Hi everyone !
Hope you're going fine.
I'm pretty new here, and old Msdos user trying to settle new machines based on cheap thin clients like the Fujitsu Futro s220 that you can find on Ebay for $30 for example. I wanted to share my discovery here, because i didn't find any infos like there :
After two days trying to understand why i got no sound with a Yamaha YMF724 and a SoundBlaster PCI 128 on this machine, i finally understood why when i tried to bypass the amps on the cards to "listen" directly to the chips themselves, and it worked ! That meant the amps were not working. While searching a reason why, i find that these cards have in common to use -12V and +12V lines on the PCI bus for amplification. And guess what ? This Fujitsu Futro S220 just use a +5V power, no -12 nor +12, so it cannot feed the PCI bus with these voltages. End of story !!

Luckily, very cheap PCI soundcards on Ebay doesn't use these -12V, +12V lines. As for for example :
https://www.ebay.fr/itm/1X-4-Channel-C-Media- … JoAAOSwqspc1Nf5

Using the C-Media 9738 should ensure some DOS compatibility.

How do you check if your PCI card uses or not -12V, +12V ? Follow this guide :
http://www.arstech.com/install/cms-display/st … cipwrneeds.html

What is very annoying now about this story is that : How do you check easily when trying to buy a cheap thin client if it can provide those tensions or not ? 😒

Best regards
Philippe