First post, by Ethaniel
This is my first post on the forums, I chose Milliways because it says «random banter», so it feels appropriate. English is not my main language, if you find any quirks, I apologize in advanced.
My plan was more or less like this: I'm very interested in Covox sound, so I decided to order a few PCBs for Necroware's Silly Sound Bastard. I also have a tiny VIA Artigo A1000, the fanless version with a 500 MHz processor and a maximum supported memory of 512 MB. For some reason, VIA only offered support for XP and WinCE, but all I want is a little DOS box chirping sounds through LPT, so, no worries. I grabbed the Artigo from the shelf, and... yeah. No.
The Artigo A1000 doesn't have an LPT port. Back to the shelf, then. «Plan B» throws the little DOS box aspect out of the window: I still have an old Compaq PC, Athlon 64 X2, DDR2, and the rest. This is the point when I said to myself: «Okay, I'll just put a hard drive with Windows 7, and a little 8 GB SSD bought from only-God-knows-where with DOS 7.1 to enable FAT32. That should work, right?»
Right?
(insert Padmé-Anakin meme here)
The Compaq in question uses the A8M2N-LA... and it doesn't have an LPT port. Again. So, I'm 0 for 2. One half of my brain wants to throw the dice and buy at least one PCI card with some DOS support that won't explode on my face, forget the Covox and call it a day. The other half wants to find a half-dead socket 7 system with an ISA slot and a real, physical, not «Mandela-Effect-imagined» LPT port, and revive it. What do you think?