I was messing around with the Margi DVD-to-go card trying to make it work on my Hitachi Visionbook Pro 6000 laptop. It's a P233MMX machine, 128Mb Ram, C&T 65555 videochip, W98, has ZV support on upper slot. I used MCI drivers for the card, WDM drivers did not detect the card at all. Initially it did not want to display video on laptop screen (error -261, unable to load margivpm.dll). I tried it both with default(windows) drivers, as well as with standard C&T 65555 video drivers. No luck. But video/audio output to an external tv screen worked. After a lot of googling I downloaded and insalled the drivers that come with Compaq Armada 1700 and the card worked. But there was no audio. Installing dedicated sound drivers for ES1879 solved the problem. Now it's working perfectly!

Testing CDROM drives in my 486, to determine if any will work in it at all. Not that I have any rails to attach to the drive to keep it in place. Stupid HP desktop cases...

JonathonWyble wrote:

SpectriaForce wrote:

I was busy editing photos when I discovered a damaged sound card (didn't notice it when I was taking photos, almost advertised it for sale 😜 ):

Aztech AZT2316 16-bit ISA geluidskaart d.jpg

Might or might not be repairable. Free for anyone who wants to collect it or pay for shipping.

Probably not. Most graphics cards may not be easy to fix unless you know exactly what you're doing. But maybe they are possible to fix, who knows. I guess you can sell that thing if you really want to.

Err it is a sound card with radial electrolytic capacitors that can easily be replaced. Still, there might be more damage besides the exploded cap. I don't sell stuff of which I am sure that it is defective.

Just went through my cable stash and got power cable to go from one systems psu to the monitor because her-in-doors complained about too many power cables being plugged into one wall power sock back on back. My record is five so far. Also grabbed a 13 to 9 pin vga cable to use on some of my Acorn systems.

Cable worked a treat so hooked up my flat screen 18.5" crt and WAHOO! IT'S ALIVE!!!

British Broadcasting Corperation MicroComputer System aka Acorn A3000 from 1989 running Acorn RiscOS 3.11(from Sep '92 so it had been undated at some point) and sports 2meg (also an upgrade from the original 1meg) of ram. The A3000 uses an 8MHz ARM2 cpu. With the OS being in rom it boots up fairly smartly. The FDD accepts IBM PC Fat12, Atari format and a couple of Acorn formats. I've been very sick for the last four or so years so it's been under the bed since I tidied up the battery corrosion. These have the batteries far away from the mobo.There is the possibility of fitting a HDD. Just just need the right 2.5" hdd module. I'm a very happy wee chappy indeedy. Found an original boxy looking Logitech Acorn mouse in an icecream container with old PC mice. The connector housing was a wonky so that got sorted out and it works fine and dandy.

Finished recapping my IIgs power supply and made a bunch of 800k diskettes with ADTpro. Ultima 1 never looked so good.

appiah4 wrote:

Windows9566 wrote:

which sound card should i use for my P100 DOS 6.22/WFWG 3.11 build, a Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 CT1600 or a Sound Blaster 16 CT1740?

Neither; the Pro 2.0 really deserves to be in a 386/486 and the CT1740 is a very noisy sound card; but if you had to choose between the two for that system I'd say go for CT1740.

The CT1740 hate is real, eh?

I can vouch for the CT1740, it is a very nice card and despite what appiah4 wrote, the ones I have are all rather quiet, one is a tad noisy but it has old smelly caps that are long overdue for replacement. The other two CT1740s I have are totally fine.

jaZz_KCS wrote:

[...]

The CT1740 hate is real, eh?

I can vouch for the CT1740, it is a very nice card and despite what appiah4 wrote, the ones I have are all rather quiet, one is a tad noisy but it has old smelly caps that are long overdue for replacement. The other two CT1740s I have are totally fine.

Thing about 'noisy' is that it isn't shielded. If your PC and ISA bus are quiet, the output of the card will also be, but if your system is electrically noisy, you'll hear it. Sounds like you have a nice quiet bus 😀

Edit: and of course the old DSP doesn't help either.

The question is : how can isa/PCI bus can be quieted ?

Deksor wrote:

The question is : how can isa/PCI bus can be quieted ?

Who cares? It's called character.

Deksor wrote:

The question is : how can isa/PCI bus can be quieted ?

It's a design thing, if it's noisy that means it's not properly filtered. Some boards have mounting holes for filtering caps between the slots that are unpopulated in newer revisions, if you solder these on it may possibly alleviate the issue.

My experience is that if you are working with brands like PCChips, Tomato and whatnot you will probably hear a lot of pops cracks hisses and high pitched whines with cards like CT1740, it's all but inevitable. This also goes for most 486 boards I've tried as well, even better ones like stuff from Chicony and Octek have a lot of interference in the bus in my experience.

As nostalgic as they are to me (I had CT1600 and CT1740 in my DX33 and DX4-100 systems) I can't stand them anymore, so I went with a decent ES688 card for my 386SX and a decent YMF719 card for my 486SX builds and I will just use an AWE64 Value for my 486DX4 build in the near future even though I have a boatload of Creative SB16 cards.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Deksor wrote:

The question is : how can isa/PCI bus can be quieted ?

Who cares? It's called character.

This so called "character" gets on my nerves.
It's a sound card, not a noise card !! 😠

Creative ISA sound blaster cards are very average in terms of output quality and noise. Even the AWE64 isn't that good from this perspective.

I have found ESS and in particular Yamaha ISA cards, to be much better. But you have to disable the onboard amplifier. If you have headphones, you will need to provide an external amplifier to get decent sound.

If you must use an ISA card from Creative in your computer, adjust the outputs to minimize the amount of noise the cards pick up and transmit.

Deksor wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

Deksor wrote:

The question is : how can isa/PCI bus can be quieted ?

Who cares? It's called character.

This so called "character" gets on my nerves.
It's a sound card, not a noise card !! 😠

Get a better card then. A generic ESS card is probably quieter. Just because it's a Sound Blaster doesn't mean it is top of the bunch.

Deksor wrote:

The question is : how can isa/PCI bus can be quieted ?

For the CT1740 I found that disabling the internal amplifier gets rid of a lot of the “thinking noise”. Unfortunately on the CT1600 there are no jumpers to disable it.

kaputnik wrote:

Got a text from an old subcontractor a few weeks ago. Knowing my interest in retro computing, he asked me if I happened to have an Asus P5A-B board to sell. Told him no, sorry, and asked what he was gonna use it for. Turned out he's repairing an old CNC mill, that's controlled by a built in MS-DOS PC with that particular mobo and a custom ISA I/O card. Figured any baby AT board would do the job, and offered to swap a tested and working Lucky Star board for the broken P5A-B.

So, today I finally got the P5A-B in my hands. It's the 1.04 revision. Cleaned it off, and checked it visually. Everything looks good. Can't wait for Wednesday, when I'm going home from work, and start the project to get it back to life again 😁

Score! A thorough cleaning did the trick 😁

don't think this is going to come out any better than this

As my main PC's PSU decided that it will take an eternal vocation from now on, I'm a bit forced to use my old trusty EeePC 1015PEM.
Intel Atom 2/4 cores, 2GB ram, 128GB SSD, Windows 7

Well... It's good enough to browse the forums and such, but youtube is completely out of the question. 😜 Full keyboard will help the first (as i'm currently posting this post from it) and the second i can do through a phone anyways. Only real downside is the tiny resolution of the screen: 1024x600

Actually, quite a nice little netbook. Back in days, it was my everyday machine at school with battery that lasted the whole full day with wifi turned on. Even today, i can get 5-6 hours out of it. 😜

went to the National Videogame Museum in Frisco.
I was amazed at how much interesting stuff they have there. If you have the chance, I definitely recommend it!
as a plus : staff was super nice 😀

Beegle wrote:

went to the National Videogame Museum in Frisco.
I was amazed at how much interesting stuff they have there. If you have the chance, I definitely recommend it!
as a plus : staff was super nice 😀

Have been and some very nice collections under one roof. If you really want to be blown away attend the largest retro video game expo in North America. It's fantastic!

https://www.retrogamingexpo.com/