I would like to mention that, while the Fortemedia FM-801 has good legacy compatibility, its Adlib FM synthesis is less than to be desired. It's quite terrible when playing FM in the first level of Duke Nukem 3D, for reference.

What about the Aureal Vortex 2? Is that any good?

I don't have a system up to compare and do not recall. Imo, nothing sounds as "correct" as genuine Adlib. There will always be some instrument that is "off".

Is Adlib support really that relevant on a 2000-era PC? For late 80s and early 90s sure, but for 2000's an onward, what really uses FM synthesis by that point?

ChrisNonyminus wrote on 2023-09-13, 00:11:

What about the Aureal Vortex 2? Is that any good?

Yes. Fantastic for 3D positional sound, highly recommended.

I use a Diamond MX300 (Aureal Vortex 2) in my Athlon XP rig. With an attached wavetable daughtercard, it's great for both DOS gaming and Windows 9x stuff.

I thought his question was for the Aurel Vortex 2 for Adlib, which would be questionable. Otherwise, it's excellent for Windows 9x, although a lot of the 3D positioning features are broken for Windows 2000, I believe.

ChrisNonyminus wrote on 2023-09-13, 00:11:

What about the Aureal Vortex 2? Is that any good?

For DOS? No, its FM is far worse than FM801. For Win9x, absolutely fantastic chipset. For 2K/XP, it is dogshit.

Personally, SB16/Pro and clones for DOS/Win9x as long as it has a YMF-262M chip. My 286 desktop, 386 desktop, and 486 desktop have Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro cards (my 486 has the NX Pro 16), which has a lot of things: DSS, CVX, Adlib, and SB Pro. The NX Pro 16 has a WaveTable header, but that's for Windows only. I have MPU-401 cards in my 386 and 486 for the FB-01, MT-32, and DB50XG and they all have the same amount of sound cards from PC Speaker to GM/XG. The 486 will get a GUS soon and I might find another one for my 386 so they'll have everything in the world.

The 286 has the PC speaker connected to the card (I also bridged the left and right channels together to mix them for 1 speaker and the 2 ground pins) and the header from the motherboard to the card so I can have the best of both worlds. Works out very well and I might do the same with my 386 and 486 so I don't need speakers connected to the system. For the other devices, I might get away with connecting it to the sound card (share the audio to the two machines) and go from there.

appiah4 wrote on 2023-09-13, 05:41:

ChrisNonyminus wrote on 2023-09-13, 00:11:

What about the Aureal Vortex 2? Is that any good?

For DOS? No, its FM is far worse than FM801.

There is more to DOS audio than FM.

For games from about 1993 and onward, General MIDI , digital sample playback, and CD audio is more relevant than FM synthesis. For that, an Aureal Vortex 2 card should be fine.

I use a Diamond MX300 and I've tested it with DOS games from 1993-onward and it works fine.

Kahenraz wrote on 2023-09-13, 02:46:

I thought his question was for the Aurel Vortex 2 for Adlib, which would be questionable. Otherwise, it's excellent for Windows 9x, although a lot of the 3D positioning features are broken for Windows 2000, I believe.

The original poster was asking about support for PCI soundcards for an Athlon 64 build. Nobody is building an Athlon 64 system just to play Adlib-supported games from the late 80s.

I think i have finally found the least effective way to store mainboards...
And i like it 😁

A freind wanted to throw away this newspaper stand.
But if its not broken why throw it away? 😁

I like it, but I worry about the ISA card teetering on the end there.

Got myself my first UV lamp for erasing EPROMs.
It's a 253,7nm wavelength UV lamp (everything under 400nm is good, lower is more effective) meant for sterilizing items. Works really quick - in less than 5min chips are empty.

I can definitely recommend it. I got a 8W variant from AliExpress.
I'm not going to put a link here, as it may disappear at any day, but the title is: 8W 6W Ultraviolet Germicidal Light T5 Tube UVC Sterilizer Kill Dust Mite UV Quartz Sterilizer Lamp 220V 110V For Bedroom Home

And as a result, i used one M2764 EPROM for my XT-IDE now instead of monstrous W27C256 just for those 4kB of tiny XT-IDE.

I really needed one of these thank you!

EDIT: Oh wow, it's quite more expensive than I thought it would be 😓

Cover that, you'll give yourself cataracts, or sunburned eyeball or something.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-09-14, 14:37:

Cover that, you'll give yourself cataracts, or sunburned eyeball or something.

Yes, that's the next plan. I keep myself away from looking at it and i plan to have a half circle metal plate over it to make it contained.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-09-14, 14:37:

Cover that, you'll give yourself cataracts, or sunburned eyeball or something.

YES. DO NOT OPERATE any UV exposed! You will damage your eyes easily.

Cheers,

I bought some broken VLB (very long bus) cards from my favourite recycler in the UK:

The Cirrus Logic card was supposed to have bad RAM but it was a disappointingly easy fix, it was missing the jumpers that select which RAM bank to use. Without those it's impressive it worked at all but the sellers pictures showed it giving garbled output. Gonna have to test it some more to see if that was all that's wrong.

The Trident TGUI9440 VLB card was much more interesting though - visually the card all looks fine although I resoldered the QFP for no good reason, when inserted the computer would start up normally but no video output. It wasn't giving the "no video card detected" beeps and was instead booting up into the usual BIOS error for FDD because this board isn't set up yet.
No output from hsync or vsync on the VGA connector, but using my cheapo £20 oscilloscope I could see that the crystal was oscillating, albeit at a frequency that the cheapo oscilloscope couldn't hope to get a good read on.

So I thought I'd try the BIOS - it's a Trident card just like this one I fixed a few weeks back: Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?
But this card has a regular EPROM and I Think the seller got caught in the same trap I did where the BIOS file from vgamuseum is read out from the OS rather than the physical ROM. On many of these Trident cards the real ROM contents are garbled when read out on a normal EEPROM reader, but the computer reads the EEPROM just fine when it's on the card because they rearranged some of the address pins. There's not a good source for Trident BIOS files that I could find but I seem to have lucked out in that someone here 5 years ago uploaded the ROM from a Spea Vega Pro Trident card which has a closely related TGUI9440A. Thank you for sharing that, if you still read this forum 😀 looking for Bios Dump of the VLB Trident 9400cxi
The Trident BIOS files I've found are not picky, the versions (A5.2 / A5.4 etc) cover a couple of chips each, so I don't think exact revision or maybe even VLB/PCI are that important, since that Trident ROM that the card usually have should be pretty generic to keep costs down since it's a mask ROM.

I also found I had a Trident 9440 PCI card and desoldered / read out the rom from that, so here's Trident BIOS Ver A5.4 which I know is a good readout:

Because I found the closer match BIOS in the other Vogons thread I haven't tried it yet, but it should work I think.

Glad I wrote down how to put an EEPROM where a 27256 goes since I didn't want to research that twice. I was hoping to use the UV EPROM that the seller included with the card but none of the UV stuff I have gives the right ~250nm - I wish I had a lamp like the one a couple of posts back but I need something much smaller and more robust.

The card fired right up with no display glitches, now to test them out more fully once I put this motherboard back into a case and add some more peripherals.

I am going to call it very long bus for the rest of my days.

Thank you.

luckybob wrote on 2023-09-14, 17:53:

I am going to call it very long bus for the rest of my days.

Thank you.

Very Long Cat.