@OasysPCI

I'd say for the virtualization route the best option would be to use KVM + QEMU through a linux distro, I only have a surface level understanding of it though but there are youtube videos on the subject.

MB: ASRock B550 Steel Legend
CPU: Ryzen 9 5950X
RAM: Corsair 64GB Kit (4x16GB) DDR4 Veng LPX C18 4000MHz
SSDs: 2x Crucial MX500 1TB SATA + 1x Samsung 980 (non-pro) 1TB NVMe SSD
OSs: Win 11 Pro (NVMe) + WinXP Pro SP3 (SATA)
GPU: RTX2070 (11) GT730 (XP)

Reply 2 of 2, by LeFlash

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Proxmox is a really nice virtualization-environment, allowing you to create multiple VMs, easily passtrough PCI- or USB-devices and also access them via Spice-Protocol (some kind of lowlevel remote-desktop)
You can also install an additional GPU and pass it trough, so you essentially can use one PC as 2 separate workstations, when you passtrough some of your hosts USB-ports!

It's quite easy to use, but is more geared towards virtualization / server usage, but can also be used as a relatively easy to "get-into" general purpose virtualization environment.
Beware that there seems to be a general issue with ryzen-cpus and virtualization of old OSes (V86-mode afair)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14328237