Tiny Pentium Gets Big MIDI Upgrade With Dreamblaster X2! 

It looks like I forgot to change the intro title, oops. I do copy/paste it, or in more project oriented terms, I use a template for it. It's a pretty complicated intro that I did in Resolve's Fusion page and it slips my mind frequently to change the title. I really wish there was a way to easily reference external data from fusion so I could update the title outside of the node editor but it only works one way. Here's a look at how the intro is actually laid out if you're curious: twitter.com/AkBKukU/status/1293199061693079552

you know your pc is small when your cat is bigger

Came for the upgrade stayed for the cat

Love the Vortex 2, I’ve used them in my Windows 98 builds for the last fifteen years! I actually quite enjoy its built-in wavetable for MIDI, though the X2 is always a solid addition to any card with a wavetable header. Good stuff 👍

Careful. The electrical tape adhesive will soften with the heat. You should wind many turns of that tape, or even bettter, use kapton tape.

The Aureal Vortex 2 also has an excellent ADC (analog to digital converter) and sounds really good when transferring records, tapes, and other analog audio sources into digital files.

I was slowly falling asleep to this video and than out of nowhere I hear "are you having a good nap there buddy" I freaked out and saw the cat on the table xDDD

CAT. We gotta see more cat in the videos :)

This video was sponsored by cat butt and tail. "Because I'm a cat and this is my table now."

That tangent between intersecting mouse cable and cat tail... :) ...and I'd swear it twitched to the rhythm at times!

I am impressed by your will power to not pet your cat till the end like that. Well done.

That's a huge cat! (Or maybe a tiny computer)

Youre literally the only RU-vidr that I watch the full in-video ads from.

oh my gosh the way your kitty grabbed your hand and playfully nibbled a finger !! they were acting all asleep-y but as soon as your hand got close it was like bam

Yeah definitely pet the cat!

I am really truly happy to see an ad in your video, You need all the support you can get making these, and frankly some of that needs to be financial! Keep up the great work.

I am really happy, because you are exist! I really love old-school computers and components. Thank you.

Notice how the cat gradually takes over the desk

Lol the Thech Tangents intro for this video says "4 floppies" dude. Oppsie.

1:12 4 Floppy Drives... I think i have seen that before somewhere :D

Make sure you give half life a try once you’ve got the time. A3D sounds particularly great with it. They also seem to not have many issues when hooked up to something like an SC-55.

I love the sense of scale the cat adds to the PC.

I loved the new old classic editing video. Please, keeping doing this direction.

Nice on the fly repair of the Voodoo2! This is a sick channel

I remember my dad’s P3 Win98 machine, it had an AU20 chip. The positional audio software that they implemented was pretty cool. I recall walking through the demos for hours experiencing the sound directionality and ambient effects...

For the enhanced rebuild of my first ever PC, based on my original Celeron 400(A), modem and case, with Windows 98se & 2000 in a dual boot configuration, I'm using one of these compact PCI Aureal Vortex II's as well, only with the sound passed through to an ISA Yamaha Audician 32 with a stereo patch cable, and a DreamBlaster S1 on the Audician 32, for all the A3D, OPL3 & MIDI wavetable synth things. :-) (Also using audio drivers from Phil's Computer Lab, patch cable idea from LGR's Megaluminum Monster). ;-)

10:55 that's got to be the cleanest camera capture of a CRT that I've ever seen

Indeed! Who CAN resist kitty belly :D

The Aureal Vortex II was a great sound card in it's day, I remember preferring it over my Audigy for a lot of DOS games. Mine was a Turtle Beach card with the Vortex 2 chipset on it, Turtle Beach made some damn nice high end audio products back then, studio stuff. DOS compatibility was great and it had solid sound quality too but if memory serves it lacked a number of Creative only features (at that time). By the time I moved to an Audigy II however it had been relegated to my attic parts box.

The OPL music sounded like it was pitched down a half step.

that midi upgrade sounded great!

Great video. The complexities of sound on those old systems can be mind boggling. I hope you aren't paying your assistant. He doesn't seem very productive, but I guess he makes up for it with cuteness, even if he does moon the audience for half of the video, lol.

The Aureal Vortex 2 with my Dreamblaster X1, X2 or S1 are my go-to PCI sound card combo for Pentium MMX to Pentium 3 era machines. I still have my original Diamond Monster MX300 and it gets used.

I was about to comment on Dooms E1M1 poor reproduction when you switched to general midi and... omg that sounds amazing!

The Diamond Monster MX300 has a wavetable header. I have one in my Falcon Mach V from '99. It's a pretty sweet card.

Love the tiny computer and the cat trying it's best to outshine it :-)

That synthesis sounds amazing! I don't think I've ever heard DOOM sound so good!

20:00 Sleepy kitty so cute :)

I love your small retro PC. I'd really like to build my own. I did have a Voodoo 2 3000 for a loooong time.

The reverb in Quake demo sounded really good to me.

That Dreamblaster is so cool! Especially since it can be used standalone.

For a long time my game rigs had a vortex2 hooked up to a set of klipsch promedia v2.400 4.1 speakers. The PC and vortex2 are long gone but the promedias still rock on my mame box. The 3d audio on the vortex2 was amazing compared to the creative eax junk.

I remember our pentium 1 having an ESS soundcard, the font was crap but years later I kind of missed the lower quality fonts and found one that was an FM synthesizer so i was able to rehear what my old pc sounded like on modern hardware, only in midi playback, one of the first games I owned that had different midi selection for windows was Sonic and Knukles on pc, it only had two options but they switched the midi's entirely if I recall

I understand we don't get to see the kitty anymore in your office.. but I really misses him, hopes he is well. Always love seeing him in the older videos

Nice build. If the Aureal DOS driver has a switch to remove it from memory you could try adding that to the C:\WINDOWS\WINSTART.BAT file so it executes when you return to Windows from MS-DOS Mode. Might re-enable DOS box sounds again.

The Vortex 2 is legendary. The more common Diamond Monster Sound was probably the most popular of the Vortex 2 cards. Their 3D positional audio was awesome and supported in many games. There was even an updated driver that allowed it to somewhat support Creatives EAX but A3D positional audio was FAR more advanced than EAX. Less games supported it but for ones that did it was amazing. These cards also did decent Sound Blaster emulation in DOS games. These cards died when Windows XP was released as there were never official XP drivers. The generic ones that came with XP didn't support any of the cards special features.

Turtle Beach cards back in the day had great Midi libraries and extension cards, also GUS PnP had a great lib

About the SB card, for windows you can always use the kx audio driver, it should have a windows 9X release and it works out of the box with all the sb live cards using the 10k1 architecture (the ones using the square sound chip)

Wow Descent really sounded very nice.

Descent, wow the nostalgia hit me hard

I signed up for linode after your last video and am super impressed. It is so much more affordable and the documentation is great. I hope you earned a few pennies because you sold me a great product.

I love the Descent theme.

yay you did it!

My go-to tester for DOS game sound quality is "Star Trek Judgment Rites". With the best real card, or emulator soundfont, you can get the theme music to sound very close to the TV show!

Good job

I have one of those Aureal Vortex 2 cards, However mine looks very different from what you have, Mines a full shape pcb not cut and the PCB itself is a different colour :D , Love how compact that system is,Id love to do a retro system that's small like that!

Does that case get really hot? I wonder how much cooling that fan actually does.

Tip to make windows 98 never ask for the CD. From freshly formatted hard drive boot from 98 CD to dos prompt. "Mkdir c:\win98" then "CD d:\win98" then "copy *.* c:\win98" then run setup from "c:\win98\setup.exe /is" leave the 98 setup files on c: and it won't ask for a CD ever again.

Love this video. I would love to build my own Ultimate Windows 98 Gaming PC.

oh god I haven't seen Descent since the 90s but I instantly recognized the interplay screen...

Those Aureal cards are the only cards that had good drivers in Linux back in the day. We used to buy them in bulk among Linux enthusiasts. Probably still have one or two boxed somewhere.

I have some S2 they are excellent!

in my experience with vortex and vortex 2 sound cards, they seem to work the best with IRQ 5, I noticed your setup is using IRQ 9, see if you can force the card to IRQ 5 and then in MS_DOS mode and windows mode the card should have no issues switching. you could turn off the LPT and serial ports to free up some resources, I'm not sure what resources you had for the sound blaster live! but when you tested Descent in MS_DOS mode it sounded like the interrupt was too high and causing the card to wait for other devices to talk to the CPU before the sound card. Maybe you had other devices sharing IRQ 9??? Oh and not too long ago Phil made a video about using sound blaster audigy drivers with the sound blaster live! cards, "Joseph_Joestar over at Vogons created the driver pack" but the driver installs and works with the weird OEM versions of the Live! like the Dell models that are a pain to find drivers for, also no need for a installer CD, just unpack the driver and install it, works really well on the Live! cards I have tested.

Cat just chillin' to DOOM music

My favorite thing about EAX on the SBLive is that it affected every source of audio in the system. Walk into a cave in World of Warcraft and your podcasts have reverb too. Very engrossing.

What brand and type of computer is that? I like the small form factor. Also I liked the video and the cat.

Very punchy percussion, crispy electric guitar, good chimes/cymbals, very impressive. 8/10 for general midi overall. I agree, it's no Roland but it is definitely MORE than adequate.

Omg that cat is awesome

If you haven't gotten any yet, you should get kapton tape for insulating parts from shorting.

Dude! When you switched to general midi for Doom, that r0x0rd my b0x0r! That wavetable thing you added was a huge step up. I remember using a soundblaster 16 on my 386, and if a game had AdLib or soundblaster support there was no question what to choose, general midi was a lame fall-back if that didn't work. Also, are you sure you have a real cat? Because s/he should have been standing directly between you and the screen, at least over the keyboard while you try to do anything.

Hi. Just a few fillers to some of the in-video gaps. ;-) - (ISA) Build for Crystal chipset audio: For full "Soundblaster Pro 2.0" / OPL3 compatibility under DOS, you normally need an OPL3 ISA sound card. Your system can improve that compatibility if hosting a specific type of Crystal audio chipset, but can run with other ISA devices as well. - If your real ISA soundcard does not seem to work even though everything should be fine, you may want to check if your ATX power supply provides -5V 0.5A power, or if you got an ISA soundcard that can do without. - You want to have at least "Soundblaster Pro 2.0" sound support, because this is where stereo starts. There are a lot more standards to be had, but those are a lot harder to work with ( or get ). - OPL3 for DOS under Win98: This is emulated for most PCI soundcards, and in most cases it works badly. - Vortex 1 or 2 DOS sound: The WIN98 emulation is good, the emulation for DOS decent but not perfect. - Soundblaster Live DOS sound: ... is bad and software emulated, which is why the sound slows down. - Dreamblaster X2: Works with exchangeable 64MB soundbanks. - Dreamblaster S1 & S2: Essentially are identical safe for their actual chip, but only provide preset wavetable sounds - which are still pretty good. - The problem with PCI sound ... : ... is the fact that PCI works in a different address space (with different standards), and since DOS sound tries to communicate directly with your sound card using a fixed list of ISA addresses, there simply is nothing there. The "special DOS setup" for those PCI soundcards either initializes an ISA address space, or more commonly simply uses a small driver to transfer data between the two. - It usually is best to get yourself a simple real ISA soundcard, for which you need vintage hardware that has an ISA slot. - The easiest and cheapest ISA DOS soundcard to currently come by, is the "Terratec Promedia Base-1", which was an entry level "Soundblaster compatible" soundcard back in the day and sold in huge quantities. The FM sound it pretty bad, but that's what it got a wavetable connector for. So if you add a "Dreamblaster", not matter if its an X1, X2, S1 or S2, this card really rocks. - The fastest vintage motherboards with ISA are socket 370 boards ( Pentium 3, old Celeron, Via C3 ) or VIA KT-133 socket A / 462 motherboards ( AMD Duron / Thunderbird ). - The most common Win98 vintage system uses a "super socket 7" motherboard with a "AMD K6-2" chipset of 400 MHz upwards, but those are a bit slower and have become ridiculously expensive. - Alternatively to the Voodoo 2 as shown in this video, if you want 3DFX / Glide support and good power, you can also use a "Voodoo Banshee 16MB" or "Voodoo 3 16MB", both of which also provide 2D and therefore can be used as regular VGA graphic cards. Have fun ! :-)

Good choiche for a pci sound card but i think that the best ones are the ones with the yamaha chips, especially for dos support

I really love modern made boards that can be used with older hardware

I really need this for my Vortex 2... Damn it sounds great! I wonder how this compares to a external Roland? I never had an Roland mt32 or whatever it's called. This sounds like it will be more or less the perfect solution for my small factor retro build.

Hmm, the OPL3 seems to play the songs off key in Windows mode.

This was a huge diffrence I had no idea. I had a "sound blaster audigy 2 zs" in my old gaming/benchmarking computer now im wondering if I was missing out back then or did that card compete with this set up. I was never really focused on sound but I paid a lot so I was hoping I had the best set up I could as a teen :)

Thanks for the 4 floppy's that you totally showed...

The sound blaster 32 and the awe series didn't have a conventional wave table header but a proprietary expansion standard, non creative cards and the og sb 16 had the proper wavetable header, don't make confusion when purchasing sound cards

11:53 that sound blaster on the bottom the SB0200 is a DEll OEM card not really worth keeping, it's only software mode and if you call that card the same, then you need glasses but if you really want the Dell OEM one you need to look for the SB0220 that's the non gimped version.

I always loved Creative Labs sound cards but had driver issues, get the exact ones or you're out of luck. Nice tabby!

I know it is a silly comment but I am curious as to where you got the blue piece that holds up your cards. I have several cards I want to display on shelves and i am interested in this. It is located at 3:27 and I have been searching a while for something like that. Thanks in advance.

If you are in dos mode and want to go back to windows, just type EXIT instead of WIN. It will reboot the computer and you will not have the sound issue, saving you to reboot two times to get the sound working again.

I have always wanted a small PC like a mini ITX but my mind keeps thinking in just 1 thing: HEAT!

First thing to do after installing win 9x is copy the win9x folder from the install disc to the hard drive. Then, after the first time you point driver installers to it, say goodbye to needing to install the Windows CD.

Have you tried any of the DS-XG based cards like the AOPEN AW744L II? I think for the use case you are trying to do with this machine its an even better fit (Also quite literally given the Voodoo space issue). It lacks the A3D 2.0 that your Vortex has (A3D 1.0 and EAX 2.0 by Sensaura) and in the AW744L's case it also lacks wavetable support (Others might have it) however it has a genuine OPL3 on board. So both in DOS and in Windows you get the genuine OPL3 synth! And on top of that in the Windows DOSBox you can get Yamaha XG midi where the card itself will do wavetables with help with the drivers and it sounds awesome. Hightreason has a good video on a YMF 724 card that shows this off. The cards go around for $25 on ebay and are easy to obtain in case you want to give it for a spin. But what surpriced me most in this video is you mentioned that you could not get sound to work in the dos prompt on these soundblaster cards. It really shows to me how poor of a choice those cards are unless you really want higher EAX versions than the 2.0 which i know the A3D and the DS-XG can do.

I remember the "joys" of SB Live! drivers... Until I found the Kx drivers and then I liked the card on Windows XP at least. No EAX support... But it already worked horribly on my computer (incompatibility with VIA chipsets, I think) so that was not a loss for me.

Did you consider grinding down the DreamBlaster's connector? There's at least a couple of millimeters of plastic it can sacrifice.

You could use an external midi connecting board.

I have a love/hate relationship with my SB Live. I hate using it, mainly because of its meh SB 16 effects emulation and terrible FM-synthesis emulation, but for me its always worked (with some help from Phil's various drivers and set up programmes), and it sounds great when using General MIDI; Doom and Descent that you showed would work just fine with the Live (in MS-DOS mode). I've actually started using a Cystal 4821 based card that has much better FM-synth emulation, and OK SB Pro emulation although its very hit and miss which games will support the SB effects. It also lacks general midi. I have an AWE32 that I use when I've had enough of faffing around with PCI cards, and I always reach that point sooner or later!

if it werent for creative buying a3d....aureal could had standing chance if wavetable was around back then when it was really badly needed for them...not all late coming out when soundblaster use Ensoniq soundescape tech plus sound fonts was all late for aureal...

I want to see more videos with your Cat Tangents! He's so handsome ♥♥

Kitty is stealing the spot light XD

I will always pick the av2 over the sbl any day for a windows 98 build

Well, technically you could load any soundfont to Live! card in Dos. But the thing is, the dos mode (for some insane reason) uses these Ensoniq soundfonts that aren't directly compatible with SF2 format and boy am I close to coding a converter since there may be just enough info about the format on the internet and just imagine using any soundfont in dos... There is one simple way to improve Live! midi sound quality though. There's this 2MB .ECW(the Ensoniq soundfont) file by default in the Windows system directory and if you can find the 8MB file and use that to replace the old one... oh man.

That Doom sound screams awesomeness.

I had the same SBLive card and curiously, the same header is also bent.

13:18 Video approved :D :D

12:03 have you ever heard about APSLive Drivers (for W98) or KX drivers for W2K or XP?

I think your OPL3 playback issues on SB Live are possibly just low processor speed. SB Live uses emulation for OPL3 support in DOS. It works great on my Pentium III Win 98 PC, but I have my own issues like how I have a random chance if emulated SB16 digital audio playback sounds choppy or not in DOS lol Enjoy the Aureal card! I feel your pain with the SB Live stuff, I just need to fill my single ISA slot with a retro Sound Blaster.

You said you don't like the MIDI sound on the SB Live! But it supports sound fonts... it can sound like anything really! But I do appreciate just wanting to try something new.