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.