That's a very nice system you build there.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2020-07-09, 13:28:

That's a very nice system you build there.

Thanks! I plan on eventually upgrading a few things. Definitively a bigger and better hard drive, since those Quantum oldies are not exactly known for their reliability.

I'm also considering a Simmconn for the AWE64. Not so much for loading soundfonts to use for General MIDI, as I can do that just fine with a SBLive. More so for those special games which use custom soundfonts to enhance music on AWE64 cards. Notable examples include Final Fantasy VII and Magic Carpet 2. More details can be found in this thread: AWEstruck...

But that's all low priority stuff. The rig works great in its current state and I plan on replaying a few of my childhood favorites on it over the next few weeks. As a kid, I always dreamed about having an AWE32 for DOS game music (didn't know what a Roland SC-55 was back then) so I think I'll treat myself to some AWE synth for old times' sake.

That sounds like a great plan to me. There's nothing better than replaying the games of our childhood again

Looks like a well thought out build, I'd almost call it "don't believe the marketing hype" build as the parts are not top shelf but the reality is they are pretty damn good.
My thinking:

Celeron rather then Pentium
OK, as you say this is a bit low end, but offers you more flexibility in speed and if you have AthlonXP in reserve then what's it matter?

ZX rather then BX
Had a P2B-ZS back in the day. Like you say fine board. the 66Mhz FSB doesn't matter with the Celeron and the lack of 3rd RAM slot isn't even a limit these days.
SB Link is MUCH more useful.

Voodoo 3 2000 rater then 3000 or 3500
Yeh sure faster cards are nice but I'm not made of money either

AWE64 Value rather then Gold
Even if I was given a Gold I'd sell it and get a value and something else with the extra cash.
Upgrade the memory and only difference is marginally better snr which is still pretty bad. Must be one of the most overpriced sound cards ever.

Yamaha YMF724F-V rather then Live!
Even back then this was a budget option, Vortex and Live! were the headline acts. It's only now when we are older and wiser that Yamaha had quite a decent card with damn fine midi support.

I Like it, its a little different but well suited with no real drawbacks.

Edit
I don't think any games that had custom sound fonts went above the default 512kb. I could be wrong about that though.

chinny22 wrote on 2020-07-09, 15:13:

Looks like a well thought out build, I'd almost call it "don't believe the marketing hype" build as the parts are not top shelf but the reality is they are pretty damn good.

Heh yeah, I had a Chantech 6BTM and a Slot 1 Celeron 333 back in '99 along with some craptastic Trident Blade 3D card. And I still played the hell out of Quake 2 on that rig. This build is a bit more powerful, while still mostly period correct and it wouldn't have been overly expensive back then.

SB Link is MUCH more useful.

It's a seriously underrated feature, too bad that it's so rare. I have yet to see a DOS game fail on the YMF724 using SB-Link. For all intents and purposes, it's practically a noise-free ISA card.

I don't think any games that had custom sound fonts went above the default 512kb. I could be wrong about that though.

Final Fantasy VII may have, but I'm not sure either. I need to test that game on this rig sometime. I also read that a couple of games had separate 512k .sf2 files for the value cards and also larger .sf2s for the gold versions, but I have yet to come across them.

System stats and benchmarks:

Game versions used:

• Quake2 v3.20 (with 3DFX miniGL driver v1.49)
• Unreal Tournament 99 GOTY (Glide renderer)
• Drakan v445 (Direct3D renderer)

Very nice it seems to be a decent performer.

Yeah, performance is solid, especially when considering the 66 MHz FSB that all Celerons run on.

In fact, according to this review my Celeron 466 seems comparable to a Pentium II 400 which, although slightly slower clocked, uses a 100 MHz FSB. Not bad at all.

I use a FSC C6 for that purpose. It's a slim-desktop with onboard gfx+snd.
Very small, very silent and very flexible.

I like your build a lot! 😀
I've enjoyed building most of my own rigs with parts that others considered not as interesting or not worthy. My most used retro rig was my old Celeron 400 on an LX chipsetted board. No 3DFX as I ended up picking a PCI TNT2 M64 16MB along with a Solo1 PCI sound card. Don't remember the HDD I picked but it was an old fashioned 3.5in platter drive with limited storage capacity. It was quite similar to what you build yourself here except I think your rig is a bit better 😀
Good picks of your parts. A Voodoo3 2000 is fine and so is the ZX chipset and the Celeron not only looks but also feels more like a PPGA Pentium MMX on steroids (lots of steriods! 🤣 😜 ).
I even like your choice of using a 24x speed CDROM drive as I personally found those to be amongst the fastest ones that didn't sound like they were about to vibrate all of your windows out of their sockets 🤣
What case did you pick btw?

If I see it correctly, you did forget to mention the PSU you picked though 😜

Tetrium wrote on 2020-07-10, 14:10:

Good picks of your parts. A Voodoo3 2000 is fine and so is the ZX chipset and the Celeron not only looks but also feels more like a PPGA Pentium MMX on steroids (lots of steriods! 🤣 😜 ).

Thanks! I have a soft spot for Celerons since I had good times with my old one back in the day. The slowdown utilities make it very versatile for DOS gaming, and my other AthlonXP rig will be there to pick up the slack in some of the more demanding Win98 games.

I even like your choice of using a 24x speed CDROM drive as I personally found those to be amongst the fastest ones that didn't sound like they were about to vibrate all of your windows out of their sockets 🤣

So true. I have a bunch of newer DVD drives and they sound like a jet engine is about to take off when reading CDs. This is particularly annoying in DOS games which load cinematics and music from the disc. On the other hand, the 24x drive is fairly quiet and I don't really need more speed than that on this setup.

What case did you pick btw?

Right now, everything is sitting in a generic 90s beige case that has a bunch of scratches and yellowing plastic parts. I intend to re-paint it and maybe do some retrobrighting on the plastic some day.

If I see it correctly, you did forget to mention the PSU you picked though 😜

Oh right, I'm using a Mercury 300W PSU. It's old, but the caps are holding up nicely and I haven't had any issues with it so far.

Upgraded the hard disk to a Western Digital Caviar WD800. It's both faster and quieter than the craptastic Quantum LCT. I was a bit worried about the 80GB size, but the Abit ZM6 motherboard happily supports it with the latest official BIOS.

Also, I managed to snag an AWE64 Gold (CT4390) for a very reasonable price, but it won't be shipped until sometime next week. Should be interesting to see how it stacks up against the CT4520 value model in terms of sound quality.

Abit ZM6 supports 100MHz FSB so you can run any coppermine CPU there (even 133 MHz versions albeit at overclocked AGP which is no problem to V3).

Paadam wrote on 2020-12-12, 22:12:

Abit ZM6 supports 100MHz FSB so you can run any coppermine CPU there (even 133 MHz versions albeit at overclocked AGP which is no problem to V3).

Interesting, I wasn't aware that this was possible.

Would that require a modified BIOS of some sort or does it run fine using the latest official version? I'm mainly wondering because the release notes only mention Celerons.

The AWE64 Gold (CT4390) arrived early so I wrote a mini review on how it compares to my old AWE64 Value (CT4520). Just a quick note before we get into that, the CT4520 is much more heavily integrated than the earlier AWE64 Value models. I suspect that many of its shortcomings come from extreme cost saving measures and may not apply to previous Value models such as the CT4500 and the CT4380.

• As expected, the CT4390 is almost entirely noise-free with the default mixer settings. After muting all unused inputs and moving the volume sliders down a notch, even that last tiny bit of noise goes away. In comparison, the CT4520 is fairly noisy by default, and you need to tweak it much more to achieve acceptable levels.
• The CT4390 has a good low-pass filter and resamples 11 kHz audio from old DOS games very nicely. On the other hand, that filter is not so great on the CT4520, so speech and sound effects from older titles often sound too harsh and tinny on it.
• The Vibra distortion bug does not appear to be present on the CT4390. In contrast, that issue was quite prominent on my CT4520 and I had to lower the in-game volume below 50% to negate it. Note that adjusting the volume is not possible in many older DOS games, and playing around with the Creative mixer settings appears to have no effect on this bug.
• Both the CT4390 and the CT4520 provide very clean sound under Windows 98. In fact, they are the only ISA soundcards that I own which don't exhibit any crackling or popping when playing Win9x games. I realize that most people will use a PCI sound card for Windows gaming, but I still thought it was worth mentioning.
• The built-in wavetable sounds exactly the same on both cards. So if you're buying an AWE64 mostly for that, then the Value model will do just fine.
• The 4MB soundfont that the CT4390 loads by default (under Win9x) sounds pretty decent, much nicer than the built-in ROM for sure. Granted, I have a SBLive in another rig which I prefer to use for soundfont shenanigans, but if the AWE64 Gold was my only sound card, I wouldn't mind letting it handle General MIDI music.

All in all, I'm very happy with the AWE64 Gold. I wouldn't recommend spending a huge amount of money on it, but if you can find a good deal, it's a very nice card to have. The Value models can be found for much less, and with some tweaks, they can be made to sound pretty decent as well. Lastly, it's worth mentioning that there are a couple of games which have special music/audio enhancements that only work on AWE cards.

You can even modify the board for Tualatin: https://www.oocities.org/_lunchbox/tualeron_zm6_mod.html

Thanks! I'll be on the lookout for some Socket 370 Pentium 3s then.

I do have an AthlonXP rig that I use for more demanding Win9x games, but it would still be nice to have a CPU from Intel that can push the ZM6 to its limits.

Just tried Final Fantasy VII on the AWE64 Gold. Can confirm that you get PlayStation style music including the vocals in Sephiroth's theme (see attached clip below). However, the process isn't as straightforward as it should be.

In order to achieve this, I had to do a clean install of Win98SE, then browse to the FF7 Install CD and from there install the Creative driver update (D:\drivers\Audio Drivers\Creative Labs\UPDDRV95.EXE) and the SoundFont Manager for AWE32/64 (D:\SFMan\setup.exe). Without doing both of those things I would get the "error opening device" message in the FF7 Configuration tool.

In any case, with the drivers from the FF7 CD, everything works fine and the message "Loading 4MB soundfont" appears in the configuration tool. After the soundfont is loaded, the test music plays correctly and the game works fine (see attached screenshot).

In my view, the music played in this manner is more faithful to the PlayStation original than the Yamaha XG version. It's an edge case for sure, but this game does sound the best on an AWE card.

EDIT - after some further testing, it seems that the applying the official patch 1.02 reduces the chance of getting the "error opening device" message regardless of the driver version used. I have updated the AWE64 drivers to the latest version from Creative's website and they work fine now.

While doing some testing, I was pleasantly surprised with how good the stock GM35REVC.SF2 soundfont of the AWE64 Gold sounds in DOS games. For reference, that soundfont is installed and loaded by default when using the official driver CD for the card. I made some recordings while keeping all the settings at their default values, including reverb and chorus.

Personally, I find GM35REVC.SF2 even better than 4GMGSMT.SF2 which is slightly larger in size. Not sure what the difference between them is, but the smaller one sounds crisper to my ears.