Okay, so what I thought was going to be a simple build has thrown some curve balls at me. […]
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Okay, so what I thought was going to be a simple build has thrown some curve balls at me.
1) ET4000 with no modifications acchives 6.8fps in 3D Bench v1.0, so thought that I would try some other cards to see if I can get a litter more performance and well, it hates my 'modern' ISA cards, system will not post with either my Diamond SpeedStar 64 or S3 928 cards, which is fine except I have a lot of noise on the ET4000 which I suspect is the RAMDAC.
System gives three rapid beeps then eight slow/long beeps with the 'modern' cards in, so I as remember it is telling me it cannot see a display adapter but need to check that, if it is that I do remember many years ago reading that some motherboards had issues with the newer vga cards as they did not use a certain signal, but again need to research that.
2) Tried every on board BIOS option with the Promise EIDE card but it will not detect my 512MB CF Card, but disable it and use the system BIOS and it works perfectly, so no large hard drive support (at the moment).
3) As I expected no EMS options in the BIOS so installed the EMS board, but the Upper memory has region E000-EFFF as read only, so lost a good wad of upper memory and cannot see any BIOS option to free it up.
4) Sound cards, wow reading the comments above I can see there are many thoughts, I would love an MT-32 but they are so expensive it is stupid, but due to the missing two ISA slots being a small board, like you all said it needs MIDI and digital sounds, I totally agree. Especially as I want to play Day of the Tentacle with both music and voice, especially for the opening scenes!
SB Pro 2.0: Causes system not to post, board works fine in other systems so slightly stumped there.
SB16: Digital sound is distorted/ or clipped and MIDI does not work (have a MIDI daughter board installed)
Terratec Maestro: Digital sound works sometimes and MIDI sometimes work (used same MIDI daughter board as on SB16).
PAS16: same issues as the Terratec Maestro
8-bit TopTek Goldern sound card: Works brilliantly but no MIDI without an external box (have an SC-55, it is no MT-32 but works).
However, as of today have a generic ALS100+ card in there with a MIDI daughter board and have finally both digital sound and MIDI working. The only game that won't work with the MIDI is Wing Commander 1, but remember that was always picky with MIDI and that does not bother me too much.
5) Tried to install 16mb of RAM but it hates every 4mb SIMM I have, not to concerned about that though, 4mb should be plenty for the time being.
So next plan:
1) Is to either find another ET4000 card or replace the RAMDAC in the one I have, might even try and find an ET4000 W32.
2) Install the correct crystal for a 25Mhz CPU.
3) Burn and install a MR. Bios chip, when I finally get round to getting a new programmer.
4) Had not considered overclocking but now someone has mentioned it, might try it in the future.