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Wasted my weekend rebuilding my PIII box; results...

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First post, by GXL750

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I recently cleaned and rebuilt my old Compaq and pulled the hard drive I was using to place in another and re-purpose the machine as a Windows 98SE system. The previous configuration with WinXP I thought made it too current to be a retro system but at the same time, it's too old for me to use as a normal computer.

I downloaded an image of the original Audigy 2ZS install CD linked on another thread in this forum and the Windows 98 drivers from that seem to be a bit nicer than the KX drivers. I'm not too concerned about pure DOS mode and within Windows 98, I was able to configure Descent, Duke Nukem and the other DOS games I installed and audio works fine with them. If I configure the game for General MIDI, then it seems to use whatever sound font I have loaded in Windows. Descent 2 with Chorium soundfont is quite nice on the ears.

In the 6th photo linked below, the red wire sticking out from under the heatsink is actually linking one pin on the CPU to another. The ghetto-esque solution I used to pinmod the Tualatin CPU to work in this computer seems reliable enough (going good for a couple months now) though I'm scared to remove the heatsink or CPU now. The heatsink and fan combo itself is also a jury rig. The stock heatsink was too small for the Tualatin CPU but I needed something that fit okay in the case. So I pulled fan off both heatsinks I had laying around, mounted a fan that was small enough on the side of the installed heatsink and the solution keeps the CPU cool enough. I also had to spend a few seconds coming up with the best way to fold and route the cables as to not obstruct airflow.

Now I'm going through all my old CDs to find some more games to play on this computer.

EDIT: I've found that the larger a soundfont I have the audio card set for, the longer the boot. If I have the sound card configured with some random 2 or 4mb sound font, the boot time is not very long and I doubt the driver loading up added much time. However, a 16mb sound font on this computer will add a good 30 seconds or so and if I have something in the 30mb range like the Chorium sound font, I can expect a boot up time of no less than five minutes on this box going into Win98.

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Reply 1 of 2, by Mau1wurf1977

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Descent 2 with Chorium soundfont is quite nice on the ears.

Yea I love that soundfont as well!

if I have something in the 30mb range like the Chorium sound font, I can expect a boot up time of no less than five minutes on this box going into Win98.

That's interesting... Does it also take as long if you load it from within windows?

Something to test for you: SVGA DOS games like Duke Nukem 3D, System Shock, Blood and others...

Reply 2 of 2, by GXL750

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Duke Nukem 3D will be tried as soon as I find my disc. It's almost obligatory I have that on an old system. As for SVGA modes, they work well with the 815E integrated graphics. Descent 2 for DOS running 800x600 actually looks quite nice in a grainy retro kinda way. Also, there' no DOS level apps or drivers running on the computer. In device manager, there's no information useful for DOS what so ever nor is there any from the driver apps. I only found the drivers are providing some DOS support from within Win98 when I ran KGen98 and noticed it had audio. Descent will lock up if you try auto detect but when I configured MIDI for port 330 and then digital audio as SBPro on IRQ5, 220, DMA 1, it worked like a charm. I don't plan to try anything in pure DOS mode without Win98 running.

EDIT: I just installed Duke Nukem 3D Atomic on the old computer. Chorium soundfont is a bit of a waste on this game as it's audio doesn't sound much different than if I used the Creative 8mb set. Under Win98 with Audigy 2ZS and 815E graphics, sound works just fine, 800x600 graphics mode runs fine. Naturally, there's no lag running this game on a computer so much newer than the game.

Within Windows if I load a large soundfont, it takes a long time as well. When this machine was still running XP, sound fonts were much quicker to load. Maybe in a faster system this wouldn't be the case. This is the only machine in which I've used an Audigy 2ZS with Windows 98. It's really a non-issue as I rarely change sound fonts and I can always just smoke a cigarette or make some coffee or watch an episode of Annoying Orange while waiting. Besides, until I figure if there's a fix, the few minutes wait is worth it to have Descent going with my favorite sound fonts.

Originally, I thought the system was completely locked up when I tried loading Chorium. Trying CTRL-ALT-DEL would give me a blue screen. It's a good thing I decided finally to see if it eventually would load. Patience is necessary I suppose.

Speaking of the Chorium soundfont, on my Dell P4 Win7 tower which also has the an Audigy 2ZS, I have three soundfonts loaded. I load Chorium, this one called 8Rock11e.sf2 and then another 30mb (give or take) sound font called Sinfonia. That combination results in the best sounding and also most accurate all around MIDI so far.

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