The PAS16 can be a great card and is quite well supported in DOS games, as your memories of seeing it listed suggests.

There are a couple of things to take note of:

- it's important to get the right version of the drivers, because there are multiple out there and the wrong version will give you wonky results (or not work at all).
- in DOS, use the mixer (PAS.EXE *) (yes the * is important!) and turn inputs off where possible, and set the rest to 'play only'. The card will hiss otherwise.

It's a kickass card, the onboard amp is a killer, you can control the mixer from the command line, the FM is thick and bassy and they are all-round good cards. The SB compatibility is pretty good too. You can also control the volume in Windows with key combinations without opening a mixer.

Be warned - the CD Audio header has a funky pinout, something like G R G L G I believe.

Something else awesome; Near the SCSI interface, you can see a little 4-pin header. If you plug a speaker into that header and have nothing in the Line Out jack, sound will play through that speaker inside the case. Don't go nuts though, the amp is pretty strong and I've damaged a 2 Watt speaker with mine before (On purpose, given it was wrecked already) so if you start making it distort you should really back off if you don't want the speaker to break. The rear jack also passes this amp, so you can use those crappy passive speakers and still get nice loud sound.

HighTreason wrote:

It's a kickass card, the onboard amp is a killer, you can control the mixer from the command line, the FM is thick and bassy and they are all-round good cards. The SB compatibility is pretty good too. You can also control the volume in Windows with key combinations without opening a mixer.

Be warned - the CD Audio header has a funky pinout, something like G R G L G I believe.

Something else awesome; Near the SCSI interface, you can see a little 4-pin header. If you plug a speaker into that header and have nothing in the Line Out jack, sound will play through that speaker inside the case. Don't go nuts though, the amp is pretty strong and I've damaged a 2 Watt speaker with mine before (On purpose, given it was wrecked already) so if you start making it distort you should really back off if you don't want the speaker to break. The rear jack also passes this amp, so you can use those crappy passive speakers and still get nice loud sound.

Very interesting! Is it likely that this card would work okay along side my CT2940+CT1920 setup? It'd be cool to hear the different types of music back to back to compare them.

Also, what kind of wattage and impedance are we talking about with that amp? I build speakers and have several at my disposal. Loose or in cabinets. Is the internal connector stereo? This is really cool... I've never heard of an amplified internal speaker connector on a sound card. I'm picturing an old dual voice coil midrange speaker I have being powered by my sound card. 😊

Ozzuneoj wrote:

It'd be cool to hear the different types of music back to back to compare them.

PAS uses same FM for music, as Creative SB, so you don't find a difference.

It does, but I think the circuitry around it is better, it sounds 'fuller' to me.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Very interesting! Is it likely that this card would work okay along side my CT2940+CT1920 setup? It'd be cool to hear the different types of music back to back to compare them.

Also, what kind of wattage and impedance are we talking about with that amp? I build speakers and have several at my disposal. Loose or in cabinets. Is the internal connector stereo? This is really cool... I've never heard of an amplified internal speaker connector on a sound card. I'm picturing an old dual voice coil midrange speaker I have being powered by my sound card. 😊

I've no idea how well it would work next to another card, I've rarely had any success in using multiple cards of any kind so I'd long given up by the time I got any PAS cards. It seems to work next to a SoundScape, but that is probably because the two cards are so different. Next to an actual Sound Blaster I have no idea how things will turn out.

The internal connector is mono so far as I am aware. It seems to be a simple + NC NC G according to memory anyway. I know I use it on my system and have the SoundScape taking the CD audio, but then hijacking its line-out and plugging that into the PAS's CD input. The PAS goes out to either an built-in speaker or the rear jack. The amplifier is 4 Watts to the best of my knowledge, but I am unsure about the Ohms rating, presumably 8 Ohms, but I honestly don't know.

Sound Blaster 16 for 10 euro. Could someone explain to me what the CT number for cards like this is? The PCB says CT2290 and the sticker on the back says CT2291?

Voodoo 2 for a 10 euro:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Could someone explain to me what the CT number for cards like this is? The PCB says CT2290 and the sticker on the back says CT2291?

CT- on pcb is always with "0" on end, and last digit on label shows revision - with or without ASP chip, with or without cdrom pins soldered, and etc.
But is most cases used only "ct-" on pcb. So if you start googling for ct2291 - you probably can't find drivers/manuals and so on.

Helwett-Packard Vectra 6 Xu (dual pentium PRO), out of 3 motherboards only one is not phisically damaged, and Maxtor XT-8380S 380MB hard drive.

Great board. I bought exactly the same one years ago, but wasn't able to power it on. Actually I didn't even try, as I'm 99% sure it requires proprietary non-ATX PSU. http://hw-museum.cz/view-mb.php?mbID=18
Do you have just the board or whole HP system (including PSU)? I'm really curious what kind of PSU is needed to run this thing. Operational i450KX board is something like dream to me... regular i440FX are too simple and boring. 🤣

Ozzuneoj wrote:

*Awesome story about a Midway/Quantum3D arcade computer (on p. 574)*

This is so cool. Please tell me you're going to keep it as a system and not part out the Voodoo's. If it were mine, I'd also be making a HDD image pretty quickly.
Thanks for sharing story and pictures!

stoof wrote:

Ozzuneoj wrote:

*Awesome story about a Midway/Quantum3D arcade computer (on p. 574)*

This is so cool. Please tell me you're going to keep it as a system and not part out the Voodoo's. If it were mine, I'd also be making a HDD image pretty quickly.
Thanks for sharing story and pictures!

No way will I be parting this out!

I plan to keep it around, use it to some degree, maybe refurbish it and keep it as retro gaming system. I do see it as an investment as its already worth way more than I spent on it. If I can find a side panel from a similarly sized computer I could probably fabricate something and maybe at some point give it a fresh coat of paint since its all scratched up.

I'll most likely put the Voodoo 3 and the hard drive (well marked!!) in storage and set it up with some different parts if I plan to use it. I could even put a different motherboard in it... but we'll see. I certainly won't be splitting it all up and selling off the components. If I end up needing the cash its worth more all together anyway.

I do have to figure out what to do about the green+black permanently connected ATX power connector though. Its currently not practical to use since it can't be plugged in without it turning on, and I really don't want to have to cut power to it with a power strip every time.

As for the other misc arcade parts, I may hang on to them for a bit to show them to the one or two people I know personally who would care about such things, but I'll likely resell them since they came to me already removed from systems. If I can scrounge up a dozen cards to save from the scrap heap and sell a few to fund the next dozen, I certainly will. 😀

By the way, does anyone else cry a little bit to themselves when they see auctions for "gold fingers" unceremoniously lopped off of hundreds of old ISA, VLB, PCI and AGP cards? I know that in reality it was probably 99% dial up modems and obsolete business\networking\telecom stuff, but in my mind I picture heaps of vintage video and sound cards laying in a land fill somewhere with no connectors on them. As if the listing was " 15lbs GOLD FINGERS FOR SCRAP - Quantum3D, Ultrasound, Voodoo, Roland, IBM, NV1"... 🤣

havli wrote:

Great board. I bought exactly the same one years ago, but wasn't able to power it on. Actually I didn't even try, as I'm 99% sure it requires proprietary non-ATX PSU. http://hw-museum.cz/view-mb.php?mbID=18
Do you have just the board or whole HP system (including PSU)? I'm really curious what kind of PSU is needed to run this thing. Operational i450KX board is something like dream to me... regular i440FX are too simple and boring. 🤣

I am also thinking that it is using an nonstandard, in my opinion rearranged, pinout of an normal ATX supply, just like for example in macintosh G4's, as the other boards keep restarting the psu 😀
Also this board uses the intel 450GX chipset, the one with up to 8GB 4-way interleaved memory, SMP up to 4 CPU's and as I read two separate PCI channels. Interesting board (nice body 😁 ).

Ok, I am playing around with the Sharp right now...the thing hangs on booting the MS-DOS floppy and the floppy drive makes noise like SH*T when it hangs.

I took the sharp apart, checked the caps and battery on the mainboard, checked the caps on the PSU....ALL FINE!!
Right now I have managed to put the floppydrives in another PC (long live my tech knowledge) and grabbed another 5,25 DD floppy from the attic (a know good one) so I can make a new boot floppy and try it.

To be continued....

This isn't exactly retro hardware, but I just picked up a big pile of useful newer parts and it contained an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI card which has a midi interface on it. The card is in excellent condition and has the original box and all accessories.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16829121120

I don't do any music recording, or anything else like that, but I do appreciate high quality audio and DACs and such, and the fact that it has a midi interface (with in and out dongle) is interesting as well.

Does a card like this offer anything to a retro computing enthusiast?

I did notice that the card (being a 2003 model) has support all the way back to Windows 95. It doesn't seem to advertise any kind of game compatibility, so I doubt its meant for anything like that, but is it useful as a midi card in any way?

Also, is it likely to have any benefit over a Xonar DX as far as providing clean and clear analog audio?

Ok so yesterday I was trying to get the Sharp Floppydrives hooked up to a "normal" desktop PC (athlon 1300) with mixed success .

I got the drive to be found, just couldn't get to format, read or write anything.
Tonight I tried again and I succeeded in getting it working.

I made a DOS 6.22 harddisk (using VMWare and images from my original DOS 6.22 install 3,5" diskettes) and planted that into my athlon tonight.
I managed to format a floppy with the Sharp floppydrive and after that I did another format, but with the /S command (copy system files to disk)

After that was done, I tried booting the just made DOS 6.22 5,25 (360k) floppy on my sharp pc-7000, and it worked!
I actually booted DOS 6.22 on my 8086 machine!!

Now the next step is writing a DOS 2.11 floppy image to a real disk and get this show on the road, for now all I have is DOS 6.22 with nothing.... to be continued...

I ended up (painfully) paying $250 for the lot. It consisted of the following Silicon Graphics parts:

4 x 8mb ram DIMMss
7 x 2mb ram DIMMs
1 x Turbo Graphics Option boardset
1 x Z-buffer Option board
1 x Bitplane Option board
1 x GR1.5 board
2 x IP25 system boards (the main guts from a Personal Iris 4D/35

It all came from a recycler...who forgot to mention he had already gone over the main boards and harvested all the VLSI chips...so they're just about a complete loss but there's a small Bt hardware cursor chip I can steal for another machine and run a two-color hardware cursor.

CelGen wrote:

I ended up (painfully) paying $250 for the lot. It consisted of the following Silicon Graphics parts:

awesome, nice deal on some sgi parts...

CelGen wrote:

It all came from a recycler...who forgot to mention he had already gone over the main boards and harvested all the VLSI chips....

oh 🙁 what a ripoff instead 🙁 that sucks to hear

Cyrix MediaGX motherboard in original box ~30€ shipped.
Board design includes fake cache, a fake DIMM slot (spots without connections) and a 133 MHz chip running at 166 MHz ...best regards from PC Chips

CelGen wrote:

I ended up (painfully) paying $250 for the lot. It consisted of the following Silicon Graphics parts: […]
Show full quote

I ended up (painfully) paying $250 for the lot. It consisted of the following Silicon Graphics parts:

4 x 8mb ram DIMMss
7 x 2mb ram DIMMs
1 x Turbo Graphics Option boardset
1 x Z-buffer Option board
1 x Bitplane Option board
1 x GR1.5 board
2 x IP25 system boards (the main guts from a Personal Iris 4D/35

It all came from a recycler...who forgot to mention he had already gone over the main boards and harvested all the VLSI chips...so they're just about a complete loss but there's a small Bt hardware cursor chip I can steal for another machine and run a two-color hardware cursor.

They look like two of those sticker books for children where the children collect alot of expensive stickers picturing animals, cars or footballers and it costs a fortune to buy enough packs of stickers to complete the book. The sticker book it self is often cheap and comes with a few stickers to get the children hooked.

BastlerMike wrote:

Cyrix MediaGX motherboard in original box ~30€ shipped.
Board design includes fake cache, a fake DIMM slot (spots without connections) and a 133 MHz chip running at 166 MHz ...best regards from PC Chips

Nice!

When it comes to PC Chips motherboards from this era, the more oddities the better! 😁

Just because I'm taking a break from buying stuff there have been an unending stream of great deals on Socket-775 hardware on Tradera (Swedish auction site) lately.

X48 motherboard + quad-core CPU + cooling + 4-8GB memory + decent video card bundles have been selling for ~50 euro, in some cases even less, that is what a Q9550 costs alone on Ebay. I have not bought anything though...well perhaps a single little cheap untested motherboard with CPU + cooling only costing ~10 euro + ~7 euro shipping.

First this picture just to once again mention ESD-safety...

What could be inside?

An Abit Fatal1ty AA8XE Intel 925XE motherboard! I already had the Abit AA8 and the Abit AA8XE but not the Fatal1ty edition of Abit AA8XE. 😀

Notice the power and reset buttons on the motherboard, not bad for year 2004 gear.

I have not tested the board yet and I have not checked what kind of hot running Prescot I got but the bundle looks good with no bad caps in sight (they are hidden by a plastic shroud). I planned to revisit my Pentium D 965 EE + Gigabyte X486-DS4 setup this weekend to see if a better Doom 3 score is within reach but I think I will postpone that a week to see if this bundle works.