FioGermi wrote on 2022-04-20, 16:22:

appiah4 wrote on 2022-04-20, 11:31:

FioGermi wrote on 2022-04-19, 20:35:

You know. I'm gonna be honest with you all: The more i spend time with the Sound Blaster Pro 2, the more I'm happy i didn't pay anywhere near what people on Ebay want.

This card is actually underwhelming. I think some of the Aztech clones iv had previously sounded better! Everything with the pro is just....muffled and uncomfortable. Just a tad bit sad sounding compared to how clear the FM and digital effects quality was on the Aztech. Could be bad caps too ofc.

Sounds like bad caps to me. PCM I can understand but FM should be pretty punchy and clean on a Pro 2.

The FM isn't distorted or anything. Its just a little quieter and a tiny bit muffled sounding compared to my memory of a previous Aztech clone card i hard. Granted i probably played with the mixer on that one (and i was using headphones then) so maybe that's why. Or caps. That probably too. Its been how many years? Beyond the expected life span of the card, that is for sure

Is the Pro 2 suppose to have issues with Duke Nukem 2?

No. That game works fine with a real SBPro2.

The sound card has a low pass filter (that causes higher sample rates to be muffled) that many SBPro compatibles clones lacks which can be disabled with the mixer program that comes with the DOS drivers.

Later Creative ISA sound cards uses a brickwall filter which prevents aliasing much better with higher sample rates.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-04-20, 17:02:

No. That game works fine with a real SBPro2. […]
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FioGermi wrote on 2022-04-20, 16:22:

appiah4 wrote on 2022-04-20, 11:31:

Sounds like bad caps to me. PCM I can understand but FM should be pretty punchy and clean on a Pro 2.

The FM isn't distorted or anything. Its just a little quieter and a tiny bit muffled sounding compared to my memory of a previous Aztech clone card i hard. Granted i probably played with the mixer on that one (and i was using headphones then) so maybe that's why. Or caps. That probably too. Its been how many years? Beyond the expected life span of the card, that is for sure

Is the Pro 2 suppose to have issues with Duke Nukem 2?

No. That game works fine with a real SBPro2.

The sound card has a low pass filter (that causes higher sample rates to be muffled) that many SBPro compatibles clones lacks which can be disabled with the mixer program that comes with the DOS drivers.

Later Creative ISA sound cards uses a brickwall filter which prevents aliasing much better with higher sample rates.

Duke Nukem 2 digital audio was garbled for me. I'll give it another go here

EDIT: My ears must be dying. I disabled the filter and messed around with the mixer and now i sounds fine. A little loud, low quality and boom-y, but it sounds like Duke Nukem 2!

My Pentium M laptop is showing its age a bit these days. It has a column of discolored pixels on the screen, and today while I was browsing vogons the left mouse button stopped working. I clicked on a thread and nothing happened. Browser freeze? OS freeze? No, keyboard still working and so is the right mouse button. But tapping also doesn't work, so I guess the left button is shorted out. I right-clicked on the NX PAD icon in the system tray and got this configuration dialog.

It's funny because after all these years I don't recall ever seeing this before. I disabled the left button and reassigned the center button. Problem solved, until I get around to doing a real repair at least. I have some spare parts for this machine, so while I am checking out the touch pad maybe I can also figure out why the cardbus slot seems to have gone dead.

Setup the DOS Multiboot Menus on the BSI. Also managed to wrangle some extra clarity out of the DSTN screen by ever-so-slightly twisting the panel....it must have lined up the layers.

Really odd thing is this DSTN panel does not really "smear" very much at all. It's a Sanyo LCM-533 series panel IIRC. Played a some DOS games on it last night, Wacky Wheels and Doom do really well on this laptop.

Also enabled the fn+ key pop-up drivers so now I can do all the usual wacky STN adjustments (bold text, stretch, etc.).

Looks like this one will be a keeper. Planning to put in one of those WiFi Modems (basically an Arduino AP that connects to the COM port), and that LPT Adlib card.

Finished repairing the first of three Korg 05R/W units today.

Previous repair work on this unit included replacing a half dozen capacitors, and reflowing solder on a couple cracked solder joints.

Volume was still wonky on this unit, so I disassembled the potentiometer and cleaned out the grime that had built up. After reassembling it's working just fine.

One down, two to go!

After letting the Thinkpad R51 dry out after rescue it is dead. Not boops, doots, just a slow sizziling power noise. EDIT: After further testing it now is fully working and the battery briefly charged enough to not die in the bios if my hand moves from the tiny micro position the charger will charge from. Worn DC jack or charger plug. Have a Dell Centrino Pentium M with borked hinges Im going to finally decommission and snag hopefully a 2nd 512mb stick to get the R51 up to 1gb along with the CPU to get rid of the 1.3 Celeron.

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-04-21, 22:53:

Volume was still wonky on this unit, so I disassembled the potentiometer and cleaned out the grime that had built up. After reassembling it's working just fine.

DeoxIT makes a specific kind of contact cleaner for this called Fader F100. I would recommend keeping a small bottle of this on hand for audio repairs. It's great for cleaning scratchy pots.

Completed my testing of dos 6.22 + Windows 3.11 on a 23mb hard drive. Using drvspace for compression still had about 13mb free after trimming down the help files and the lesser useful apps. My experience with this OS (Win3) was on a PS/2 for many years, so I never had networking or audio. This time around i learned about enabling SB support in Control Panel (that was easier than expected 🤣) and got networking to work too. Mapped network share in File Manager to my Pi running Samba and it worked pleasantly and immediately. The only issue I’m seeing is that I guess Linux isn’t managing dos 8.3 Filenames so files longer than 8 are a crapshoot and only the first letter appears to be reliable. Good news is the stuff I would need for that OS is limited and I could work on renaming those.

But I won’t. Had my fun learning but it’s just not worth using. Honestly even on a 486dx2 66 Windows 95 is plenty fast enough for me and frankly just more fun and flexible, and that’s about the lowest spec I have in my arsenal so I’m definitely sticking with it.

Zeerex wrote on 2022-04-22, 04:31:

Had my fun learning but it’s just not worth using. Honestly even on a 486dx2 66 Windows 95 is plenty fast enough for me and frankly just more fun and flexible, and that’s about the lowest spec I have in my arsenal so I’m definitely sticking with it.

yes, whilst it can be fun to run a machine of pre 486 vintage when it comes to actually using a machine i will always take a 486 or pentium 1 over a pre 486

and will always prefer win 95 (if machine has 16 or more mb ram) for ease of use, win 3.1 if spec is borderline. I suppose it's my lower limit for practical vintage use

This is my opinion as well. I think I works feel differently if the machine was all genuine vintage IBM, but otherwise it feels like a waste. I don't mind using Windows 3.1 though.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-04-22, 03:32:

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-04-21, 22:53:

Volume was still wonky on this unit, so I disassembled the potentiometer and cleaned out the grime that had built up. After reassembling it's working just fine.

DeoxIT makes a specific kind of contact cleaner for this called Fader F100. I would recommend keeping a small bottle of this on hand for audio repairs. It's great for cleaning scratchy pots.

Yeah, I should probably invest in some new contact cleaner. I do have some off-brand stuff, which I tried on this particular pot. It didn't help much.

When I took it apart, there was a lot of blackish gunk built up which I removed. Wonder if a better contact cleaner might have helped with that.

I wonder if that gunk was some kind of fader grease. I'm not sure why else something like that would be in there. If the component produces a lot of compression, it might be designed for grease and wear quickly with it cleaned off.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-04-22, 14:09:

I wonder if that gunk was some kind of fader grease. I'm not sure why else something like that would be in there. If the component produces a lot of compression, it might be designed for grease and wear quickly with it cleaned off.

There was some sticky black gunk on the device in various places (including inside). Not sure if it's all related, although it could ben an indication of the environment the unit was used in, or some type of past spill.

At any rate, the pot is lubed up so it should hopefully be fine. Since it's only used for volume, I don't think it would be used as frequently as if it was some multi-purpose encoder. I'm not too fussed about it.

I do have replacements if I ever needed to replace it.

Started recording some Game Midi's on a Miditech Pianobox USB Module and uploading them to Youtube.

Made a Playlist for Transport Tycoon and started uploading the recordings

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8qJAX … TuBJ1kEWP7yr8qj

Bancho wrote on 2022-04-22, 17:35:

Started recording some Game Midi's on a Miditech Pianobox USB Module and uploading them to Youtube.

Made a Playlist for Transport Tycoon and started uploading the recordings

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8qJAX … TuBJ1kEWP7yr8qj

Awesome, sounds like a great module!

Did you do any editing to the MIDI files first or are these stock GM files?

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-04-22, 20:52:

Bancho wrote on 2022-04-22, 17:35:

Started recording some Game Midi's on a Miditech Pianobox USB Module and uploading them to Youtube.

Made a Playlist for Transport Tycoon and started uploading the recordings

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8qJAX … TuBJ1kEWP7yr8qj

Awesome, sounds like a great module!

Did you do any editing to the MIDI files first or are these stock GM files?

I didn't touch the files. I downloaded the files from https://www.transporttycoon.net/music?recording=1

I plan on making recordings of other games and uploading them to my channel.

I've made a bracket - stand; I don't know how else would I name it, to prevent my graphics card from bending too much, due to quite heavy passive heatsink. It was time-consuming, but I like the result in my Windows XP build.

Replaced the socket plastics on a ECS K7VZA. Left is the old socket and right is, of course, the new socket.

Well done. How hard was it to desolder the socket?

I'm testing out the GM2 mode of the Roland VSTi from many years ago. It seems quite nice with the QuestStudios MIDI files.