VOGONS

Anyone have the PC Chips M575 Game/sound interface pinout?

Topic actions

First post, by Ace

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, "PC Chips, are you out of your mind?!" I don't care, I had this board laying around with a dead AMD K6 in it and even with a different CPU, the motherboard still refused to work. Turns out the BIOS was corrupt, so after finding the latest BIOS for the M575 on an Italian website(or Spanish, I don't remember exactly), I flash the BIOS into the ROM chip using my ROM programmer, and sure enough, the board works.

Of course, I know PC Chips' products are a giant mound of garbage, but what made me want to fix the board was the sound card integrated on the motherboard. It's a rebadged C-Media CMI8330, the SoundPro HT1869V+, and I know several people on here have made mention of the CMI8330, so I wanted to see how good of a SoundBlaster 16 clone the CMI8330 is. There is one problem, however: I can't find the pinouts for J4 on the motherboard, which is where a separate piece bearing an audio output, line in and microphone input as well as a Game port plugs in to. Here's a page on Statson.org detailing everything on the motherboard:

http://stason.org/TULARC/pc/motherboards/P/PC … ntium-M575.html

Does anyone happen to have the pinouts of the J4 header? I'm looking to build my own Game/sound module with at least 2 RCA jacks and a Game port(and possibly a WaveBlaster header if it's at all possible - inside the computer, of course), but without the pinouts of the J4 header, I can't do that. I need to know which pins carry the audio outputs and the signals required by the Game port.

Oh, and one last question: is the cache on this board real or fake?

Creator of The Many Sounds of:, a collection of various DOS games played using different sound cards.

Reply 1 of 3, by ratfink

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Could it be similar to the m571, in which case there might be something useful here:

http://www.m571.com/m571/

Reply 2 of 3, by Ace

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I bookmarked a page from that site on my laptop which seems to show the pinout of the Game/sound header(labeled as J6 instead of J4 on the M571, it seems). I'm going to purchase a DB-15 and two RCA jacks either later today or over the weekend and see if the pinouts of the Game/sound header on the M571 match those of the M575's header.

Creator of The Many Sounds of:, a collection of various DOS games played using different sound cards.

Reply 3 of 3, by Ace

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Seems like the M571 and M575 share the same headers, but at different locations as my M575 has both the audio in/out header and the Game port header as one big piece rather than two separate headers, but they do share the same pinout. Thanks for your link, Ratfink; I got two RCA jacks mounted to the header now to get audio out of the rebadged CMI8330.

It's really a pretty damn good SoundBlaster 16 clone, but I've noticed a few things about it:

-Really weird Stereo sound. The Stereo sound of the OPL3 clone is reversed, but the Stereo sound of SoundBlaster digital audio is reversed only in SoundBlaster Pro mode. It's correct in SoundBlaster 16 mode
-The integrated OPL3 clone appears to output certain notes at different volume levels than the real YMF262
-The integrated OPL3 clone is EXTREMELY noisy. Makes me think of a Yamaha YM2413; that chip is damn noisy.
-The integrated OPL3 clone appears to have quantization noise much like ESFM
-The card has some volume balance imperfections. OPL3 is too quiet.
-Not too crazy about the quality of the digital audio. Later SoundBlaster 16s sound better than this.
-Overall sound output is very low, at least with DOS games running under Windows 95(still need DOS drivers for this card)

Now to wire up the Game port.

Creator of The Many Sounds of:, a collection of various DOS games played using different sound cards.

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to General Old Hardware
Close window
Close window