First post, by xlucas
- Rank
- Newbie
Here goes a story. It is remotely possible that one of you can give me a hint and help, but most likely, it's not possible. Still, maybe this could be a good example of what not to do when you're curious on how things work.
I discovered sound table music rather late. I had a SBPro clone until perhaps year 2000 or 2001. Then one day, a friend of mine acquired a used SB AWE64 by chance because he obtained an old computer from somebody else who was upgrading. We were both surprised. I had no idea that thing existed. I had heard the name, but assumed it was a lot less "dramatic", the difference from a SB Pro or SB 16. So I went and found a shop that had an old AWE64 in stock. It already was a little hard to find.
It was wonderful for a couple of years. And one day, I wanted to know how to program the card's ports. I did find some information online and in booklets, but was insufficient. So I did what I normally do when I have doubts: I ran a series or pretty random experiments. I was able to get some sound from the OPLs by randomly poking to the two lowest ports (which also works on SB pros) so I wondered what would happen if I wrote to the other ports. I did get some sound from the EMU8000, but it was less clear, more random. So I tried flooding all the ports randomly with random data. Some strange sound came out. After that, nothing changed again. So well, I decided to stop the testing and run some games, but now the games weren't making any sound. It was the same noise coming from the sound card. So I rebooted the computer. At that point, the sound card was no longer detected by the system. I tried reconfiguring it from software and then hardware (changing the jumpers to the defaults) and a few more things, but it never worked again 🙁
My guess is that my random flood must have activated a command to write over the firmware and I just filled it with trash. Of course, imagine trying to find instructions to recover the firmware of a 90's AWE64! I still have the card somewhere. It was really hard to find a replacement later on, but I eventually did.
Anyway... any thoughts? I learnt a lesson that day. It was sad.
