havli wrote on 2021-11-26, 19:13:

This board has one ISA slot but to my surprise ESS 1868F doesn't work as good as the ESS Solo-1 PCI.

This got me intrigued.

Can you elaborate on the problems that you encountered with the 1868F? And how was the Solo-1 better in that regard?

Well, there are more things. Nothing really major, but why not use the best... 😀

1. The Solo had slightly less noise. At least that is what I heard.
2. The 1868F needs to use the mixer application in order to get maximum volume (the same level as the Solo has by default).
3. There was one game, where sound didn't work with the 1868F. Perhaps Stargunner, but I don't remember exactly.

I have a very similar M-ATX 440ZX board. It also has an on-board ESS Solo 1 and it's a really good all-rounder board with AGP and ISA. The Solo 1 sounds very, very good in DOS, especially for a PCI solution. Unfortunately with Slot 1 CPU prices not going down anytime soon I'm stuck with a 450MHz P3! I typically pair it with an AGP MX4 card. I like small builds so I can't see myself getting rid of it any time soon...

Edit it's an AOpen MX6B EZ

Interesting build!

Now you can attempt the Voodoo challenge. Onboard V3, V3 in the AGP slot and voodoo2 in the PCI.

Almoststew1990 wrote on 2021-11-26, 19:47:

Edit it's an AOpen MX6B EZ

Oh, that is a nice board.

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There is no AGP slot on this board, but I could Add V4 PCI and V2. 😁

havli wrote on 2021-11-26, 19:28:

Well, there are more things. Nothing really major, but why not use the best... :) […]
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Well, there are more things. Nothing really major, but why not use the best... 😀

1. The Solo had slightly less noise. At least that is what I heard.
2. The 1868F needs to use the mixer application in order to get maximum volume (the same level as the Solo has by default).
3. There was one game, where sound didn't work with the 1868F. Perhaps Stargunner, but I don't remember exactly.

Most of those single chip ISA cards have a pair of jumpers to flip from speaker/amplified output (default) to line level, which should greatly reduce noise. You should also disable unused inputs (Mic/Line-In) on both cards if you aren't using those connections for anything. There is nothing wrong with using the mixer to get the volume levels to match, it's entirely possible that the Solo defaults to maximum output level while the 1868f card has a more conservative starting point, particularly if you are using Unisound to initialize the card.

What does your SET BLASTER statement look like, curious about Stargunner's audio not working with the ISA card installed.

Oh yes, I am aware of the amplifier - I noticed the noise even with the amplifier disabled. Line in and mic were left at default settings in both cases. Disabling them sound like a good idea, I'll try that.

I am not sure how SET BLASTER was configured at the time. It was two months ago. But every other game ran well (doom, doom2, wolfenstein 3d, duke nukem 3d, etc). So it couldn't be that wrong. Maybe I'll give the 1868F another try at some point just out of curiosity. Anyway, the Solo when running in DDMA mode is hard to beat.

Hello again, It took longer than expected, but I finally made some progress. 😀

I actually have more of these boards and decided to use this one. Is is the later V2 type with color I/O ports and empty spot for TV-OUT... that I don't need anyway. The important thing here is the missing heatsink on the V3 chip. I want to use my own bigger passive heatsink and removing the original glued one is risky... here someone did it for me years ago 😁 More on that later.

As the first move I had to replace the dead capacitors. Most boards of this era are plagued by that and MS-6168 is no exception.

It took some work, but I replaced all the bigger ones. I guess Hitano is not that great brand, but for occasional use it should be more than enough.

Before the board wouldn't even POST, it was completely dead. Now it showed some signs of life on the POST card... but not enough to run properly. After replacing the PIII 700 for Celeron 266, I got no VGA beeps. Ugh, having a board with non-working Voodoo3 is not that great. However, I remember it worked when I bought the board like 10 years ago.

Long story short - the BIOS was likely corrupted. I took the BIOS chip from another MS-6168 and all good now. This is just temporary measure, later I will try to reflash the original chip or replace it by some spare one.

Definitely put a cooler on that V3 chip!

I did a similar project a couple of years ago - put an MS6168 into an Avance H100 half-height MATX case with a Katmai P3-550 and a YMF719 ISA soundcard with a 3d printed bracket (I was just cutting my teeth on 3d printing at the time, that was fun)

It is already in place 😀

It took some minor adjustments to the heatsink to fit - it is very close to the CPU and there is not much space around.
It seems even with no airflow at all temperatures of CPU and GPU are acceptable (around 70°C). So inside the case with proper airflow, it should decrease to much more comfortable level.

Interesting build! Do you also get those pesky div0s in Stargunner? I would like to see those fixed someday 😀

The progress is slow but I have some new photos.

This is the front panel of the case. It took a lot of effort to print it somewhat properly on the textured plate. The result is not as good as I hoped... but acceptable, I guess. 😀
There are two 60x60x10 fans. This time I decided to use some dust filters too just for the sake of completness... because why not. 😜 Other than that there is not much to see, simple power and reset switches and also red and green led.