(WARNING: Lots of RAW pictures (i.e. not edited)... if you're on dial-up or in Firefox with 64M of RAM, hit STOP button NOW! Thanks!)Time for another
Service Night(tm)!As promised, Marika got his genuine SoundBlaster! I had to change the Crystal 4237B-XQ3 soundcrap due to interferences and crappy drivers. The lab was full of old SB16s, but nobody knew which was the one that worked... While searching for the less dusty ones, i got one that looked like a AWE32, but after checking on
Creative SB product codes, it resulted to be an AWE64 PnP!
Here are the cards:
- AWE64 PnP (CT4380):
- SB16 Panasonic/IDE CDROM (CT2290) - not tested:
- SB16 CSP (what the heck is a CSP? Model CT1740) - not tested:
And here is Marika, ready for the action: (BTW: before starting this experiment, i've ripped a HD image of the system disk: 519MB, then RARed to 189MB... No more disasters...)
... and with the AWE64 in place....
Installation was a bit on the difficult side: when you plug and unplug cards from this box, some of them stop working... I had to do some cleanup on the riser card and on every ISA card on this box. Ah, i also had problems with Plug'n'Pray (see "Horror tale of the Week", below). After that, the AWE64 was working fine with latest Creative drivers:
The audio jacks on the card were a bit dusty, but they work MUCH better than the Crystal crap. I've tested also audio recording with a microphone: it was a pain due to the dusty jacks, but finally it worked. That's right! Recording audio ON A 386! And Creative AWE64 manual says that you need at the very least a P90...
I also got some Creative DOS utilities, and one of these is a diagnostic program. Let's check the card...
Ah, it has 512K of DRAM for samples... The RAM is OK, so if i ever decide to play with MIDI stuff, at least i have a good card for start.
Now for some serious testing!
- DOOM! It sounds
AWESOME! (much better than the Crystal)... unfortunately it froze when starting a game
- Nintendo didn't want you to do this with your 386, but anyway, here is it...
It's the
Special DOS 80386 optimized version of NO$GMB, an old GB(C) emulator. Super Mario Land runs almost fluid, while color games like Pokemon run a bit sluggish, sometimes with HUGE performance hits. Having a FPU helps a lot, specially if you want sound! The missing border chunks on Pokemon Red are due to the faster renderer used on this box. NO$GMB has a more accurate render engine, but it's way too slow on a 386.
Results:
TOTAL SUCCESS!!! Now waiting for those 4M RAM sticks...
And now, the
HORROR TALE OF THE WEEK(tm)!(sponsored by Adaptec and Plug'n'Pray)While installing the AWE64, i had another episode of the "Plug'n'Pray" nightmares... This time, it was the SCSI card (Adaptec AHA-1542B). This card DMA channels and I/O ports clashed with the AWE64, redirecting all audio data to the SCSI card (WTF!?), causing crashes, hangs, and no AWEsome audio coming out of my speakers (save for CD audio)
A long night just started, battling with countless jumpers
If you didn't know, the AHA-1542B has a whole load of jumpers, on 4 pin headers, to configure the card (DMA/IRQ/IO/other). But... for simple things, like changing the DMA, you need to deal with at least two or three jumper sets! Fortunately, this is very documented in the AHA-154x manual, although it still is not fun to setup this card... Anyway, i win at the end... but i had to discard the 2Gig Quantum HD, because it was dead
Score that for the blacklist (Quantum Fireball TM)
The card... it used to be at the bottom, just on the top of the RAM sticks... NOT GOOD!
Remember, kids... if you have no life, feel free to Plug'n'Pray
BONUS SHOTS!- Almost ready for pr0n...
- Wiring madness...
- My ultra-rare (at least in Venezuela) IIT 3C87 FPU, and just on the top of it, my AMD Am386SX-33. At the right, a on-board 2MB RAM bank, and at the left, a soldered DS1287 (
), a NEC 8042 keyboard controller and the 64K BIOS EPROM.
- Testing the NIC...
I've done another minor experiment: setting up a networked printer there. This time, added a PostScript printer, directly linked to a PDF generator on Saki. Now i can (pre)print on Marika! Pretty slow, but does the job...
- Wintendo serialz *COUGH*MSDN*COUGH*subscriptions*COUGH*
--end of post!--
