The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-24, 22:02:

After how many hours? six?

I've been fighting with that cursed Intel board around 2 hours.

Hopefully the fight was much better than the game itself. 🤣

The 16-bit section is in a really awkward position & direction for routing straight out to the 16-bit of an ISA slot with the 8-bit section directly over it. It's slightly impossible to follow with just one side of the board, and would be much easier with a 4 layer board to do ground and power planes. But the autorouter did this for me, I can't claim much credit beyond putting all the pins in the right places (and checking their location with a multimeter before proceeding)

I much prefer 4 layers PCB at a minimum and few bulk capacitors sized for polymers and few 4.7uf 16V MLCC. You can't imagine how much noise things makes with 2 layer boards especially for improving audio quality.

Finding 4 layers ISA i/o card with fully buffered IDE, and resistors in series of correctly done IDE is nearly impossible.

Also, same problem with ISA video cards. I managed to find some and purchased one.

Cheers,

Testing two ISA WD video cards (90C30-LR and 90C31-LR) in compaq deskpro 386/25e. Actually the compaq's onboard video chipset is faster when I do dir of dos directory. I know this is crude check but that all I have time for.

Cheers,

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-09-24, 18:51:

Today, after some prolonged troubleshooting, I've finally experienced Quake on original Intel Batman board with Pentium 60. It was horrible, as expected.

Was it faster than what I had to deal with on an i486DX4-100 I wonder..

Quake? Obviously faster. After overclocking to 66 MHz, timedemo scored 19.9 fps with Matrox Mystique. Interesting platform from historic POV, but totally not worth resoldering/modding dead RTC for some benchmarks.

I was happily enjoying my new(ish) ESS AudioDrive ES1868F when I decided to play an old favorite of mine, Xargon. I was immediately startled by how damned loud the music was! I quickly turned the speakers down and shock turned to despair when I realized how distorted the audio was... did I just blow out my speakers???

I did some testing and found to my relief that the speakers were fine (they are pretty nice speakers). To make a long story short, I figured since the card does not have a separate "speaker" and "line out" output, it must have some builtin amp—and a way to enable or disable it. Some research showed that the two jumpers (JP1 and JP2) needed to both be set to positions 2-3 to disable the amp... and sure enough, I had mine set to the factory default (positions 1-2; amp enabled). Switching the jumpers fixed the issue, and now it sounds glorious indeed, even when playing XARGON!

I really like this card! The FM synth is not 100% accurate to the OPL2/3, but it's pretty close and it sounds very clean. I definitely prefer it to the CQM synth of the AWE32/64 (my previous card), which I actually didn't mind too much.

My favorite Atari computer model and this one cleaned up nicely. Still had factory plastic over the function keys. Yes, the ST line was nice and the TT030 was a piece of hardware art, but the 800XL holds a special place in gaming history for me.

The 800XL is my favorite, too. The Atari -XL series is the first computer I ever touched, inherited from my older brother (likely a 600XL). I've got an 800XL along with the Lotharek sio2sd (though not in such a nice case as yours!), and it's a lot of fun. Great keyboard to type on, and I still think it's the best looking micro out there.

The HDD for the Versa P/75 came in yesterday (80GB Seagate Momentous 2.5" IDE ATA-133). As of now, it's running Windows 95 and now goes the long and paitient process of pushing software to the 80GB HDD for installation/configuration/setup. I found out the P/75 has the 800x600 screen on it (might have to try that out on the M/75 sometime) - probably also explains why the hinges have not blown up on it (yet) - seems the touch screen and 800x600 had the best hinge design on these laptops. The Memory Card (32MB) Comes in today giving it a total of 40MB of RAM (32MB + the 8MB on the Motherboard) - so it should be pretty fast for what it is.

I also made a discovery. So the other night while messing with the P/75 to test out the ESS 688 Audio Drive in it - I decided on a whim to briefly do the "short trick" on the aftermarket battery it came with and put the battery in my M/75 which is getting daily use as of late. Thinking nothing of it, I went to bed, woke up at 6 a.m. - and found the cats knocked the power plug out of the Versa while I was asleep....well I'll be if that thing was not running under that battery on it's own - I got a good 30 minutes out of it before work playing Hoyle Card Games and MicroLInk Yahtzee on it before going to work. At work I just let it sit idle and run under it's own power off full charges to exercise the battery a bit - I was batting between 30 minutes to a full hour thirty out of that thing depending on screen contrast......looking forward to being outside and doing some sunshine gaming on these beasts on my patio in between rounds of working on the Les Paul copy guitar I'm rebuilding.

I guess I now have what I wanted - a fully mobile DOS system (M/75) - and apparently also a fully mobile Windows 9x system as well (P/75)

newtmonkey wrote on 2020-09-25, 14:36:

I was happily enjoying my new(ish) ESS AudioDrive ES1868F when I decided to play an old favorite of mine, Xargon. I was immediately startled by how damned loud the music was! I quickly turned the speakers down and shock turned to despair when I realized how distorted the audio was... did I just blow out my speakers???

I did some testing and found to my relief that the speakers were fine (they are pretty nice speakers). To make a long story short, I figured since the card does not have a separate "speaker" and "line out" output, it must have some builtin amp—and a way to enable or disable it. Some research showed that the two jumpers (JP1 and JP2) needed to both be set to positions 2-3 to disable the amp... and sure enough, I had mine set to the factory default (positions 1-2; amp enabled). Switching the jumpers fixed the issue, and now it sounds glorious indeed, even when playing XARGON!

I really like this card! The FM synth is not 100% accurate to the OPL2/3, but it's pretty close and it sounds very clean. I definitely prefer it to the CQM synth of the AWE32/64 (my previous card), which I actually didn't mind too much.

I had the same with a ES1869F, the amplification was just too damn high. But I had something similar with the AWE64 where the 'Spk out' port was loud and noisy so I ended up using the 'Line out' port instead.

What are those pre-amplified signals meant? Were they for cheap, passive speakers that didn't have an amplifier (and were those still around around the time of the AWE64?). I don't think I ever saw such things.

Installed a coprocessor on my 386 motherboard. I know it doesn't do much, but I like it when it says it is present, on bootup.

liqmat wrote on 2020-09-25, 14:56:

My favorite Atari computer model and this one cleaned up nicely.

What kind of cable did you use to hook your Atari to TV?

Turbo -> wrote on 2020-09-25, 21:01:

liqmat wrote on 2020-09-25, 14:56:

My favorite Atari computer model and this one cleaned up nicely.

What kind of cable did you use to hook your Atari to TV?

A composite A/V cable.

newtmonkey wrote on 2020-09-25, 14:36:

I was happily enjoying my new(ish) ESS AudioDrive ES1868F when I decided to play an old favorite of mine, Xargon. I was immediately startled by how damned loud the music was! I quickly turned the speakers down and shock turned to despair when I realized how distorted the audio was... did I just blow out my speakers???

I did some testing and found to my relief that the speakers were fine (they are pretty nice speakers). To make a long story short, I figured since the card does not have a separate "speaker" and "line out" output, it must have some builtin amp—and a way to enable or disable it. Some research showed that the two jumpers (JP1 and JP2) needed to both be set to positions 2-3 to disable the amp... and sure enough, I had mine set to the factory default (positions 1-2; amp enabled). Switching the jumpers fixed the issue, and now it sounds glorious indeed, even when playing XARGON!

I really like this card! The FM synth is not 100% accurate to the OPL2/3, but it's pretty close and it sounds very clean. I definitely prefer it to the CQM synth of the AWE32/64 (my previous card), which I actually didn't mind too much.

I seem to recall that LGR mentioned the same about the sound volume of Xargon on one of his latest videos (the one where he reviews a new MCA sound card) so maybe it's the game, not your soundcard.

Turbo -> wrote on 2020-09-25, 20:28:

Installed a coprocessor on my 386 motherboard. I know it doesn't do much, but I like it when it says it is present, on bootup.

Nice and Hahhaaa ! I did same with a couple 286 and one 386. Yep ! does not do much much for regular use but maybe Quttro Pro or other app may make use of it 😀

Worked on attempt number #32768 to get this computer to become a functional computer and not an increasingly enraging paperweight:

IBM NetVista A40 (6578-RAU): Video signal constantly goes out

Nothing I do works. The second the Found New Hardware wizard comes up to install drivers the machine goes to sleep and cannot be resuscitated or even powered off without unplugging the power cord. This would be a great time to break out an oscilloscope...if I owned one.

aha2940 wrote on 2020-09-25, 22:18:

I seem to recall that LGR mentioned the same about the sound volume of Xargon on one of his latest videos (the one where he reviews a new MCA sound card) so maybe it's the game, not your soundcard.

I saw that video, too, last night, coincidentally, and I think that's the case. It seems to take control of the mixer and set the volume to max! I've noticed this with a few other games, too (the worst of which MUTE your line in volume!!! examples: Might & Magic III and Prince of Persia 2).

HandOfFate wrote on 2020-09-25, 18:30:

I had the same with a ES1869F, the amplification was just too damn high. But I had something similar with the AWE64 where the 'Spk out' port was loud and noisy so I ended up using the 'Line out' port instead.

What are those pre-amplified signals meant? Were they for cheap, passive speakers that didn't have an amplifier (and were those still around around the time of the AWE64?). I don't think I ever saw such things.

I am pretty certain they are indeed for passive speakers. I remember lots of shops selling these kinds of cheap unpowered speakers for <20USD, often in discount bins/shelves.

Today I've been attempting to diagnose why my recent Turbo XT acquisition keeps corrupting the HDD when it's in turbo mode... even though the machine has managed to pass multiple different diagnostic tools' testing with flying colours and zero errors.

Investigations are ongoing!