CoreDuo's build thread
Because of the nature of my site it became a necessity to be able to test older games that will not run on my Windows 7 machines and will not run on VMware due to its incompatibility with older VESA standards.
Planned build:
ASUS P3B-F Slot 1 (440BX Chipset)
Intel Pentium III 500MHz (subject to change)
512MB PC-100
NVIDIA GeForce4 440MX
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 (SB0100)
Rosewill RC-201 PCI SATA card w/ 250GB HDD
Rosewill RV350 350W PSU
Gigabyte ATX Mid-Tower
Windows 98 SE
My goal for this is to be able to play games between roughly 1994 and 2001.
Planned build:
ASUS P3B-F Slot 1 (440BX Chipset)
Intel Pentium III 500MHz (subject to change)
512MB PC-100
NVIDIA GeForce4 440MX
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 (SB0100)
Rosewill RC-201 PCI SATA card w/ 250GB HDD
Rosewill RV350 350W PSU
Gigabyte ATX Mid-Tower
Windows 98 SE
My goal for this is to be able to play games between roughly 1994 and 2001.
Comments
Well, I sort of had to start from scratch because most of the old motherboards and PSUs and such that I did have didn't really work, so I threw most of that out and kept a couple of complete machines and whatever else that was worth something.
I could have used my Dell P1 as a starting point but it has a subpar S3 Trio64 video card, no AGP or USB, nor did it support the K6-2 processors, or support more than 128MB of RAM so it really wasn't where I wanted to start. There's also my Thinkpad 385CD but that's even worse off than the Dell. A whopping 1.125MB of VRAM from a NeoMagic video card. I distinctly remember some games that required 1MB of VRAM not working right because of the oddball amount it had.
I have another PIII that I'm going to use though. It seems to be working so far.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdmsound/
Tried this?
Soundblaster is still in limbo.
This post is kinda boring without photos, and there's not really anything I can do about it at the moment so here's a stop gap for the mean time:
vdmsound is for NT based systems, not 9x... which is what I'm running on that machine.
http://www.sierrahelp.com/Utilities/Emu ... ha%29.html
I'd forgotten you were running Windows 98...
I was going to use my old SB16, but that system doesn't have any ISA slots.
Your best bet with only PCI slots is to get a card that has "good enough" Sound Blaster 16 emulation. There's a number of "Creative" sound cards that do this. The reason I put Creative in quotes is because all of these cards are based on an Ensoniq AudioPCI chipset. There's the Sound Blaster 16 PCI, PCI64 and PCI128, and the Ensoniq AudioPCI itself. Any of those cards should be available somewhat inexpensively on eBay. Either that or look around eBay, craigslist or some other place that carries old computer parts for an older slot 1 board that has ISA slots. Unfortunately, without a Sound Blaster 16 you may never achieve 100% Sound Blaster compatibility.
I'm not going to spend any money on this project. If I can get it working, yay. Otherwise, I'm not going to mess with it. If I'm spending money on anything, it's a new graphics card for my desktop.
I'm cleaning out a bunch of stuff I have. Downsizing and all. I have two Sound Blaster Cards WITH installation CD. Both are PCI cards. One is a Sound Blaster Live (SB0100) and the other is athe Sound Blaster 16 PCI (CT4740). If either one of these will help you in your endeavors, let me know and I will mail it/them out to you no charge. Both were installed and working in Win 95/98 machines I had once upon a time.
In my DOS 6.22 & Win.311/Win95 box I use for my old games I have a Sound Blaster 16 PnP ISA card, Cirrus Logic GD-5446 Video Card, 192 Megs Ram, 3.5 an 5.25 Floppy Drives, 2 - WD 4.2 Gig Hard drives and a CD-Rom drive of some sort. Mother Board is an ASUS P5S-B with an AMD K6-2/500 CPU
Anyway let me know about the sound cards
Mike
http://dl.coreduo.me.uk/SBL51_W9xME.exe
Try that one. I found it on Creative's support website. They wouldn't let me hotlink so I just downloaded it myself.
That would be lovely, I dropped you a PM.
There's definitely something wrong with that system. It BSOD'd on start up with a memory parity error. Then it froze at a blank screen the next two start ups before it finally booted to the desktop.
Joy. Just out of curiosity, could you post the model number that should be printed on the card?
In a stroke of luck, I'll also end up with the AT case and power supply that I need to finish the K6-2. I'll end up with two completely working machines and I never intended to. Cool. meb5749 also got back to me with the UPS tracking number so the sound cards should be here soon as well.
This is what happens when you buy a motherboard from Canada's equivalent of a small town in the middle of southern Alabama.
The cardboard box the motherboard is sitting on top of in the photo was not used in shipping. It's in an antistatic bag now.
The case, SATA card, and PSU have been ordered and should be here in 2 or 3 days.
Then the real fun can begin.
The computer is now assembled, and it powers on.
However, the power supply that I used does not have any SATA connectors and I can't seem to find any of my molex to SATA adapters. Oh well. Time to go buy a $1 cable.
It doesn't have a 3DFX card but it is period correct and damned if it doesn't look cool.
Also:
Is that CMOS checksum error one-time only or is it recurring. I hate those so much.