mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Sound Blaster 16 CT2230 with a Creative CDROM drive attached to it

Awesome retroness man!!! If I was in your case I would try to find a motherboard first... and then the graphics and then only if you need the storage subsystem. For a proper retro motherboard you could get one with VLB slots.. although there are ones with PCI too. Once your done with that.. then you can pick out the video you want to use... from what I understand cards based of off S3 or an ET4000 are about the best bet. The ram on your board is likely FPM mode.. and as long as the pin count matches you should be able to transfer that right over. I would love to see someone justify needing more than 20mb for your application so you should be fine there. I you did feel you need to replace your storage you can look into overlay software and possibly different controllers to help with that 500mb limit... and go with a modern(ish) IDE drive, go SCSI (best performance, 2gb+ partitons, tricky to implement though, and last but not least Compact Flash. We have several threads here at VOGONS about 486's and the other subtopics too. Once you get an idea what way you want to go we can give a better picture of said path.

Good Luck!!

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

...though I'm trying to keep everything "old-skool" to ensure the most authentic experience possible. 😀

Then load Ontrack Disk Mangler or Stacker on those hard drives. 😳

The Mach64 really isn't the worst card in the world for DOS stuff. When compared to the last generation VLB cards, it is about in the middle of the pack. However, it is quite excellent for windows accelerated graphics.

If you are considering to upgrade your VLB graphics board, you're really going to have to go with something based on Tseng ET4000W32P to see a substantial boost in performance. The ARK1000 cards are generally considered the fastest VLB cards for DOS, but this is only true if you can get one that works at zero wait states...from my own experience and from what I have read they usually do not work on the 0WS setting

I have read that the s3 Trio64 card is supposed to be about as fast as the Tseng, but my experience with Hercules Terminator DRAM based on this chip hasn't been so great. To me it feels about the same as the Mach64. Maybe my card just isn't that great.

If you upgrade to a 486 board with PCI slots, then you have lot better options for video upgrades, but good PCI 486 boards are few and far between. I'd probably stick with what you have.

This may be a dumb question, but I have a spare SB16 CT2940 with an ATAPI IDE port on it, and I want to install it alongside my SB16 CT2230 just so that I can use the ATAPI IDE controller on it (I noticed recently that the proprietary CDROM drive was starting to die, and I have tons of IDE CDROM drives kicking around that I could possibly replace it with). Is this possible, or will the two sound cards conflict with one another? BTW, the reason why I want to keep the CT2230 is because it has a Wave Blaster header and a CSP chip, neither of which are available on the CT2940.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

This may be a dumb question, but I have a spare SB16 CT2940 with an ATAPI IDE port on it, and I want to install it alongside my SB16 CT2230 just so that I can use the ATAPI IDE controller on it (I noticed recently that the proprietary CDROM drive was starting to die, and I have tons of IDE CDROM drives kicking around that I could possibly replace it with). Is this possible, or will the two sound cards conflict with one another? BTW, the reason why I want to keep the CT2230 is because it has a Wave Blaster header and a CSP chip, neither of which are available on the CT2940.

The soundcard IDE ports where notoriously bad, I would try to source a dedicated card or even set it as a slave.