luckybob wrote:

The voodoo 3 is overkill for a P2. hell, even a pair of voodoo 2's can make a 333-p2 work for its money. Personally i'd go with the awe64 for the P2. And you ALWAYS max out the ram. (with a p2 dont go over 512mb)

having a k6-2 system and a p2 system is just redundant.

the 486 looks good. again i'd go with the sb 2.0 over anything else.

Voodoo2's are more powerful than people think. I read somewhere once that a single V2 will continue to scale up to about a 1ghz PIII or Athlon. A pair in SLi don't stop scaling until you put a 1.5ghz CPU behind it. Of course by the time those CPU's came out, there were already faster cards with more features on the market and the Voodoo2 no longer supported the latest standards so the V2 isn't a very good choice on those motherboards, but will shatter any old benchmarks you may find using the most powerful CPU's available in the time period between the V2 and V3.

sliderider wrote:

luckybob wrote:

The voodoo 3 is overkill for a P2. hell, even a pair of voodoo 2's can make a 333-p2 work for its money. Personally i'd go with the awe64 for the P2. And you ALWAYS max out the ram. (with a p2 dont go over 512mb)

having a k6-2 system and a p2 system is just redundant.

the 486 looks good. again i'd go with the sb 2.0 over anything else.

Voodoo2's are more powerful than people think. I read somewhere once that a single V2 will continue to scale up to about a 1ghz PIII or Athlon. A pair in SLi don't stop scaling until you put a 1.5ghz CPU behind it. Of course by the time those CPU's came out, there were already faster cards with more features on the market and the Voodoo2 no longer supported the latest standards so the V2 isn't a very good choice on those motherboards, but will shatter any old benchmarks you may find using the most powerful CPU's available in the time period between the V2 and V3.

Voodoo2's in SLI can give Voodoo3's a run for their money. Sometimes they are even a little faster than a plain vanilla V3 3000.

If setting up using jumpers make sure there isn't a AGP Divider that might be setup in the wrong spec. Maybe its booting at he 1/3 setting instead of the 2/3 divider?

Have you tried pulling the power, pull the battery then clear the RTC as well? This has helped me in the past with many things. Also if you still have cap issues you can try power cycling a few times or hitting reset while booting. Lastly check the manual to see if there is a special key you can hit to reset cmos (some boards use the "insert" key during bootup)

With the cap issue. it can be very hard to find the right size since alot of the time they were special sized for the needed room. You can try badcaps.net and see if they carry the right size. Personally I'm not against setting the cap on its side against the board and if you really want to put heatshrink or tape over the exposed legs so incase they cross or touch anything. I had to do that with a cap inbetween a AGP and PCI slots that is too tall.

Making another order today I found my distributer makes specific low ESR and High Ripple caps for my needs. I ordered like 50x 1000uf10v for .39 a pc, also got some others so hopefully that may strech to fix 5ish mobo's 😀

This Pentium II computer is mainly meant as a test box so I can test various sound cards on all the MS-DOS games I have and get some clips from those sound cards for my "The Many Sounds of:" series of videos on YouTube, so AGP graphics cards are not a priority for me. Besides, the picture quality out of the Matrox Millennium II is better than what I get out of a Voodoo 3 2000 and 3D Rage IIC AGP, so I'll stick with the Matrox Millennium II.

I also took a look at the SBLink connector on the motherboard. It's a real working SBLink connector as the traces connected to it go directly to the southbridge.

So the final specs for the Pentium II build are as follows:

-Intel Pentium II 266MHz
-64MB of RAM
-Matrox Millennium II graphics card
-OPTi 82C930 ISA sound card(this will be regularly swapped out with a variety of other PCI and ISA sound cards - even at this very moment, I'm trying out an ESS AudioDrive ES1868F in the computer)
-80GB Maxtor IDE hard drive(I know it's overkill, but that was the smallest I found)
-52X LG CD-ROM drive
-Soyo SY-6BA+ motherboard with Intel 440BX chipset

I've been there, I had a PII-400 tricked into 266mhz by setting the bus clock to 66mhz (cpu has locked multiplicator). but I found the design to be too unflexible, some games were running to slow, some games were running to fast, it just didn't feel right most of the time.

I ended up in building a K6-III+ (see sig for details), and now I can switch the cpu clock with a simple config.sys statement dynamically from 133 - 400mhz. works perfectly fine for both DOS and Windows. this also eliminated the need for a P90 - 133 machine. I know other guys that play around with L1/L2 cache and slowdown tools to also emulate 386/486 speed, but I must admit I really prefer the real ones 😀

ps: although the VIA MVP3 chipset is only a poor competetor to the glorious BX chipset, it did not bring me any trouble so far

Would there be some way I can underclock the Pentium II to below 200MHz? From what I can tell, the Pentium II I have is multiplier unlocked, but the BIOS settings only lets the Pentium II underclock down to 200MHz. This is still too fast for me to test sound cards with the Collector's CD-ROM edition of X-Wing with the AdLib sound option for music(I get heavy slowdown with AdLib music on fast computers). And yes, I did set 8-bit I/O recovery time to 8.

EDIT: WTF??? I just installed MS-DOS v6.22 on my Pentium II computer and whenever I boot DOS, I get almost two lines full of garbage characters! And the computer has crashed. What the hell just happened here?

which mainboard do you use? does it support jumpering 2,0 multiplier in order to get 2 x 66 = 133mhz clock speed?

Ace wrote:

EDIT: WTF??? I just installed MS-DOS v6.22 on my Pentium II computer and whenever I boot DOS, I get almost two lines full of garbage characters! And the computer has crashed. What the hell just happened here?

yeah well one thing pops into my mind: DOS 6.22 has its problems when it comes to drives larger than 4GB, try DOS 7.x instead

€dit: found the technical background here: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pc-hardware-faq/enhanced-IDE/part1/

My 4GB+ drive has problems in MSDOS 6.22 or below. […]
Show full quote

My 4GB+ drive has problems in MSDOS 6.22 or below.

Some BIOSes assign a drive of over 8192 cylinders a translated
geometry with 256 heads. MSDOS 6.22 and below fail when they try to
access the last head.

If your BIOS allows a user definable drive type, use a geometry with
15 heads and 16/15 times the original number of cylinders, rounded
down. Thanks to universal translation you can always do this. Remember
to write down the geometry somewhere so that you can reproduce it if
necessary! If no user definable drive type is possible, there's little
you can do about this except upgrade to Win95.

Great... things have just gone downhill. I installed MS-DOS v7.10, but I can't boot it at all. To make matters worse, I can't even start up the setup program for MS-DOS v6.22 from the floppy drive anymore! WTF?! What the hell just happened?!

EDIT: Seems like the hard drive might have something to do with the bootup problems. I can boot into DOS v6.22 with a boot disk as long as the hard drive is not plugged into the motherboard.

EDIT 2: Turns out the partition MS-DOS v6.22 made was bad. I deleted it and have installed MS-DOS v7.10, which works perfectly now.

Now, all I have to do is to install the drivers for all my ISA and PCI sound cards.

Okay guys, I need some help here. I just installed the DOS drivers for my SoundBlaster Live! model CT4830 but I'm having problems. The SoundBlaster 16 support works fine, but the FM Synthesis is abnormally slow and causes all DOS games to stutter pretty badly. What's causing this?

General MIDI is fine, by the way.

can you post your ctsyn.ini file?

it shuould look like something like this:

1[ctsyn.drv]
2SBEnable=true
3JoyEnable=true
4Waveset=C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\default.ecw
5PCIPort=6000
6PCIIRQ=9
7OPLPort=388
8MPUPort=330
9SBPort=220
10SBIRQ=7
11SBDMALO=0
12SBDMAHI=5
13JoyPort=200

My CTSYN.INI looks like this:

1[ctsyn.drv]
2OPLPort=388
3MPUPort=330
4SBPort=220
5SBIRQ=7
6SBDMALO=1
7SBDMAHI=5
8SBEnable=true
9JOYEnable=true
10Waveset=C:\SNDDRV\SBLIVE\default.ecw
11PCIPort=6000
12PCIIRQ=9
13JOYPort=200
14
15[SBEMIXER]
16MasterVolL=250
17MasterVolR=250
18WaveVolL=250
19WaveVolR=250
20CDVolL=250
21CDVolR=250
22SynthVolL=250
23SynthVolR=250
24MT32=FALSE
25DigitalSpeakerEnable=FALSE

But even though I set the PCI port to 6000 and the PCI IRQ to 9, the SoundBlaster Live! ALWAYS initializes at port E400 and IRQ 10. What gives?

ok which game(s) are you using for testing?

Right now, I'm using the Collector's CD-ROM edition of Star Wars X-Wing and The Ultimate Doom, but will later have the floppy disk edition of X-Wing, the Collector's CD-ROM edition of Star Wars TIE Fighter, Wolfenstein 3D, Red Baron and Aces of the Pacific. I was able to get the SoundBlaster Live! working with X-Wing already on another computer without slowed down FM Synthesis and choppy gameplay.

Actually, come to think of it, the SoundBlaster Live! I got working with X-Wing was a different model number than the one I have now. The other SoundBlaster Live! has model number CT4780. I don't know if the model number affects anything.

at least x-wing (both floppy and cdrom) is quite famous for having disturbed FM sound on faster CPUs. well if you have a free isa slot you should go for an awe64 gold, you can get them for 1-5€ on ebay

The floppy disk edition of X-Wing is the only one that really screws up on fast computers, but it doesn't screw up with the SoundBlaster Live! on all the computers I've used it on. The Collector's CD-ROM edition only screws up when using the AdLib sound option for music, which I'm not using. I'm using 4-Op FM, which I've never had any problems with.

I already have two AWE64 Values, but for some reason, I just can't get them working correctly under DOS. I can't even get my SoundBlaster 32 CT3600 working under DOS! The best I got was either CQM and SoundBlaster 16 digital sound without any MIDI or AWE synth or just SoundBlaster 16 digital sound. I have no idea what the hell I'm doing wrong.

By the way, this computer is just a test computer to test out my sound cards with DOS games, so I will be regularly swapping out sound cards on the computer. I'd personally use my OPTi 82C930 or Yamaha YMF744 as the primary sound card, but even those will be regularly swapped out for my other sound cards. Only my ESS AudioDrive ES1868F, ESS AudioDrive ES1869F and OPTi 82C931 have been properly set up on that computer.

regarding the awe64 (also the awe32 if it is PNP), you need to initialize the PNP bios with the ctcm.exe program, after that you need to initialize the card itself using the diagnose.exe program with /s parameter. and finally, you have to load aweutil to get the card in proper working condition. that's PNP as we like it 😁

I can't do that with MS-DOS v7.10. I get errors from the program about running Windows 95 to do I'm not too sure what and CTCU says it can't run in a Windows 3.1/Windows 95 DOS box. WTF? I'm not trying to run the damn thing under Windows, I'm trying to run it under DOS! WTF???

you can try my CTCM folder, maybe this works for you.

if not, you can try creating a C:\WINDOWS folder where you put in the CTPNP.CFG file

I'll give it a go later today.

Now for yet another problem, this time concerning PCI sound cards with SBLink connectors on them. I put together a homemade SBLink cable and I'm trying to get it to work on my Yamaha YMF744. However, I've got a big problem with SBLink on that card. I need to use the SETUPDS program provided with the DOS drivers for the YMF7x4 PCI sound cards in order to enable SBLink on the YMF744, but every time I tell the program to use SBLink on the sound card, SETUPDS crashes the entire computer, and at one point, I got a "divide overflow" error. What gives?

Okay, so I've tested your CTCM directory, and while I can get SoundBlaster 16 digital audio and CQM out of my SoundBlaster 32 and two SoundBlaster AWE64s, I can't get any General MIDI or AWE synth working. What's the problem?

As for my SoundBlaster Live! issues, I figured it out. I have to overclock the Pentium II a little bit, otherwise, the FM Synthesis slows down.