Got these over the last month but was away travelling so can only start to play with them now!

I've now got an identical twin for my 12MB Diamond Monster Voodoo2
No vga pass through included but £4.20 is a lot less then the £20 I spent on the first card (I’m still getting used to retro prices)

It's running in a P4 & while It doesn’t seem hot I don’t want to risk it so have invented this short term fix till it goes into my retro box.

The fans are blowing onto the card with I seem to remember worked better then the blowing away in an oc forum somewhere? Not that mine will be oc'ed.

Also got an SB0350 Audigy 2 ZS for £12, only problem is it’s not supported in Win9x. That'll teach me not to research properly! Not a big deal as my XP box could do with something better then the onboard Soundmax anyway.

Next is a CT3910 AWE32, I got for £1.20 this will go into storage till I get a proper retro PC with ISA slots. Quite pleased with this as it’s got the real OPL chip from Yamaha & after the initial new toy wow factor I’m to lazy to load sound fonts so don’t really need the missing SIMM sockets.

Saved the best for last a Yamaha MU10 for £23.99 complete with the joystick/midi cable. Needs a bit of a clean but what I didn’t realise my PC has no game port. I could have sworn It had one before I went away? No problem I’ll use my new Ausigy2, Nope just a useless 1394 port. Not a big deal as I’m in the market for a 1st gen Audigy to plug it into, long term it will go with the AWE32.

Picking up a PC for £4 tomorrow don’t really know the specs yet but has a Creative branded CD drive (which is what attracted me) so can’t be that new.

Just remember that the rubber bands will dry out quite rapidly.
Better replace it with something else (like that metal wire surrounded by plastic)

A lot of people put little heatsinks on the chips to help conduct heat away on the Voodoo 2. A long time ago (in a galaxy far, far, away) there was something called the Tennmax Stealth V2 which was basically a triangular piece of metal with the points overlapping the 3 large chips on the V2 board and a fan in the middle. It's really hard to find them now unless they're already mounted on a card. I have two of them with the coolers mounted on them.

And yeah, the rubber band idea isn't so good. Those bands will rot and fall apart pretty quickly in the heat inside a computer.

Yeh the fans are still in trial, if I'm happy with the results I'll use something more permanent. I'd love a pair of Tennmax Stealth's. Found reveiws of them while researching V2 cooling, look awesome & suit a SLI setup more than mine but couldnt find them anywhere. Much better then the 3dfxcool product (a bent bracket with fans attached!)

I've opened up the MU10 for cleaning here is a pic if anyone is interested

The whole thing is covered in a shielding which I wasn’t expecting

chinny22 wrote:

No problem I’ll use my new Ausigy2, Nope just a useless 1394 port.

There's a header on that card for a joystick port, if you felt so inclined. 😉

I have an Audigy 2 ZS sitting here doing nothing, but it came from a Dell box, so the drivers are weird. I think the kX drivers work though...

Where did you get an MU10 so cheap?!

If you have a DB50XG or compatible daughterboard I'd be interested to see how the two compare...

Saw the header, but as I didn’t get the joystick port bracket the MU10 will have to wait till the 9x box gets a better sound card which is where I really want it to live.

As for how I got it cheap, no idea! just did a what’s my chances search on ebay and it came up with a few days to go! Think I was prepared to pay £30 for it thinking the extra 10ish quid was worth an external device that gave me more options, say like using a CT3910 with no DB header otherwise I would have just got a NEC DB50 clone.

It was a pick up only which reduced it to London but I can’t be the only bloke in or knows people in the London area into old hardware?
I'm also interested in comparing the 2 but now I've got this getting the DB version is further down the list. I'll put up some recordings when it’s up & running though

chinny22 wrote:

Saw the header, but as I didn’t get the joystick port bracket the MU10 will have to wait till the 9x box gets a better sound card which is where I really want it to live.

You could always make one:

http://pinouts.ru/Multimedia/sound_inp_pinout.shtml + http://pinouts.ru/Inputs/GameportPC_pinout.shtml

The Audigy 2 ZS is a really nice card, it wouldn't take much effort to get it working with your MIDI unit.

I forgot 1 joystick port supported 2 devices, not that I ever had more then 1 joystick!
Got a PC with Isa slots so hopefully that’ll look after my dos & midi needs.

Hey SquallStrife was going to tell you about the kX drivers for your dell card, but reread your post & you already knew, gotta be quick!

Um, well, it's not really hardware as such...

All the manuals and stuff are there! 😀

How much that cost?
Actually saw a working copy of Win 3.0 on a PC my dad brought home from work to clean up in the late 90’s. (He’s a TAFE or collage teacher)
Just a general delete old files, defrag, etc. No internet connection in those days so not that much needed doing.
I was still using Windows 3.11 but liked the black & green clock from 3.0 so “downgraded” my clock (copied accross the files)

SquallStrife wrote:

Um, well, it's not really hardware as such... […]
Show full quote

Um, well, it's not really hardware as such...

All the manuals and stuff are there! 😀

But does it have Reversi?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk

It's rocking Reversi like a motherf*cker!

Got a pair of Wicked3D H3D glasses complete with driver CD.

Received today:

An Soundblaster 2.0 CT1350..
Only need to buy an GAL IC..

built and fired up a rig with an ASUS CUV4X-D mb with two PIII EB 1000 running at 1245mhz/166 fsb, 896 megs of ram at 133 cas 2, a Visiontek Gf2 GTS 32mb/V3 3000 agp and a 400gb with 98se and XP. I'm also waiting for two tualatin 1400-Ss adapted to fc-pga1, a gateway 2000 case and an aureal II. I might post pics when finished 😀

also, tell me some good old stuff to play cause I'm running out of them and I don't know what to play with here..

Well, it's not totally retro yet but it's definitely not new anymore.

Earlier today I got a used Dell XPS Gen 4 desktop. 3.2ghz Pentium 4 640, 4gb DDR2-533, 80gb hard drive, 256mb GeForce 6800 PCI-e, SoundBlaster Audigy 2ZS. Win 7 Ultimate installed in about 20 minutes and this thing's feels pretty snappy. It was, however, incredibly nasty when I got it. Had to give it a thorough wipe down and when I used the air compressor to get all the dust out, you should have seen the dust clouds.

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

also, tell me some good old stuff to play cause I'm running out of them and I don't know what to play with here..

well what sort of games are you into?

some of my favourite games from the win98 era:
Battlezone 1 & 2
System Shock 2
Deus Ex
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Total Annihilation
Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age
Sim City 3000

All of these should run great on your system 😀

GUS Classic 3.4

How can you tell how much RAM it has?

Edit: Did another photo that might be easier to read.