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SB 16 on XT

evildragon said:
how would you create a partition AFTER unallocated space?
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No, I meant you can start the partition at any cylinder you like if you have known bad areas in the first cyl. Either use norton to manually edit the partition table (you'll need to reformat the drive afterwards to lay down a new FAT12/FAT16 filesystem), or you can use something a tad more user-friendly like Ranish partition manager (2.37 supports 8088, you can grab it here: http://www.ranish.com/part/ ).

i want to swear many times, but instead, i'll just say: Thank you for Zip Disks!
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I have nearly 100 zip disks but I can't find a single external parallel zip drive -- I must have at least 2 in the house but they elude me...
 
paul.brett said:
Using the tips in this thread has enabled me to 'rescue' a genuine Amstrad PC1640 hard drive, bringing my PC1640HD30 closer to its original spec. (I was using a hard card before, which has now gone into the PC1512DD).

Once it was working, I used Interlnk/Intersvr from DOS6 and a parallel cable to copy everything across (MSDOS, GEM, etc..) Surprisingly fast operation using XtreePro.
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I like happy endings... :D
 
I installed the SBPRO drivers for my Creative 1350 (IN PC XT 10Mhz), it play wav/sound with the SBTEST utility. Plays midi and the other installed apps work.

But i can not see any wavplayer installed for the card, play.exe only plays CD tracks, or could it be used to play wav?

Is there any good commandline wavplayer for XT that support other formats VOC, AU, MOD (maybe even MP3, eerhrm maybe not).

JT
 
The Sound Blaster 16 Pro (CT2910) works in XT machines. It has jumpers to configure every setting. I set it at A220 I5 D1 H1 P330 and found no problems at all (with the IDE port as exception, it needs the 16 bit part of the slot)
- Galaxy Mod player works in SB Pro mode
- FM synth works in games
- The MPU401 is working correctly with a NEC XR385 waveboard attached. I can run Monkey Island in MT-32 emulation mode and sounds fine (worse than a real Roland LAPC-I / MT-32, but these modules are getting expensive and hard to find nowadays)
 
Well it seems like this thread is awake again :)

So there is my 5 cents:
- Most SoundBlaster 16 / Vibra 16 cards won't work on 8-bit bus (tried it myself)
- Vibra 16xv is an 8 bit chip, and cards that use this chip will work on 8 bit bus, provided that you will be able to run the PnP enabler utility (which uses 80186+ instructions, so will run on NEC V20, but not on 8088)
- ESS1868 based cards work. Again require PnP utility, and again V20 CPU.

In general check where higher 8-bit of data bus are going (look at the traces on the card). If they go only to the IDE connector (usually thru 74LS245 transceiver), then chances are that the card will work in 8-bit slot. If they go directly to Vibra/SB chip, when most likely it won't work. And by the way SB IDE interface will never work in 8-bit bus.

Thanks,
Sergey
 
sergey said:
- Vibra 16xv is an 8 bit chip, and cards that use this chip will work on 8 bit bus, provided that you will be able to run the PnP enabler utility (which uses 80186+ instructions, so will run on NEC V20, but not on 8088)
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Would it be possible to translate the utility into code that will run on the 8088 itself, i.e. to recode whatever the 186 instructions are to 8086 sequences?
 
Media Vision made the Thunder Board: Thunder Board

It's basically a Sound Blaster clone (NOT Pro or 16, just plain Sound Blaster).

They might be a bit hard to find though.
 
Anonymous Coward said:
An 8088/8086 system cannot use a 16-bit ISA bus, because they can only do 20-bit memory addressing, and 16-bit ISA requires 24-bit memory addressing. 8086 CPUs do however have a 16-bit datapath...so a proprietary 16-bit expansion bus may be possible, but I've never seen it.
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The AT&T 6300 / Olivetti M24 has exactly such a proprietary 16-bit expansion bus. Unfortunately, I can't find the documentation/pinouts for it anywhere on the web. (Anybody?)

(I know this is somewhat off-topic. Sorry about that.)
 
The problem with trying to use the AT&T 6300 16-bit bus is that the "upper" part of the bus is fairly different--and the placement of the connector is a little ugly. Note also, that the 6300 doesn't have the extra 8259 interrupt controller, among other things. I'm not saying that it can't be done, but it would be a fair amount of work.
 
That depends on how complicated the PnP enabler Utility is. If it is a smaller .exe or .com that was written in C or assembly, it is usually quite easy to disassemble it, fix it, and reassemble it. I'm willing to try if the utility is small enough. (If it's larger than, say, 30K, it was probably compiled in a HLL and would be more difficult to work with.)
 
Having installed an earlier, CT1746B-bus-interface-based variant in a V30-based Tandy 1000 SL system, I've found the Sound Blaster 16 to be completely functional in an 8-bit slot, when appropriately configured (16-bit playback through the 8-bit DMA-channel).

Others have reported similar experiences, but, contrary to that information, I've tested and found that the Panasonic/Matsushita CD-ROM interface is also fully-functional. The SBCD.SYS driver was apparently designed to support both 8-bit and 16-bit data transfers, facilitating its use with the 8-bit standalone Panasonic/Matsushita CD-ROM interface cards. Presumably, this latent functionality should also apply to the same CD-ROM interface on the SBPro and SBPro2 cards.

Given this, a non-PnP SB16 compares very favorably with the PAS16, as far as complete operability in 8-bit slots is concerned, with the latter perhaps edging out the former in terms of overall usefullness, given its more-versatile 8-bit SCSI interface.
 
Cloudschatze said:
The SBCD.SYS driver was apparently designed to support both 8-bit and 16-bit data transfers, facilitating its use with the 8-bit standalone Panasonic/Matsushita CD-ROM interface cards.
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Going to monologue here for a moment...

Interestingly enough, the Matsushita interface doesn't even have a 16-bit data path - it's physically 8-bit to begin with.

I'd also thought to test the interfaces on the SBPro and SBPro2, but there's really no need - these cards completely lack 16-bit ISA data interfacing.
 
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