Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Very interesting. Got a picture?

I'll take one when I get at home 😀

I tried to test my awe32(ct3980) card with hexen. First, I have to mention that I'm using a nec xr385 db. So I'm not playing with awe32's gm synth. Last week when I tried that with the nec db on my ct2800 sb16, when I played level 2, from the begginng I had this very high frequency annoying continuous note. Today the first time I loaded level 2, and left it there without playing at all and waited. After 5-6 minutes there was a note playing all the time, however it wasn't like that I heard the other time. Sounded a lot better, if you can say that... But played forever. Then I tried something else. Reloaded the game, and started playing. Sometime I "died", but instead of quitting the game, I left it playing music. And it's playing for about 1hour and 15 minutes without any annoying sounds.... I'm confused.

Another fact, is that since I bought that nec db, I've used 3 different creative cards. First I had a sb16pnp. It had lots of problems while playing. Then I bought the ct2800, and it played a lot better. Very big improvement. I would play monkey island in roland mode, and it sounded good(of course having played the mt32 emulation midi file first), but it was very different from a real mt-32. Now I tried that also with the 3980 card, and to my surprise, it works even better. And I tried again monkey island, and this time it resembles a lot the real roland sound!

Well that sounds odd, as the wavetable boards should sound the same, no matter what host card you are using...

I know that it should play the same. I can't explain why it doesn't... Is it possible that the sound card doesn't drive the db correctly? Here, you can listen to it. http://www.mediafire.com/?7d76k8c5zzyku9r
I think it sounds rather good.
I'll try some other time to record the other card also.

Wow that sounds great! 😳

if I forgot to mention, I did the hexen test using my CT1910 (wave blaster II) attached to my CT3900 (AWE32)
as stated earlier, no problems

Alright, crappy cellphone pictures
I can upload more pics when I'll completely rebuild it, when I receive all the parts 😀

http://i55.tinypic.com/125ntbc.jpg
http://i56.tinypic.com/aotfuq.jpg

White ISA slots 😁
Looks pretty pretty hehe 😜

Anyway, whats wrong with the Banshee anyway? They aren't getting much love it seems. Maybe because they are (slightly) worse then the V2's and slower then the single card V3's?
Maybe they are just problematic? I remember having tried an AGP one once and remembering there was 1 game I couldn't get to run (though I didn't try very hard also) and exchanged the card with a TNT2 Vanta and a V2.

And about the blocking slots, thats one advantage ATX has. As the cpu socket is located above the slots, none of the expansion slots should be blocked 😉

One thing I don't like about AT style systems though, they have very poor cooling.
And about the Voodoo 2's and active cooling, if there are fans mounted on them, you might as well use them. If you're short on molex's, you could get a couple splitters. Those splitters should work fine for things like fans.

Because the ATI Rage LT Pro is more recent, am I risking having a poorer compatibility than say a S3 Trio 64?

Tetrium wrote:

White ISA slots 😁

Very nice!

The cable layout is a pain however. Unless you like a Spaghetti cable job 😜

As I said I'm probably gonna rebuild it when everything gets there 😜 I have like 7 packages incoming, so yeah.

I was thinking about making some custom length IDE cable, I have access to a nice crimping machine.

Markk wrote:

Now I tried that also with the 3980 card, and to my surprise, it works even better. And I tried again monkey island, and this time it resembles a lot the real roland sound!

Edit: My post below is wrong. Please ignore. End Edit.

This is really intriguing. I wonder if your AWE32 is using its special "FM to AWE" music "conversion" functionality?

I think that the AWE32 is capable of "converting" FM game music using the AWE32's EMU processor, with added effects such as reverb/chorus. I'm not too sure how it works, exactly. However, I believe that there is a jumper on the AWE32, which toggles this functionality between On and Off, depending on what you want the AWE32 to do with FM music. It might be called MFBEN, but that's just from my vague memory.

It's just possible that you have unwittingly activated this feature, somehow. I really think this needs further investigation. 😀

I don't know.... maybe most creative cards are buggy when used with a db, and perhaps the 3980 isn't, or is less buggy than others. To make you understand better what I mean when I say that the previous card I used, didn't play correctly, I can tell you this. When monkey island starts, first you hear 3 sustaining notes that form a chord, and that is kept playing until the main theme begins. Then when the lucasfilms games logo appears, we have some other notes heared as soon as the edges on some letters glow. With my current setup it sounds ok. But using the other card this didn't have the sustaining notes from the beggining. And when the main theme started it used a different instrument for the melody. And of course each time I first remap the instruments to mt-32 mode, otherwise it plays very wrong.

Markk wrote:

And of course each time I first remap the instruments to mt-32 mode, otherwise it plays very wrong.

Well that answers your question 😜

That card is running in MT-32 mode, nothing more, nothing less.

To test this, type MONKEY a for Adlib and MONKEY r for Roland.

Monkey Island doesn't use custom sounds (at least not in the beginning) and that's why any card in MT-32 mode will sound good.

Well, that might seem to explain it, however using the other card, it was still very different when running in mt-32 mode. I really don't know. When I have time, I'm going to try all of the three cards I have and try to record them all playing the same thing, and perhaps start a new thread.

Yea it's likely a combonation of having too many parts and getting old 🤣

MT-32 with manual and AC adapter for 120$, good deal?
Considering I don't have a MPU-401 intelligent mode card.

olivil wrote:

MT-32 with manual and AC adapter for 120$, good deal?

I've got an idea. I'll go on to ebay, and carefully type in the phase mt-32, and see what's available...

Tinkering, I found the jumpers to change the FSB, changed it from 66MHz to 75MHz, overclocking from 200 to 225. Snooper really basic benchmark gave me positive results. How can I be sure it's 100% stable? And won't that give me funky RAM timings? (Was it important in that time? I mean, I understand how overclocking works, but I never overclocked a non-DDR setup) My board has jumper tables printed onboard , the next step is 83MHz, there are 2 non-documented settings (6 are printed out of 8 possibilities), can I burn the CPU or is there any protection?

EDIT: 1st undocumented jumper setting: 66MHz
2nd undocumented jumper setting: 83MHz (giving me 250MHz!) 😀

What symptoms should I look for except temps?

Don't overclock. IMO if you aren't sure what you are doing, why mess with it?

If you need something faster, just get faster retro parts 🤣