u/O_MORES

After installing an NVMe SSD on my Pentium II 350..., I decided to add an ISA sound card (ESS1869) with an FM module.

If you haven’t worked with one of these before, you might wonder how you actually interface with the radio module. It turns out you need to track down the exact tuner software - it's not a part of the standard drivers. Next, the radio software expects the FM module to be accessed at the standard I/O port (0x30C), which can easily cause conflicts if that address is already taken or the card is manually configured (via jumper) to a different one. It’s a bit of a puzzle, but definitely doable...

This particular card comes from an OEM batch, so the manufacturer is kinda difficult to trace. It's the SDR version, nothing special about it, but I'm super happy to have it in my collection, especially now that these cards are getting pricey.

Yes, it's a 3D card based on a DSP chip. Mpact cards are hard to find in general, but the model I own didn't even have a picture on the whole internet, just a mention from 1998 on a Polish website.

I know this is not exactly breaking news, but it's the first time I've tried an i7 14th Gen. It's running on bare metal with CSM support turned on and CREGFIX. We don't have to worry about 'too much RAM'... because the motherboard (Gigabyte B760 DS3H) will report only ~860 MB for 32-bit OSes (the rest is reserved for 'system use').

Those 2×32 MB FPM SIMMs cost around $2,000 in 1995 (the year this CPU was released) so it didn’t make much sense to use them in a 486 system. You could buy a Pentium 120 MHz PC for the same price. Still, it’s interesting to pimp out a 486…

Yeah… watching a 320×240 Video CD (VCD) felt like time travel. After fighting to get a DVD-RW working in Windows 3.1, this somehow felt better than 4K on an OLED.

This combo: i7-14700KF + Gigabyte B760 D3SH was just passing by. I got XP running and installed some drivers, but didn't get to do any proper testing, it seemed to work fine though.

This exact card was manufactured in 1998. Occupies two PCI slots simultaneously, includes an integrated 2D daughterboard with Cirrus Logic GD5440 chip and has two RAM slots for texture memory.