Some of the best music of any video game.

Here is some important information to know if you can't get music out of it for some reason.

How to fix missing music in Civilization 2, even when you have a disc in the drive

Fixed a GF4 MX460 whose 1st VGA had taken a dent, somehow. Also slapped a nice HIS cooler in place of the stock one as the original had broken blades.

Hi all,

Finally got a fully working external SCSI CD-ROM setup. I had a 12x CyberDrive in an external enclosure (no idea if that's the actual brand name but it reports itself as that and the label is equally vague). It struggles with CD-Rs sometimes (excessive spin down/spin up) and even with a new rubber belt and lubrication, it needs help sometimes ejecting the tray which is knocking the top with your fist quite hard as it ejects.

I found an identical but scuffed up SCSI enclosure instead with a very yellowed Toshiba 4x drive complete with dead laser in this sort of shipping container/interesting hoarding situation in rural PA. That's another story...
Then I bought a NOS identical drive with a grey faceplate. Now I've made a best-of-all-the-parts external drive. Fits in better with the Dell 486 styling too.

Retrobrited beige faceplate from the dead drive, NOS Toshiba drive and original clean external enclosure. Now I've got a fully working and clean drive that reads any CD-R flawlessly, a spare external SCSI drive with the 12x drive as a backup and a dead Toshiba drive I can keep for parts minus the laser. I forgot how quiet quad speed drives are! Haven't experienced on in forever.

Looking forward to finally trying out Wing Commander 3 since my dad first bought it in 1994/95. We went from a 286 to a Pentium 75MHz and well one was too old/slow without a CD-ROM and the Pentium simply couldn't launch the game. I vaguely remember crashing and/or memory errors on a brand new computer that was otherwise fine. Also, the 12x CyberDrive caused a lot of stuttering. I think the game is just incredibly picky with drives, especially fast ones.

luckybob wrote on 2024-03-19, 08:58:

The CIV II music lives rent free in my head.

It's neighbors with SimCity 2000 and Escape Velocity.

Sim City 2000 with FM sound regularly goes in and out of my head for no explainable reason. I've no idea why. Recently heard it from a wave table card and it seems so strange.

Shadzilla wrote on 2024-03-18, 19:46:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-03-18, 15:41:

gerry wrote on 2024-03-18, 12:55:

a note of gratitude! whenever this is done it helps others in a practical way and also is an act of preservation

Does the CD contain the Tiny Computers logo for the system information?
I have one but the CD is a standard Windows 98 SE CD, same goes for the floppy. But I remember the system dialogue window did have a Tiny logo on it when we got it in the 90s.

I don't see anything like that. I've had a scan through the Ghost image that's in the ISO and there's no OEMLOGO.BMP or OEMINFO.INI in there, and there's no mention of 'Tiny' in a quick scan of system.dat either. There are links to the Tiny BBS on the desktop and in Hyper Terminal though. Not sure if the boot screen is customised. I think to be completely sure you'd need to restore it onto a system and see what's what.

I might have a go at that with 86Box actually.

I remember the Tiny BBS too 😀

Its strange yours is a ghost image. I know the disc we had was just a plain jane Windows 98 CD because I used it several times over the years to install Windows and yeah its just a 98CD.

b_riera wrote on 2024-03-19, 15:57:

luckybob wrote on 2024-03-19, 08:58:

The CIV II music lives rent free in my head.

It's neighbors with SimCity 2000 and Escape Velocity.

Sim City 2000 with FM sound regularly goes in and out of my head for no explainable reason. I've no idea why. Recently heard it from a wave table card and it seems so strange.

I only know the music from FM synthesis as well. It sounds fantastic and doesn't need General MIDI to stand out.

I always played it from within some variation of Windows. Maybe the experience is different for those who played the DOS version on whatever sound card they had at the time.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-03-19, 17:35:

Shadzilla wrote on 2024-03-18, 19:46:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2024-03-18, 15:41:

Does the CD contain the Tiny Computers logo for the system information?
I have one but the CD is a standard Windows 98 SE CD, same goes for the floppy. But I remember the system dialogue window did have a Tiny logo on it when we got it in the 90s.

I don't see anything like that. I've had a scan through the Ghost image that's in the ISO and there's no OEMLOGO.BMP or OEMINFO.INI in there, and there's no mention of 'Tiny' in a quick scan of system.dat either. There are links to the Tiny BBS on the desktop and in Hyper Terminal though. Not sure if the boot screen is customised. I think to be completely sure you'd need to restore it onto a system and see what's what.

I might have a go at that with 86Box actually.

I remember the Tiny BBS too 😀

Its strange yours is a ghost image. I know the disc we had was just a plain jane Windows 98 CD because I used it several times over the years to install Windows and yeah its just a 98CD.

Well the weird thing is, that's what I remember too. We had (in fact I still have) a basic Windows 95 OSR2 OEM disc, and there was a Tiny boot floppy that was really just a basic Win95 boot disk, and the user was left to their own devices to figure something out. I have no idea why I also have this restore kit, but I'm damn certain I never used it. We must have requested it for some reason but obviously it was a very long time ago now, the reasons are lost to time 😀

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-03-19, 18:10:

I only know the music from FM synthesis as well. It sounds fantastic and doesn't need General MIDI to stand out.

I always played it from within some variation of Windows. Maybe the experience is different for those who played the DOS version on whatever sound card they had at the time.

We had the DOS CD version included with our Win 3.11 Pentium 75 Packard Bell circa Christmas 94. Think I still have the CD although it's far too scratched to work. The DOS version is like most late DOS games when it comes to sound card/MIDI support. Totally depends on what you have and what you select although the vast majority of people were going to have some sort of AdLib OPL/Sound Blaster compatible so the sound was mostly the same. You're stuck with one resolution which is annoying on a monitor over 14".

I recently tried the Windows version and being able to play in 800x600 is amazing although it defaulted to the DreamBlaster S2 I installed on my Sound Blaster. It's just too odd playing a game I know to sound one way for decades sounding completely different now. Agree on FM being great for Sim City though. Definitely doesn't transform the sound track like it does with something like Monkey Island.

Finally found out why 33 MHz bus CPU's ran unstable. The clock divider! 16 MHz is just too fast for ISA!

And if one doesn't Disable this setting, the rest of the settings are disregarded. I feel stupid.

Now I have a stable DX4 100 Overdrive with 64kB L2 cache. Lets fiddle with 256k chips and see how that goes...

b_riera wrote on 2024-03-19, 18:32:

It's just too odd playing a game I know to sound one way for decades sounding completely different now. Agree on FM being great for Sim City though. Definitely doesn't transform the sound track like it does with something like Monkey Island.

Or Loom on an MT-32!

Speaking of SimCity 2000, also installed and tested that on this Pentium 4 under Win 3.11.

Despite running on a P4 @ 3.4GHz, performance feels surprisingly chunky. 😅

Haven't played any of the Sim City series in many years. It was my favourite game back in the day. Going to have to dig out my old CDs some time. Loved the cities taking off into space 😀

I killed a £200 vintage sound module.

InTheStudy wrote on 2024-03-19, 19:50:

I killed a £200 vintage sound module.

That's unfortunate. How did that happen?

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-03-19, 20:06:

That's unfortunate. How did that happen?

I trusted the advice of people on the internet instead of my own judgement. Lesson painfully learned.

InTheStudy wrote on 2024-03-19, 20:13:

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-03-19, 20:06:

That's unfortunate. How did that happen?

I trusted the advice of people on the internet instead of my own judgement. Lesson painfully learned.

Ah, just saw the thread in question. That sucks. 🙁

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-03-19, 20:24:

Ah, just saw the thread in question. That sucks. 🙁

Can't say I'm super happy, to be sure. I was already going to be asking a technician I know to help me with the MU50 battery, now I get to also ask them to change a fuse in an SC-D70 while I pray to every god that will listen.

Regardless, I'm out of pocket for at least the repair, plus I have the extra wait for parts and servicing; and I'm not cheerful. And worst case? It's completely dead and I lost £200 to this stupidity.

InTheStudy wrote on 2024-03-19, 20:32:

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-03-19, 20:24:

Ah, just saw the thread in question. That sucks. 🙁

Can't say I'm super happy, to be sure. I was already going to be asking a technician I know to help me with the MU50 battery, now I get to also ask them to change a fuse in an SC-D70 while I pray to every god that will listen.

Regardless, I'm out of pocket for at least the repair, plus I have the extra wait for parts and servicing; and I'm not cheerful. And worst case? It's completely dead and I lost £200 to this stupidity.

Ouch, I hope you get that working again soon, hopefully it's just the AC>DC section that's got a problem. I really don't get why these sound modules need to run off of AC, it's probably a sound quality thing but imo it's just unnecessary complexity.
I was wondering about the edit to the your earlier post and it's a shame that's what prompted it 🙁

Buying stuff from Japan can always be a mess too, I got a Japan-only Toshiba Dynabook V486FV that I could see had vinegar syndrome / polariser breakdown on the LCD which I thought would be an easy fix - when I got it it turned out that the nimh batteries inside had wreaked havoc and damaged a bunch of traces. Still haven't got that running yet even though it's probably the most expensive vintage laptop I've bought in a while.

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Today I made some tidy double-diode CR2032 holders where previously I've been making them using the motherboard style with the clip. These little flat ones completely enclose the lithium cell and there's enough room in the housing to fit two diodes - the benefit here is that no heatshrink or insulation is needed, unlike the old style one in my Toshiba 400CS here

Thermalwrong wrote on 2024-03-20, 00:06:

Ouch, I hope you get that working again soon, hopefully it's just the AC>DC section that's got a problem. I really don't get why these sound modules need to run off of AC, it's probably a sound quality thing but imo it's just unnecessary complexity.
I was wondering about the edit to the your earlier post and it's a shame that's what prompted it 🙁

You're not wrong. The MU-50, I just had a rummage in our stash of spare PSU's at work. First one I grabbed works perfectly with no noise. The Roland UA-100, I just went on Amazon and had a new, updated Roland PSU delivered next day. If I get bored of the UA-100 (now that the Alpha works on the World's Worst Recording Studio I don't really need a 16/44.1 sound card as well) as an effects processor it'll also power my GI-10 without the nerves caused by running a 30 year old transformer. If the SC-D70 had an external PSU, I'd have never have plugged it in - just raided the box at work again and used a fresh, modern UK-spec switched mode wall wart from the start.

So, yeah. I'd definitely have preferred an external unit and it would have saved me a fair amount of sadness.

Been selling most of my inventory to make place for a few new exquisite acquisitions.

Boards to sell so far:

- Intel D865GLC
- DTK PRM 27I E0 "Laplus Deskstar"
- ASUS A7N8X-X
- Gigabyte EX58-UD5.

Names to take on their place: Jetway, ABIT, Soltek 😁