Next order of business was the sound card. The Jazz-16 is one of the many OEM cards that Gateway 2000 sold while I worked there, along with the Ensoniq Soundscape (an early PnP ISA card), the Vibra16, and eventually the Ensoniq AudioPCI once Windows 95 was firmly established. Creative would eventually buy Ensoniq and that AudioPCI would get a SoundBlaster name, but that was later.

On paper the Jazz-16 sounds like a good card. Fully Soundblaster Pro compatible with a true OPL3 FM synth chip. Like the SoundBlasters it came with a variety of CD-ROM interfaces bolted onto it. As OEM cards go, it's not all that bad. This one supports an LMSI CD-ROM with a diminutive 25-pin connector and CD-Audio header. That drive is long gone, so that interface goes unused.

The Jazz-16 is soft-set and unlike the SoundBlaster it requires a driver, JAZZ.SYS, loaded via config.sys. You tell this driver what hardware personality the card should have and it does the thing. The only hardware configuration is an IO address and IRQ for the LMSI interface and a pair of "disable" jumpers for the joystick and MPU-401 emulation. The MPU-401 is factory-set to "disabled".

The Jazz-16 has a hardware volume wheel on it like the old Soundblasters, but the FX/music mix is way off. I need to check the driver for a software mixer. The driver I'm using came right off the Vogons driver site, so thanks for that.

Perhaps there is something amiss with my connection because I'm unable to see a photo of the system. All I see is a wall of text. Maybe you forgot to attach it? New threads with photos are more likely to be viewed and read.

It took a while to get here but I didn't start a deep clean until I was sure the system was operational in all the ways I wanted it. She was pretty grimy.

The motherboard occupies about half the case. It's interesting to recall how tightly integrated these systems used to be: note the first two RAM slots lie at an angle, which provides clearance for the 3.5" drive cage to be installed immediately above it. In the north is a Socket5 CPU and in the southwest is a set of full IO (2x Serial, 1x Parallel, Floppy, 2x IDE), and it features 4x16-bit ISA slots, 2 PCI, and 1 combo slot.

With the drive cage installed you can barely even see the RAM living beneath it. This cage would house a 3.5" floppy drive and/or a hard disk, neither of which are presently installed.

In this view you can see the front fan/speaker assembly (I've installed a modern Noctua fan to replace the phenomenally noisy original) which provides air intake for the passive heatsink as well as those beep tones so crucial to retro computing. With the ribbon cables for all the drives and IO ports installed, the view becomes much more cluttered, though there's still a lot of room in the case to fold and tuck those things (given that fact, I think this computer needs a drag name).

The other side of the case has the 5.25 bays and the power supply, which is installed in an over-sized cage with some anchor points that allow mounting two more 3.5" hard drives, though it would be a tight fit. There is plenty of room under this cage to tuck the ribbon and power cable slack. The new fan is routed over and around to this side where a power tap from the floppy drive feeds it.

That combo floppy, by the way, attaches with the edge-connector like a 5.25 drive, using a cable with *three* pairs of connectors, which makes it one of the longest floppy cables I've ever seen. Ordinarily this type of cable would connect to an A: and a B: drive and the third connector could support a Tape Backup Unit, like the Colorado 250 that Gateway sold as an option.

Photo of the case? Is that an intel-branded motherboard? I think that's what Gateway used, wasn't it?

feipoa wrote:

Photo of the case? Is that an intel-branded motherboard? I think that's what Gateway used, wasn't it?

looks like a Intel Premiere/PCI II Plato with a 430NX chipset

The Jazz-16 card is well-known but under-documented. As I mentioned previously it came in several flavors and this is a Gateway OEM version with an LMSI CD interface.

There's very little in the way of hardware configuration here:

* J11 - DISJS - Joystick Disable
* J12 - DISMPU - MPU-401 Disable
* J10 - CD IO Address (340h Default)
* J8 - CD IRQ (IRQ 11 Default)

There's a header for the LMSI CD interface (J9) and a 3-pin header for CD-Audio (J1). It has Line-In, Mic-In, Out, a Volume wheel and 15-pin game port.

It features the Yamaha OPL3 chip. MPU-401 is factory-set as "Disabled."

With a driver loaded (JAZZ.SYS), the card provides SoundBlaster Pro compatibility. There is a DOS mixer application but its settings do not persist. A mysterious "JAZZTSR.EXE" reports that it is a "resident mixer" but provides no instruction for its use. The default Digital/MIDI mix you get at power-on is not great.

The original CD-ROM drive is long gone, but it left behind its CD-Audio cable in the form of this hack that marries it to the replacement drive:

After undoing this Frankenstein's Monster cable I put a DuPont connector on the "new" cable so it could hook up nice and clean to the 3-pin header on the Jazz-16:

feipoa wrote:

Photo of the case? Is that an intel-branded motherboard? I think that's what Gateway used, wasn't it?

Exterior beauty shots are coming soon.

This is an Intel Neptune (Intel Premiere/PCI II) (430NX) board. It supports the P5 75 and 90. It has jumper settings for but will not support a P5-100. This board maxes out at 128MB RAM.

JudgeMonroe wrote:

With a driver loaded (JAZZ.SYS), the card provides SoundBlaster Pro compatibility. There is a DOS mixer application but its settings do not persist. A mysterious "JAZZTSR.EXE" reports that it is a "resident mixer" but provides no instruction for its use. The default Digital/MIDI mix you get at power-on is not great.

Yes, the default mix is way too loud, but this can be fixed. The major limitation is that the card doesn't, in fact, support SB Pro -- at least not fully.

gdjacobs wrote:

Yes, the default mix is way too loud, but this can be fixed. The major limitation is that the card doesn't, in fact, support SB Pro -- at least not fully.

That's interesting. Do you have specifics about either of these assertions?

I dont mind Gateway. At least in the Pentium to P3 era they used Intel boards and other hardware was OEM but mostly not crippled like Dell or non standard like Compaq.
They make a good foundation to build a decent gaming rig off

Ohh wow, I had one of those back in the day. It came in that cow spotted box.
Played Heretic/Hexen, it ran so smooth. Happy days.
I will be following this topic.

Good luck, I hope you get her working soon 😁

chinny22 wrote:

I dont mind Gateway. At least in the Pentium to P3 era they used Intel boards and other hardware was OEM but mostly not crippled like Dell or non standard like Compaq.
They make a good foundation to build a decent gaming rig off

There's something to be said for that, for sure. I felt the same way about them back in the day. They used good parts: Intel processors and motherboards, Western Digital hard drives (good except for that one sticky model), US Robotics modems, Sony displays. The one place you almost always saw them compromise was the sound cards, which as a gamer meant pulling out whatever the factory put in there in favor of a retail Sound Blaster. It made sense to Gateway because most of their customers didn't care about sound beyond Windows playing chimes at the right places or the CD player producing audio. Saving a few dimes per system by using a Jazz or Vibra or Ensoniq was a good play.

Gateway was always good about its video cards, at least in the mid-90s.

This box has the "ATI Graphics Wonder PCI" Mach32-based card with 2MB DRAM. It won't be as fast as a VRAM card but it will get the job done for general computing and VGA gaming. The RAM is a collection of 16 V53C104HK45 chips, which are 256K x 4 bit DRAMs, as is fitting for an OEM cost-reduced card. This system is from 1994, but the Mach32 is a 1992 vintage chip, so it was already getting a little long in the tooth. It wasn't long before Gateway starting selling the Matrox Millennium, a card I personally used from 1995 until I found a game it couldn't run (Baldur's Gate).

With its single VGA connector you can drive a monitor up to XGA resolutions using a Windows 3.1 driver or the built-in Windows 95 driver, both of which support 24-bit color in 800x600 or 16-bit color in 1024x768. The Windows 3.1 driver, which doesn't really care about the connected display, can go up to SXGA (1280x1024) with 256 colors, but this mode is effectively illegible on the 15-inch monitor.

This system is of an age that both the video card and the monitor (Gateway CrystalScan 1572DG) are known by Windows 95 so no extra drivers are necessary. The monitor can be selected from a list but the Mach32 is auto-detected. In Windows 3.1 an ATI driver can be loaded to run Myst or make Hot Dog Stand really pop. DOS drivers generally aren't necessary but some professional tools had their own driver framework, notably Autodesk (CAD or 3DStudio) and the like. These and other drivers are available in the Vogons Drivers repository so no need to go ranging for them.

The discoloration on the back of the card are QA or origin stamps.

I mentioned this system came to me without a hard drive, which is fine. Period hard drives were small, slow, noisy, and could be prone to failure given inconsistent storage environments and long periods without spinning-up. This system would have had a drive in the neighborhood of 540MB. I recall in mid-1995 the highest capacity drives were 1.6 GB and this system is right around a year older than that. Things moved really quickly! To verify, I found a 1994 issue of PC Computing Magazine on archive.org and checked the Gateway 2000 ad in it.

The Intel Plato/Neptune board BIOS has LBA support for drives larger than 528 MB but still top off at 2GB. Instead of a hard drive of any kind, I did what everyone should be doing with these vintage systems: make the move to CompactFlash. The cards and interfaces are dirt cheap, and they're natively IDE devices in the first place, so it makes a lot of sense. The popularity of this approach has much to do with availability and cost; it's not the technology that's new. Industrial systems back in the day would frequently have a solid-state CF storage device because of vibration, EMI, or other rough-duty requirements. These disks were exotic and expensive back then. Now, you can get a CF-IDE adapter for $10 and rummage through your wife's photo gear for a 2GB CF card.

I went with the one what has a mounting bracket for clean permanent installation:

Using CF for mass storage is convenient for many reasons:

* Directly supported by IDE interfaces.
* Can mount and access on modern systems, making file transfer fast and easy.
* Can mount and access on Virtual Machines, making even vintage OS operations fast and easy.

This last point is one I've had a lot of use of. Given a set of floppy disk images, it is convenient to boot a DOS VM that has its virtual hard disk mapped to your physical CF card, mount and install from those images, then -- bam -- move the card back to the vintage system, and the software is right there ready to go. I prefer this over the approach of a Gotek floppy emulator (which I do not have but they seem a lot more fiddly with their custom software, fixed drive types and such).

If you have two CF cards, like I do, put DOS 6.22 on one and Windows 95 on the other, and "Reboot in DOS Mode" takes on a whole new meaning.

I did try some 4GB CF cards in this P5-90, but the BIOS would not recognize them, and even though it's possible to manually configure the BIOS for a drive that size, it's simply not recognized. 2GB is fine and obviously a big improvement over what the 540MB factory original drive would have been.

I created two 1GB partitions on the CF card. This was a compromise between size/convenience I could live with. The two partitions are equally sized and formatted with FAT16 they check out like this:

In the days before FAT32 we had to give thought to how big our partitions were once we got past 1GB drives. In that CHKDSK output, note the line saying "16,384 in each allocation unit." An "allocation unit" or "cluster" is the smallest piece of disk available to write a file. That means that any file smaller than 16k will use a 16k on disk; a 20k file will use 32k; and so on, always in multiples of 16k. (It is these clusters that DEFRAG is moving around, because a file can spread over multiple clusters but those clusters need not be neighbors on disk; it's faster when they are, though.) FAT16 scales up the cluster size with the partition size. Above 1GB, a partition formatted with FAT16 gets 32k clusters, which makes the problem worse, and above 2GB the cluster size jumps again to 64k. Back in the day with those 1.6 GB hard drives, we would split them into 4 partitions of about 400 MB to keep the cluster sizes down (8k at that size) and squeeze every bit of space from our expensive drives. FAT32 and other modern filesystems make this concern moot, but if you're doing your vintage computing with FAT16 DOS machines, it's an interesting bit of trivia. My 1GB partitions are about as big as you can go and still have 16k clusters (this is base-10 talk; in FDISK, the partitions are "955 MB").

To be honest, I don't remember where that "disk space pressure" even came from because software really wasn't that big. It's like the conventional memory thing: past a certain point the pressure's off but you keep optimizing anyway because you can.

(By the way, the creation timestamp on that filesystem is crazy! I guess MS-DOS 6.22 isn't exactly Y2K compliant.)

JudgeMonroe wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

Yes, the default mix is way too loud, but this can be fixed. The major limitation is that the card doesn't, in fact, support SB Pro -- at least not fully.

That's interesting. Do you have specifics about either of these assertions?

Brain fart. I was thinking about some of the earlier Aztech cards that sometimes claimed SB Pro compatibility with actual support. Apparently there are some compatibility issues on the mixer chip, depending on the version.
Media Vision Jazz 16 - anyone use one of these?

I'm tempted to try my MV Deluxe in my 386 build as I'm a bit tossed up over what to use.

gdjacobs wrote:

Apparently there are some compatibility issues on the mixer chip, depending on the version.
Media Vision Jazz 16 - anyone use one of these?

You know, it's funny. I've read that thread a couple of times in the process of researching this card, but it didn't click until just now -- "the MVA-514, which is [...] fully SBPro mixer-level-compatible." This Jazz16 card has the MVA514 which puts it at the "more compatible" end of the Jazz spectrum, so...

If I can't figure out the MV Jazz utility to set the mix, why don't I just use the SBPRO utility to do it? So I copied over an SBPRO install and used SB-SET.EXE to set the mixer, and...

It works. As it should, if the MVA514 really is "fully SBPro mixer-level-compatible". If it wasn't, then the mix controls in games wouldn't work, either.

Not a perfect solution but it's a good workaround.

I've updated the first post with this hero shot of the P5-90 along with a couple pieces of my Gateway swag.

The wallpaper is from the "Gateway 2000 System CD" which they started distributing with their PCs around the time CD-ROMs became mainstream. These CDs contained drivers for all of Gateway's shipping products, a Windows For Workgroups installer and a bunch of multimedia gee-whiz shovelware: MIDI files, low-res promo videos, and a whole gallery of Gateway-themed 640x480 wallpapers.

The surfing cow was always my favorite. I used to open it up in Paintbrush and doodle piercings or harpoons through the chest on the cow.

Damn this brings back memories. You have a beautiful machine there sir!

The "wave effect" on the left is pretty cool, and the duel 3.5 5.25 drive is desired round these parts and matches the slot CD drive well.
Was never a fan of the "sideways" mounted 3.5 drives myself, but that's just personal taste.

The "cartridge style" CF card option is underutilized I rekon especially for systems with smaller hard drive support. I have my games installed on d:\ and once that filled just got another CF card exactly the same, keep installing games and just swap the cards depending what games I want. Rest of the PC doesnt even know the difference 😀