matze79 wrote:

2x 1Mb MDRAM Chips for Tseng ET6000 😀

Hercules Dynamite now with 4Megs for my Pentium Class Machine 😀

I was a big Hercules fan in the mid 1990s. I remember buying most of their model line up just to benchmark them and keep the fastest one in my system. I remember having the Dynamite Pro (ET4000), Stingray (ARK2000PV), Terminator 64 (Vision 968) and more. They had great box art and for that short period of time were one of the top video card companies.

Regarding memory chips on graphics cards, I now make sure I buy only cards with them filled. Saves you quite some money and another shipping expense.

Looks like I'm joining the ESS AudioDrive movement 😊

And Turtle Beach Santa Cruz because ZanQuance said I must check them out 😀

Hi Phil,

Take note of the MIDI emulation on the Santa Cruz. I know it's entirely subjective, but I find that for most DOS games it sounds better then even the 8MB SBLive! set. Better than DreamBlaster S1 as well. I've never experimented with the MIDI header on it, that might be something to check out too. 😀

Also curious to get your take on its 3D positional audio abilities.

clueless1 wrote:

Hi Phil,

Take note of the MIDI emulation on the Santa Cruz. I know it's entirely subjective, but I find that for most DOS games it sounds better then even the 8MB SBLive! set. Better than DreamBlaster S1 as well. I've never experimented with the MIDI header on it, that might be something to check out too. 😀

Also curious to get your take on its 3D positional audio abilities.

Cool, I will check out those areas 😀

And something from me... hard to find any info on this one.

Batyra wrote:

And something from me... hard to find any info on this one.

Interesting. Never saw a card with the extra YMF704 chip. I think it supports both Wavetable and OPL synth although not sure about that one. The YMF719 already supports FM synth on its own so the extra chip is there probably only for crappy wavetable MIDI.

Finally, after years of waiting... I have a decent (and working) socket 754 PCI-E board. 😀

Asus K8N4-E Deluxe

The battery is from Ikea 🤣 ?

shiva2004 wrote:

The battery is from Ikea 🤣 ?

Yep. We have them here too. They don't last long, but hey, they are cheap.

My MT-32 finally showed up from Japan today. I am waiting for a few more parts to arrive, and I will have both of my retro gaming setups ready to go.

sprcorreia wrote:

shiva2004 wrote:

The battery is from Ikea 🤣 ?

Yep. He have them here too. They don't last long, but hey, they are cheap.

We have IKEA batteries here too 🤣

Ikea furnitures are a bit like chinese capazitors. Cheap and will not last long. 🤣

Another Tseng ET4000, this time VLB.

It appears to be this one: http://arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/v/A-B/50028.htm

rkrenicki wrote:

My MT-32 finally showed up from Japan today. I am waiting for a few more parts to arrive, and I will have both of my retro gaming setups ready to go.

Nice. I've been hunting for one of these as well to use with my 386, but I haven't been able to find anything under 160$ shipped. I'll pay 100$ and not a penny more! 🤣

rkrenicki wrote:

My MT-32 finally showed up from Japan today. I am waiting for a few more parts to arrive, and I will have both of my retro gaming setups ready to go.

From the angle of the photo it looks like it has a straight face at the front 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

rkrenicki wrote:

My MT-32 finally showed up from Japan today. I am waiting for a few more parts to arrive, and I will have both of my retro gaming setups ready to go.

From the angle of the photo it looks like it has a straight face at the front 😀

whoa, it really does!

Found something interesting at the flea market in my home town today:

QDI VIP596P3 - socket 4 / VLB / PCI / ISA

It's a VLB socket 4 pentium board made by QDI! Granted it only takes the 60 or 66mhz original pentium chips, but I'm curious to see how VLB runs on it compared to a 486. Haven't had a chance to test the board yet but I'm pretty excited about it. Hope it works! If it does I'm sticking a VLB Cirrus Logics 2MB card on it, a Voodoo 1 and an AWE64 (don't really have anything older left).

One odd thing I noticed about it is the lack of on board I/O and IDE controllers... this baby will have to run with an ISA multi I/O card (I sold my only VLB I/O card like a moron).

Nice! I do remember VLB-on-Pentium being derided as the ultimate kludge (since VLB was, by definition, an extension of the 486 processor bus, which is rather different than the Pentium processor bus.)

As for no onboard controllers - that also was fairly standard on multi-VLB boards. They expected you to use one VLB slot for a video card, one VLB slot for a multi-I/O controller card (serial, parallel, floppy, ATA,) with one spare. (Ethernet was probably the most likely candidate for the third slot, but those were rarer than hens' teeth.)

One fun thing you can do though is slap a PCI SATA controller in it! That would just be the ultimate oddity, a system with a VLB video card and SATA hard drive...

Anonymous Freak wrote:

Nice! I do remember VLB-on-Pentium being derided as the ultimate kludge (since VLB was, by definition, an extension of the 486 processor bus, which is rather different than the Pentium processor bus.)

As for no onboard controllers - that also was fairly standard on multi-VLB boards. They expected you to use one VLB slot for a video card, one VLB slot for a multi-I/O controller card (serial, parallel, floppy, ATA,) with one spare. (Ethernet was probably the most likely candidate for the third slot, but those were rarer than hens' teeth.)

One fun thing you can do though is slap a PCI SATA controller in it! That would just be the ultimate oddity, a system with a VLB video card and SATA hard drive...

As a matter of fact I have a PCI sata / pata Promise controller - I'll try and use that. Right now I don't have a socket 4 CPU here, but as soon as I get it I'll test the board out.

stamasd wrote:

Another Tseng ET4000, this time VLB. […]
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Another Tseng ET4000, this time VLB.

It appears to be this one: http://arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/v/A-B/50028.htm

Nice. I think that's the same card I have. Is it FCC ID ICUVGA-GW142? Cardex are better known as Gainward 😀