I am not here to insult your Socket 3 motherboard – if you are the owner of this specific model and love it: The PCChips M915i. I recently had this board in for “repair”, even though it is supposed to be “new old stock” (NOS). Luckily, nothing was at fault! All it needed was FPM memory instead of EDO. My suspicion is that the owner tried to run the board with EDO…
Now, there are four memory boards for the AWE64 – all available to the community! Schematics, Gerber files, PAL/GAL equations and the Bill of Material for each board will make it easy for anyone possessing the proper skills to make one of these memory boards for the Sound Blaster AWE64. OK, the MIDI FORGE Symphony (YouTube) is not yet available due to licensing issues with Creative…
Hey everyone, this AWEsome journey of AWE64 memory expansion boards isn’t over with the introduction of the MIDI FORGE Symphony – it was simply STARTING! And I can tell you, the MIDI FORGE Rhapsody won’t be the last chapter of this book! I’m really excited to share the latest addition to the AWE64 memory upgrade – the MIDI FORGE Rhapsody, a sleek, modernized 28MB memory…
Do you own an AWE64 sound card, but don’t have enough memory for loading larger sound fonts? This is especially true for the Value edition that came with a measly 512KB of onboard memory. It is almost as if Creative wanted to make sure that sound fonts was a feature reserved for their premium product: The AWE64 Gold.
AWE64 Value: 512KB of onboard memory
With 512KB onboard memory, you…
If you’re anything like me, you probably didn’t think much about the Wave Table header on those old-school sound cards. But I always wondered about that “General MIDI” option in games. Every time I picked it, the MIDI music just wouldn’t play. It wasn’t until recently that I finally cracked the code on what General MIDI is and how to make it work. Spoiler alert: you need a Wave…
The Hanging Note Bug on the Sound Blaster 16 is a frustrating issue that disrupts MIDI playback in games like Hexen and Doom, causing notes to stick and loop endlessly. Specific to DSP chip versions 4.11, 4.12, and 4.13 [1], the bug stems from faulty firmware that mishandles certain MIDI commands, resulting in persistent audio glitches. While the Sound Blaster 16 has other issues, this particular…
A few years back, I picked up a lot of 10 graphics cards on eBay for around $100. Most of them turned out to be junk—though they might make for interesting test subjects someday. But one card immediately stood out: a silver heatsink with the unmistakable shape of a 3dfx Voodoo 3! Of course, the lot was sold as untested – which, in eBay terms, means NOT WORKING! I really should have seen…
XTIDE is a BIOS extension that helps to detect hard drives and probably a lot of other devices like Compact Flash and SD-cards. After I restored a 386 board at the end of 2024, I once more was confronted with a limitation of those old systems: HDD capacity.
Many 386 and even 486 systems are limited to hard drives no larger than 500MBs. That is plenty of space for such old systems since…
During one of my adventures at the scrapyard, I picked up a 486 motherboard – the BEK-tronic BEK-V429S. As it turns out, this board had fake cache chips installed! If you want to see the full story, here is the video in which I discover that fake chips.
But how is it possible that seemingly nobody caught on and identified the fake cache earlier? The company or individual who owned…
Owning a Sound Blaster back in the mid 90’s was probably a big deal – I wouldn’t know with my ESS AudioDrive. And although my ESS sound card wasn’t a real Sound Blaster from Creative, it was a compatible card which got the job done. Recently, a viewer sent me a Sound Blaster 32 PnP for repair. My first attempt to fix the card failed. There was just no way to get past a…