Okay, the Rialto stuff is taking more and more shape.

I was able today to take the bare PCIe BIOS and put the rialto config block + data into it, no other motifications. The card boots, comes up as the X700SE it was flashed with and even reports a VIVO card (though the Rage Theater is not present).
This is just awesome. The config blocks from my HD3450 and X1950GT work on the X700 as well.

So I'm pretty certain now about Rialto being pretty universal.

So today I started going further and started to rip apart the sacrificial HD3450 AGP. Goal is to remove the GPU and memory and maintain the Rialto on it. Record behavior. Then I'll add a PCIe slot and put an HD3450 PCIe into it..

Long way to go, but I'm very excited..

I can see the rialto chip alone enumerating in windows without the GPU - so the bridge is alive and well. Tomorrow there will be some annoying handwiring.

To be honest it took me more than today, but it's done. Modded the FIC 386-VC-H bios by integrating an XTIDE inside it, so bigger than 504MB drives can be used and a working shadowing can be leveraged. Found a chunk of 3 consecutive 2KB blocks that hosted the 6KB XTIDE custom build. Linked the address in place of the E000h window in bios.

Even went to the extend to match the Award bios color scheme.

And the cherry on top, a working 8.4G drive that will be the storage for the build.

Trying to get a Samsung SD-606F drive working. Opened it up, cleaned lens and regreased with lithium. Still not working. Trying to get a low noise ide drive for dos as a spare

More Rialto.. but gotta wait with testing till monday..

Faceplate swapped an AT AMD K6-2 machine. Now to get it to overclock past 400MHz.

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-19, 02:29:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2026-09-18, 17:16:

RetroLizard wrote on 2026-09-14, 13:47:

Even AWE32/AWE64 cards seem horrendously expensive. I'm not sure I'll even be able to get one.

AWE cards are, IMO, comically overrated. The native AWE64 MIDI mode doesn't really sound that good, and the full length AWE32s are comically unreliable.

Get any random SB Pro clone that has a waveblaster header, and a real OPL synth and then get a cheap general MIDI module (LittleDreamer by TexElec for US or Dreamblaster S2 by Serdaco for EU region).

Would there be a list of SB Pro clones somewhere?

Clone wasn't really the right word here, I meant SB Pro compatible with true OPL3 onboard.

The Yamaha Audician 32 (and the Labway board thats basically the exact same design) are extremely common and well regarded, thats what I have in my Windows 98 PC actually.

Running SPECViewPerf 6.1.2 on a Pentium 133 running Windows 95 as part of my massive benchmarking project.

It's been running for more than 3 hours, so far...