Outstanding Batyra! Those Casio speakers in particular tickle my fancy - love that box art. I had a quick google but couldn't find a recording of the midi - how does it sound?

Wow, nice stuff as always Batyra!

Today a more limited post here - got myself a little VRAM fix:

I know the performance sucks, particularly of the Virge/VX, but there's just something about the aesthetics of VRAM that gives me a warm fuzzy feeling - particularly when on such high-quality PCBs as these ELSA cards. Deutsche Gründlichkeit indeed 😀

brassicGamer wrote:

FGB wrote:

However, the ASUS is not the first ATX Board. I think the first ATX board was Intel FX based, made by Intel.

Love your photos, FGB - always a please to analyse (no blur, crystal clear). Anatomically, I would have thought that a dead giveaway of earlier ATX boards would be those with AT & ATX power connectors. I guess not based on a comparison of this board and the ATX pictured above. Both boards have a similar layout though, if you consider the position of the ports and of the RAM sockets - I don't think I've seen the RAM slots sandwiched between the PCI slots and the CPU socket before and now I've seen 2!

FGB wrote:

I'm building a P200 rig with it, along with a Miro Highscore 3D (licensed Canopus Pure 3D card) and a Riva or a Savage or Matrox Mystique card.

I'm looking forward to some photos and benchmarking results 😀

I think it was the Intel Advanced/ATX (Thor), which was the first S7 ATX board, i have one which is flashed with MR BIOS

Thanks Guys!
@badmojo - box art. is crazy… only pokemons are missing there… I havent test it yet - I have to find proper power adapter (its 110V and in Poland we have 230V) but I'm pretty sure it sound similar to Casio GZ-50 midi module:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QGK-8jf2Nk

It's very small and sound nice. I'll let you know when I'll test it.

God Of Gaming wrote:

brostenen wrote:

TheMobRules wrote:

I have one of them Jazz16's, that do not pick up any ISA noise or noise from drives loading. And it has no DMA clicking noise. The specs are nearly identical to an SB-Pro card. Now, the bad part is that I have no idea what Jazz16 model it is.

EDIT:
It is shown in my blog, as I used it, when building my dx33 machine.

Assuming one is able to obtain one of the early revision AWE32 cards that have real OPL3 chip, and using separate mpu401 intelligent mode card, is that the ideal, or is there still something that the sb 16 or pro 2 do better?

for the early <95 dos games the pro2 is the best choice, more compatible, less problems. i use the sbpro2 and an awe64gold to cover the dos age (from the blaster side - i also use gus, midi).

sb16 first gen - clicking problem, noisy digital output
second gen - compatibility problems, analytical fm sound, buggy mpu
awe32 - mostly second gen sb16 problems

Batyra wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QGK-8jf2Nk

It's very small and sound nice. I'll let you know when I'll test it.

Yeah I really like that, very bright and "computer music" sounding.

Got this in the mail today from Russia. They got all the good stuff over there! Gonna pair this with my Pentium MMX 233 😉

Anybody want a sammich? Lots of them in baggies here... wait, these aren't sammiches at all!

Looks more like:
3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
3dfx Voodoo 3 1000 AGP
Creative 3D Blaster Banshee AGP
Diamond Monster Fusion (Banshee) AGP
2 different Diamond Viper V330s (possibly Riva 128ZX 8MB and Riva 128 4MB... hard to tell)
STB Velocity 128 PCI with TV Out (cool!)
Creative CT6610 3D Blaster Permedia 2 (with 3D Labs branded chip, not TI)
Gigabyte ATI Rage 128 Pro with Red PCB (neat!)
ATI Rage (128 probably) PCI card
Diamond Stealth II G460 8MB (Intel i740)
Opti\ADI Soundport ISA sound card
Unidentified nvidia PCI card (unusual looking, possibly a TNT2, Vanta or Geforce 2 MX, but I can't tell... looks like the heatsink fell off and is loose in the bag; also has a disk with it?)
RealMagic PCI mpeg card
ISA external SCSI interface card (I think)
A couple ISA modems
A couple very old hard IDE hard drives
A couple mysterious Athlon Slot A CPUs with dual fan heatsinks (hoping for two 1Ghz models... hah.. 😉 )

The sammich bags irk me big time when the seller puts in electronics, PCB boards, hard drives, anything that can get ruined by static instead of using ESD Anti-Static bags.

A retro and slightly less retro pickup:

On the very very retro side of things, I finally found a PVM! After five years of searching, I got this JVC BM-H1300SU for $40 at a local Goodwill. Amazing condition, beautiful picture.

On the less retro side, I got my hands on a Korg Triton Extreme 88, the highest end model of the Triton line up. I've been lusting after one of Korg's workstations for a while now, and for the price I paid ($650) I couldn't pass it up. Fantastic synth with fantastic keys and amazing sounds. It also has General MIDI 2 support for no apparent reason, which means it's gonna get run through some paces with DOS games 🤣

^ excellent find!
I also managed to get a 14" PVM last year, they are simply amazing. If you get used to it all other 15k displays will look like ultra-low res 🤣 🤣 🤣

bjwil1991 wrote:

The sammich bags irk me big time when the seller puts in electronics, PCB boards, hard drives, anything that can get ruined by static instead of using ESD Anti-Static bags.

I agree. I'm happy to save these from being either scrapped, eaten as sammiches or shuffled around in baggies so long that they slowly get zapped to death.

I will say though, I've gotten all manner of cards that had been kept in horrid conditions and the vast majority work fine. Not to say there isn't some unfathomably small amount of ESD related damage in a chip somewhere that hasn't shown itself in testing, but in the end, I'd rather have them in baggies than stripped of their caps and heatsinks and left in a tote with an inch of water in it. I've salvaged and repaired cards in that condition and they still tend to work perfectly fine in the end, but the ones that are safely\unsafely kept in sammich baggies tend to take a LOT less damage which equals less time. 😀

Dont know why I buy all these TIGA cards as they are prctically useless...but they look nice and it was again a really good offer: EIZO MD-B12. Looks like new!

A VGA-passthrough cable is also included:

As there is a BIOS on the card I expected it to work stand-alone. The printing on the box of this auction...
https://www.ebay.ie/itm/172026675858

...seems to confirm it. But with the EIZO only the PC doensnt power-on, but with another VGA in addition it boots. Maybe there is some DIP to activate the stand-alone mode? Dont know...

Same seller, same price: NIB PX486P3 80486 Board including RAM and CPU 😎 Will remove the battery now...

Good looking board.

more interesting a dx free 486 😀 in 91 that was the top cpu, the mobo is more than 2 years newer. the opti495 is not a speed champion.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

A couple very old hard IDE hard drives

Hmmm, which Deskstar is that? Looks like one of the infamous 75GXP DTLA models from this side. The other one should be a 4500RPM Seagate.

About the bags, anti-static is of course preferable over the transparent ziplocks, but I'd rather have the ziplocks than have bare PCBs rattling around and scratching each other up in transit.

I found someone selling an old new stock Philips PCRW2010 20x 10x 40x drive for just €10.

I had a very similar drive back in 1999 in my Pentium III (with a Pioneer DVD drive since it didn't read DVDs) and it was pretty good. The tray opens real fast and the discs are read very fast as well. It has a very distinctive look which may not be to everyone's taste but I like it.

Never seen a design like that before. All of my drives throughout the years slowed down at opening, won't open unless I punch the daylights out of it, or won't open period unless a disk isn't inserted in the drive, but opens rather slowly. I did fix a CD drive that had the not opening issue, but read the disks without issues by replacing the eject motor from a broken CD-ROM drive I had and it opens faster than before and it still does to this day. Not bad for a CD-ROM drive from 1993-1994 (Creative Labs CR-563-B).

It's all about wear & tear isn't it? A retro PC won't get heavy use - I really abused my drives with damaged CDs, shitty CD-Rs, etc. back in the day but now I make sure all my CDs are nice & clean. Most of my older drives still work pretty fine though now that I gave them a bit of a clean. I'm not sure but I think most of the time I got rid of a drive, it was because I wanted a faster one so I passed on the old one to family. The Creative one I had in 1995 stopped reading discs though, that one I remember. It would take several ejects before it would read any disc.