Author Archives: Michal Necasek

The Vanishing Dream

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Michal Necasek

By sheer coincidence, three different yet similar wavetable daughterboards landed on my desk. They’re of different ages but all use Dream synthesizer chips. Together they provide an interesting window into the evolution of MIDI synthesizers. The oldest daughterboard is from … Continue reading →

Posted in MIDI, Sound | 2 Comments

How To Feed This Board?

Posted on August 25, 2015 by Michal Necasek

I have a minor problem and it looks like this: Those are the power connectors on an Intel Server Board SBT2, produced circa 2000. I can’t find the right thing to plug into them. The 24-pin connector should be more … Continue reading →

Posted in Intel, PC hardware, Xeon | 19 Comments

386 ZIF Socket Adapter

Posted on August 3, 2015 by Michal Necasek

After a long wait, I decided to bite the bullet and order a ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) socket adapter suitable for 386 CPUs through Digi-Key. The manufacturer is Aries Electronics and the part number is 196-PRS14001-12, as established some time … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Hardware Hacks, PC hardware | 13 Comments

Upcoming Fun

Posted on July 31, 2015 by Michal Necasek

Finally got one of these: There are pluses and minuses. Detailed report later.

Posted in 386 | Leave a comment

Something Happened

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Michal Necasek

My first experience with the Windows 10 media creation tool was, in a word, terrible. After 20 minutes or so of downloading, the tool told me that “Something happened” and the only option was to exit. That’s probably what passes … Continue reading →

Posted in Bugs, Microsoft | 17 Comments

OPL3 Copies

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Michal Necasek

A while ago, a reader commented that in certain circles, it’s well known that there were “fake” OPL3 chips. This does not appear to be widespread knowledge. After a bit of digging, an interesting chapter in the history of PC … Continue reading →

Posted in PC hardware, PC history, Sound, Yamaha | 15 Comments

Summer Slowdown

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Michal Necasek

Once again it’s summer and the frequency of site updates will slow down somewhat. In the next two weeks I’ll be gone with very limited or no Internet access. So if you don’t get an answer right away, please be … Continue reading →

Posted in Site Management | Leave a comment

UINT32_C Macro Considered Harmful

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Michal Necasek

The C99 family of INTN_C and UINTN_C macros fills a real gap in the language, but it also lays extremely nasty traps for the unwary. The evolution of how the macros are defined in the C99 language standard shows that … Continue reading →

Posted in C, Development | 2 Comments

Broken Spigot

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Michal Necasek

While searching for an unrelated piece of hardware, I came across an old video capture board. Alarm bells started going off when I heard something rattling in the anti-static wrap. Sure enough, one of the large capacitors fell off… because … Continue reading →

Posted in Graphics, PC hardware, PC history | 3 Comments

44-Voice MIDI on Yamaha OPL4

Posted on June 10, 2015 by Michal Necasek

In 1994, sound cards with wavetable synthesizers were all the rage. Typically these supported 24-voice or at most 32-voice polyphony. So 44-voice synthesis sounded fancy. The following text can be found in a README file in the driver package for … Continue reading →

Posted in MIDI, Sound | 9 Comments