Are we talking mass-marketed consumer-oriented cards, or professional/mastering audio cards? I have and have used quite a few of the latter and they can be equally impressive and expensive. On the consumer side, I have heard from anecdotal stories that in the PCI realm the Creative Audigy 2 and …

What's with the C versions of these cards? Nothing wrong with the hardware, of course, its just a driver availability issue. 3C905A and 3C905B hardware revision use the same drivers; very easy to come by drivers for OS earlier than Windows 98SE (i.e. DOS, WFW, W95). The 3C905C hardware revision …

I might check out GRUB4DOS. It's pretty flexible, and I have it successfully dual booting DOS and Windows 98. It supports booting Windows NT (i.e. Windows XP), but ironically doesn't support booting plain DOS as well (it can, of course, but not as easily as Win 9x, Win NT, or Linux it seems). It …

A beige internal ZIP drive... I'm kind of jealous.

Back in the late 90s (like, 1999) I seemed to accumulate a lot of 486 and 586 hardware donated to me by friends and friends' parents that knew I was "into computers". I'm also not sure how, but 3Com 3C509 ISA cards seemed to grow like mold. So what do I do? Why network up my own LAN party room for …

OMG!! MDK, POD, GP2, Tomb Raider, Quake, Diablo, Fire Fight... Yeah, of those I did eventually get Tomb Raider and Quake, but only after we got our P2 machine, so a couple years after those games were released. I dunno, at the time, I guess, it didn't seem like I missed out much. No budget computer …

As I've alluded in my previous posts, I am currently building a Socket 7 PC for all my retro gaming nostalgia needs; at the prompting of a friend of mine, I have started a blog about the build: motivation, hardware selection, assembly, software selection, configuration, etc.. I am just starting the …

CMI8330 = A220 I7 D1 SB32 = A240 I5 D0 H5 P330 In your Autoexec.bat file it will state: SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 T4 Thanks for the suggestion! If I remeber correctly I read or heard somewhere that older games (i.e. games that would target SB Pro) often have hard coded settings to use I7 as that was …

Sorry, the machine is a Pentium 166; targeting a 1996(ish) build. My thought as well was to use the CM8330 for digital/SFX and SB32 for music/MIDI. I do hope at some point in the future to get a Sound Canvas or MT32, or even direct it to the MIDI in on one of my contemporary machines for Sound …

So slowly building my DOS retro machine, and am now at a cross roads for sound card configuration. I have a Sound Blaster 32 (CT3600) which I would really like to use, and also have a CMI8330-based card (SB Pro compatible clone). Neither have perfect OPL-3 clones but the CMI8330 does not have the …

I was wondering... is it Windows "Three point One One" or "Three point Eleven"? Or, for that matter, MSDOS "Six point Two Two" or "Six point Twenty Two"? When I was younger and these things were popular I (perhaps mistakenly) thought that Windows 3.11 was just 0.01 better than Windows 3.1... but... …

gdjacobs wrote: As luck would have it, the M571 v7 has a BIOS patch available Awesome, thanks for the link!

If the board has a low enough voltage regulator and compatible BIOS, then it will work. And you also don't need SS7 for all those CPUs, too. Failing that, a simple S7 interposer can take care of the voltage. Indeed. The M571 v7 has a factory setting for 2.2V and bus speeds up to 83.3MHz. With …

I vote for a SS7 or S7 for playing dos games. This seems to be the consensus so I think I'll stick with the Socket 7 I originally acquired. P166MMX should be more than sufficient for what I want to do, and is upgradable to K6-2 as mentioned if it isn't. If your Socket 7 board is equipped with an …

If your socket 7 board is actually a super 7 board (it has AGP and SDR) then go with that. Alas, it is just regular Socket 7, however does surprisingly support 2.2V core voltage and max 83.3MHz FSB, hence compatibility with most K6-2, but not K6-2+ or K6-III. I actually have a stack of K6-2 450 …

I have recently been inspired to build a retro PC by the likes of PhilsComputerLab, Lazy Game Reviews, WaybackTECH. My target is a true-to-period (ish) 1996-1997 machine. To that end, I've aquired a Socket 7 motherboard and have also just recently come across a Socket 8 motherboard. I have a 166MHz …