CD Rom and Sound Card problems on an HP Vectra

[washitaeagle]

486 HP VECTRA XM2 96mb ram (win 3.1 for WG) 500mb HD 2mb vram
"Sometimes I wonder if I would have a better time just banging my head against the wall."

CDROM problems:
Having issues getting a CDRom recognized in my machine. I do have an IDE ribbon chain that is currently housing my 3.5" but it terminates to a 5.25" card end adaptor, so I took the extra IDE hard drive cable and plugged into that. It's an Acer 56x drive. I have installed the Acer drivers, and tried the oak tree drivers, but it always says that the driver isn't working...probably because it can't see the drive because it is plugged into the wrong IDE ribbon chain. I would just grab an extra ide cable in the 3.5" chain, but the plug into the motherboard is smaller. This is probably something rudimentary but what's the story on these ide cables?

Sound Card Problems:
Also, I have a large variety of sound cards, but only 2-3 of them are ISA. One is a "modem blaster" another is an IBM M Wave, the other I just randomly ran across at the thrift store today and it is a Rockwell audio card that looks more sound card than modem. I have tried to get a SB16 card to work via PCI but win 3.1 and PCI don't play too nicely together, so I have switched to the ISA and the Rockwell as it looks the most interesting. I have found some win 3.1 drivers on a CDrom ISO, took those files out...disk 1 and disk 2 on the CD-ROM and it gets pretty far, but runs into a file path issue, I wonder if it is looking for things on the ISO?

In a bit of a pickle.
It seems that the sound card problem would be fixed with the cd rom fix. I have also thought I might update this machine to win 95 as it might allow me to use the PCI slots a bit more and get a little more classic gaming out of this machine. I do have a local vintage computer guy here that swapped a Harley Davison for an old computer store/warehouse. I swapped a couple MAC SE for this machine so he probably has an external CD that I could use with the appropriate card.
I have yet to move the machine closer to my switch to get it online and this might fix a lot of my issues. As I could just download and possibly mount the ISO in dos?

Thanks for the read,
D

 

[Timo W.]

As for the CD-ROM, standard IDE for desktop PCs only has 40-pin connectors - there are no smaller ones or 3.5" / 5.25". You are certainly have something wrong here. Also, using a 56x drive in a 486 won't be much fun, as the system can not handle that speed and will cause the CD to constantly spin up and down, resulting in terrible speed and noise.

As for the sound card: for anything PCI or PnP ISA, you need to install a software like ICU (Intel Configuration Utility) that does the PnP stuff under DOS.

If possible, show pictures of the stuff you are trying to get working.

 

[washitaeagle]

As for the CD-ROM, standard IDE for desktop PCs only has 40-pin connectors - there are no smaller ones or 3.5" / 5.25". You are certainly have something wrong here. Also, using a 56x drive in a 486 won't be much fun, as the system can not handle that speed and will cause the CD to constantly spin up and down, resulting in terrible speed and noise.

As for the sound card: for anything PCI or PnP ISA, you need to install a software like ICU (Intel Configuration Utility) that does the PnP stuff under DOS.

If possible, show pictures of the stuff you are trying to get working.

Sounds like I'll work on getting another CD Rom as this is one that I had on hand. Possibly an external caddy style. I believe my buddy has a slew of those.

Here are photos:

floppy controler vs IDE standard...I guess it make since to plug into the HD IDE ribbon chain. This is how we would have done it on Macs at the same time period.


I used the full size IDE off of the HD to plug into the CDrom.


Here is the Rockwell sound card:


My brain is telling me to go ahead and plug in the 5.25" drive that I have rather than the CDRom as this will allow me to check out a few disks. I think it would assist me in making images of some of my trs80 software as well. Go with an external CDrom with appropriate card, etc.

 

[ajacocks]

That sound card is actually by Aztech. The Rockwell chip is for the modem that is also present.

- Alex

 

[washitaeagle]

That sound card is actually by Aztech. The Rockwell chip is for the modem that is also present.

- Alex

Awesome...thank you for the information.

 

[Brian Todd]

If you have plugged the CDRom into the same IDE as the HDD, did you check to see if the CDRom is configured as slave? I remember having some nightmares a long time ago and this was the simple fix!

 

[NeXT]

It's second nature to me that when I had two IDE devices on one ribbon cable the hard drive was Master and the Cd was Slave. Technically though you can do it the other way around and it doesn't change anything. The whole master/slave thing was just the equivalent to saying ID 0 or 1.
99% of the IDE ribbon cables out there are completely passive on all three headers.
Just don't try using Cable Select unless you know what you are doing because that causes headaches.

Get a Windows 98 boot floppy. If you can't "boot with CD-rom support" on a regular IDE CD drive you got hardware issues.

Nice Aztech card by the way. That is actually a Packard Bell OEM model and should also have OPL support.

 

[washitaeagle]

It's second nature to me that when I had two IDE devices on one ribbon cable the hard drive was Master and the Cd was Slave. Technically though you can do it the other way around and it doesn't change anything. The whole master/slave thing was just the equivalent to saying ID 0 or 1.
99% of the IDE ribbon cables out there are completely passive on all three headers.
Just don't try using Cable Select unless you know what you are doing because that causes headaches.

Get a Windows 98 boot floppy. If you can't "boot with CD-rom support" on a regular IDE CD drive you got hardware issues.

Nice Aztech card by the way. That is actually a Packard Bell OEM model and should also have OPL support.

thanks for the reminder.
I'll double triple check the master vs slave configuration and try again.

I was able to use the universal sound driver listed here on VCFED to get the card recognized and working. It sounds pretty great.


OFF TOPIC: I just got rid of my NeXT machine just because I couldn't find a proper monitor/power cable to get it up and going. I listed it on craigslist and had a guy drive up from Texas to Oklahoma to pick up the machine. He picked up a few trs80s and a couple apple ii from me. He has drove back since and bought more.

 

[washitaeagle]

UPDATE:
I have a cdrom drive, and as stupid as I am, as stupid does, it really came down to having the drive in drive select rather than slave mode. I need to find a caddy sled to mount this drive tho as it is sort of laying in the bottom of the bay at this point, but seems to work okay just doesnt look too clean..

SOUND CARD ISSUES:
I am able to get the Aztec card running via the universal sound driver, but my issue is that certain games do not see the card with this driver and alas I have no sound. Warcraft II being one of them.
So, my buddy dropped by and picked up a couple Apple 5.25 drives from me and a Se/30 case that he is attempting to get working after purchasing it from me. Along with cash he gave me a SB16Scsi card. Thoughts on this card? Should I swap it in? I see that it has midi hangs, should I worry about this?

Network Issues:
I have relocated this computer closer to my router to get it online. After installing Windows for Workgroups, WinTCIP I have got an error on Win startup.
It says that my network adapter isn't working right. Maybe this isn't the correct device for the integrated ethernet on this board? This device is what Windows auto detected on installation. So, my hopes is that it's the correct one but the settings are wrong, or...I'll just have to grab another card out of the bottom of my PCI ISA network box.

 

[washitaeagle]

NETWORK ISSUES:
I swapped in the 3comm Extreme 10/100 PCI network connector and it decided to start working after a bit of trial and error. I used the drivers on the VOGAN Drivers section and it works fantastic. It's online. I noticed Opera works really well, although the screen space on my windowed application seems to be pretty lame. I might redownload another browser or two and check it out, and I am also interested in reusing the Gopher browser implementation and to get that going.

SOUND CARD:
I swapped in the SCSISB16 and it works fantastic. I am still a little bit out of knowledge when it comes to the PC realm of audio cards as I was primarily using 68K machines in the Mac world at this time. So, I am constantly reading up on what I should and shouldn't be doing. For instance, is this card even better than the Aztech Packard Bell (modem, Soundcard combo, 3230) card that I had been using?

Final Thoughts:
The interesting thing, I remember using a Win3.1 machine a lot back in the day and especially with the Calmira skin, so maybe my brother or dad had a machine that I would use when I was home on leave from the USN. I remember beating a few games with my brother on a Tandy 1000 that we had in the house. maybe we had it running win3.1? I need a better way to mount the CD Drive as it is just laying in there, I have updated to hopefully the latest BIOS for the machine, and I am going to try and get a IDE to SD or Flash going. I also remember the necessity as was stated above to have a Autoexec manager as it seems weird that with 96mb of ram I will still fine issues with running out of memory.

 

[Brian Todd]

Great to hear that you got the majority of your issues sorted. I'm not clear on why you have the CD Drive lying in the bottom of your casing as you seem to have it under the floppy drive. Normally I would have expected a bracket in the desktop to connect a second floppy drive so it's kinda weird there is nothing to mount it to? Not sure if your SB is better than the Aztech but Creative were definitely the name at the time so you can't go far wrong there and there will not be a game from that era which doesn't recognize the card! Give us an update on how you get on with the browsers ... I have yet to find a half decent one that works with Windows 3.1!

 

[washitaeagle]

Update to my fun with this HP Vectra XM2 with the 486 DX4 2mb Video Ram and 512k of cache.
Drivers
I was able to find drivers on a site HPdrivers.com. I always hate looking at these type of sites as they look so trojan horse like. So far so good though. I updated the video drivers for win 3.1 and it allowed me to have a 256k color and large 1080 screen space. Win3.1 is super tiny now. I think I could go in and change up the fonts to be larger, but with more space. My biggest concern is not having any drivers for DOS. I don't think I am getting the most out of the onboard memory. I have ran a few DOS performance tests and a couple recognize my onboard video card as an S3 864, its built into the motherboard, so its HP variant of the s3 864 I guess..but maybe DOS drivers for that card would work? I have DOS drivers for the machine but they are for CAD and other graphic programs and not specifically for DOS and video games. I have yet to find any DOS drivers for this card. SVGA performance is terrible in any game, VGA is better, but it doesn't look to great and I feel something isn't setup right.

BROWSERS
One thing I know I don't have is a modern computer and I don't expect to do much with this machine on the net with modern security measures, and modern code. It does feel fairly snappy with the 100mb NIC when I load up a site, especially using frogfind. I do enjoy browsing the Gopher poxy...or at least what is left of it. Opera is so much more usable with more screen space. It's very nice. I even downloaded a specific Gopher program that can be used to access gopher proxy sites. I have yet to try out any other browsers as I have ran out of space on my main drive.

CD BAY and Drive space issues
I will soon have a CD cage once I make it down to my buddies warehouse with all the computer equipment. I'll probably even look around and find a 4x SCSI drive that I can use to replace the drive I have on the IDE chain right now. With only 500mb on my current scsci drive hard rive I have ran out of space really quickly. I wish there was a decent drive space analyzer for win3.1 or even dos so I could see what was taking up all my space, but I am not sure they had to worry about products like that back then. One thing I have not been able to find lately is a copy of WinTune that I can download. Most links I have seen are dead ends. Maybe that will help me analyze my drive space situation?


Finally, Sound:
I really have been enjoying listening to MODs and Midis on this thing. It puts out a nice sound with the Sound Blaster. I have got it to produce the hanging midi bug, once. I was playing MegaMan and forced quit (Ctl,Alt,Del) and the music didn't stop, just hung on the last note until I did a restart, so sort of self inflicted. All the sound applications for win3.1 are really cool and worth checking out. Until later:

 

[ryangs]

My biggest concern is not having any drivers for DOS. I don't think I am getting the most out of the onboard memory. I have ran a few DOS performance tests and a couple recognize my onboard video card as an S3 864, its built into the motherboard, so its HP variant of the s3 864 I guess..but maybe DOS drivers for that card would work? I have DOS drivers for the machine but they are for CAD and other graphic programs and not specifically for DOS and video games. I have yet to find any DOS drivers for this card. SVGA performance is terrible in any game, VGA is better, but it doesn't look to great and I feel something isn't setup right.

You don't need video drivers for DOS, as programs talk directly to the video card. The game has its own drivers, essentially. You can read more about that here. And video RAM shouldn't affect performance, as that's only for reaching higher resolutions or color depths (as you are doing in Windows).

SVGA performance is typically bad on 486 machines. How fast is the processor? That's going to be your main determinator of rendering speed in most games. SVGA mode often isn't playable until you're in the Pentium era with higher clock speeds (like 100mhz).

Keep having fun!

 

[washitaeagle]

Thanks!
It’s a 486DX4 100mhz.
I ended up wiping the hard drive and starting over just for the “fun” of it. Attempting an install of win 95.