Ydee wrote on Today, 08:45:

Dothan Burger wrote on Yesterday, 23:02:

Used the Via Vinyl driver the has great windows DOS box support.

Which one - you mean genuine VIA or another one?

Just the Via Vinyl AC97 driver. It came on a CD for industrial motherboards and I just let it search for it, the chip is a Ciruss logic though.

This i810 board is the only one I have that runs this Voodoo 4500 at 66mhz PCI.

Resurected my 29 year old front yard "Halloween display" controller.

This was a DOS PC I setup and started using around 1997 (at least that's the date on most of the files) to drive a display we set up in our front yard every Halloween for many years. The display included:

1About a dozen hard carved pumpkins (at least 2 were "giant"s) with controllable
2   lights in all of them, and LED "eyes" and speaker in the two biggest.
3A spider on a motor which would go up/down.
4A coffin that would open/close at varous times.
5A skeleton with LED eyes that "jiggled" at various times.
6A Raven what would fly back and forth across the front yard at various times.
7Spotlights to highlight certain things at vertain times.
8Plays spooky sounds and shows various halloween pictures on a large monitor we
9   would put in a front window.
10Pumpkins talk back and forth (Light goes OFF and Eyes light when talking), telling
11   spooky jokes, making Halloween oriented comments etc.
12+++ probably more than I've forgotten

In the last 10 years or so, there have been far fewer kids in our rural neighborhood and we stopped spending the 2-3 days it took to get it all set up and working.

It wasn't a dedicated PC, I actually used the system I originally developed ImageDisk on, which often got used for "other stuff".

I sold that system (it was a very good ImageDisk system) about 5-6 years ago and didn't think about the Halloween display (I thought we were done with it)

A few years back a friend who had been big part of "the production" moved into town and lives in a neighborhood with lots of kids - so this year I just go the idea to recreate the system. I though I could do it with my P3 DOS Desktop (it has a Sb16, serial and parallel ports used to control "the yard") - but it turns out the "CSHOW" utility I had used to display the pics fails on a faster machine!

Fortunately due to ongoing requests to support ImageDisk I had made up a system with a second identical P1 mainboard: Re: Windows 95 on a Breadboard

So, I dug through my boxes, found an SBpro. stuffed it into the system. I also still had the interface box I had built to control all of this stuff from the PC parallel port, and was able to find a backup of the control software - and it all seems to work!

--

For anyone interested, here is more detail on how the system worked:

It started with "CAM" a BASIC interpreted I had written so that a close friend who had a young handicapped child - this had all kinds of special interfaces so that he could build "learning stations" for his son:

11 - Standard PC keyboard and video display
22 - A separate Four-button input keypad
33 - Beeps and melodies via the PC speaker
44 - Sound input/output via a "Sound Blaster" card
55 - Text-to-speech via a "Sound Blaster" card
66 - Infa-red "remote" control of external devices
77 - Analog knobs, dials, levers etc.
88 - Digital I/O via "parallel" port.
99 - X10 "Home Control" devices via CP290 interface

I basically wrote the Halloween display controller in this dialect of BASIC and used it to control the above mentioned devices in my front yard (HALOWEEN.BAS is 172 lines)