Thanks guys! @Rawit: I ended up going a different direction with the CF adapter, see below. That's a neat adapter & much tidier than mine turned out (it looks better in the pics than in person) though so thx for the offer!
chinny22 wrote:Am I right in thinking the 2 CF cards appear as I HDD to the PC? How well does that work?
The cards show up as two drives, the jumper on top selects master/slave for the top card (or slave/master for the bottom card.) You can also just stick one card in but you need both positions on the IDE occupied for that to work, i.e. if you stick a card in the top slot and set it to master you need another device on the bus to be slave. I didn't know that yet at this point in the build but we'll get to that in a couple posts. This thread is lagging behind reality by a couple weeks BTW.
chinny22 wrote:Also what do you use that Sony 4 screen thing for?!
Absolutely nothing at the moment. I bought it for an art project a year ago but I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. Why is that such a common theme around here?? 😜
Let's talk about sound!
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Edit: this pic is now a huuuuuuuge version that you can zoom into for maximal 16-bit high-fidelity glory.
I had the choice between two very cool sound cards that I've wanted to use in something for a while. The first was that GUS MAX I found in a trash pile a while back. I'd cleaned it up but hadn't tested it yet; I really wanted this card to work. I've been a GUS fan since the '90s but never had a GF1 card before (only PnPs ... which honestly are totally fine, I've never run into any situation where a PnP is incompatible over a GF1, but I digress.)
The second choice was an ATI Stereo F/X CD. Specifically this ATI Stereo F/X CD. Now this is an extremely interesting card to me, because ... this is literally the card my family had in our 386SX/16 when I was a kid. Most of the hardware from that machine is long gone but with some foresight I hung onto this. Nice that a little bit of its legacy could live on in 2017.
I honestly credit this sound card with me being a musician today. Sure, there were other factors, but this card got me started with Adlib Composer and trackers, right in the middle of my personal heavy-BBS-use era when I could share my tunes and hear new ones from a wider community of people for the first time. You want to see a random piece of hardware that altered the course of someone's life, for the better? Look right here.
Naturally I really wanted this one to work as well. It had been sitting in a box for probably more than 20 years when I rescued it.
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Wait a minute, did I say I had a choice to make?? They both went in. Of course they did.
Incidentally here's what I did to tidy up the power switch cable since it wasn't connected to the switch any more:
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Yep.
I hadn't had any luck with the CF cards and decided I hated my floppy adapter. I wanted this machine to have primary storage in the range of 100-500MB and I didn't have any old hard drives around that fit the bill. So I swapped that out for a 250MB Zip drive and set that up as IDE master (only one channel on my I/O card, so not "primary" master 😉 ), then I made a boot disk that would load iomega's Guest.exe and configure it to be C:. Sorted.
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With that out of the way I was able to install the GUS driver suite onto my new "hard drive." Incidentally I chucked a MOD player and a couple songs onto the boot disk, so I already knew that the ATI, which needs no drivers, was working fine. But what about the GUS?
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I didn't mail in the registration card.
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