Bargin!!

Yesterday & today:

$4 for a set of PlayStation (working)

$2 for a HP ScanJet 3300C (working)

$5 for two 10/100M network switch (untested)

A free USB camera (untested)

now I’m looking for bargin DV camcorder and LCD display, even faulty.

What a pity!

I missed the long expecting Recreational Vehicle expo yesterday. I was thinking Apr. 14 would be next saturday.

There’s another pity today. Tried my best to purchase a matress pad from IKEA (one hour driving from my home) , I found I purchased a wrong size. Although I always thought my bed is queen size, actually it’s a double-size one!!! My fault is, after living in this apartment for one year, I didn’t actually measure the size of my bed to make sure what size it is. It’s a big lession, somebody must take the responsibility. I have to replace it sometime next week. A two hours’ waste of time and fuel:(

MIDI workstation Day 2

Finally, all connections are beautifully setup. Now the D-9 MIDI port looks like original design:) Inside the box, I have to directly solder the three signals on the sound card board.

To get the best possible MIDI quality with the available hardwares, the original ESS1868 ISA card is replaced by a Creative PCI64 (actually an Ensoniq EM1370 card). Since all three PCI slots are all possessed (sound card, display card, dvd decoder card), a vintage Intel EtherExpress 16 ISA network card is currently installed. Unfortunately, this card is neither PnP nor supported by Win2K. I’m testing the Win98 driver now.

Although I have an extra 1.6G harddisk could be fitted to this computer, I decided to do that later together with replacing ATX power supply. The hardware modification is temporerly frozen from now:) Software deployment will start from tomorrow.

Software todo:

- install original wavetable support for Creative card.

- find some piano teaching software and install.

- install cakewalk or other composer software.

- tune arcade game emulator

- make network card working under W2K

- play with OS/2 live cd

- play with DSL live cd

Later hardware todo:

- check Dxr2 TV out support for GUI display

- ATX power supply upgrade

- install second 1.6G harddisk with second OS

BTW: Surprisingly, among those popular old sound cards, Yamaha 724 is one of the best MIDI quality. The disadvantage of Ensoniq EM1370 is they didn’t open their wavetable format even the card actually support dynamic wavetable loading. That means it’s impossible to delivery new instruments by third party. What a pity! Maybe software synthesizer can resolve this problem, but I’m not sure if this K6-3D 450 machine is capable to do that.

MIDI workstation Day 1

Tonight, finally, I began to connect my Casio keyboard to the computer freshly refurbished yesterday.

The circuit is quite simple since I only need MIDI out to computer, actually the most important part is an optical coupler.  A TLP521 4pin one was salvaged from an broken fax board. This time, instead directly soldering everything together immediately, I used a prototyping board and some temporary wires to test the concept and components firstly. It works beautifully with the soundcard’s hardware synthesizer.

One big issue is, I hope to connect the joystick while I connect midi keyboard. Therefore, I am going to install another 9 pin D-sub socket on the computer shell and soldering all isolation circuit inside. That means, hopefully my computer will have a new MIDI port. The bad thing is there is no internal connector on the soundcard for MIDI port. So I have to directly solder wires from sound card.

I also found a new Creative SoundBlaster Pro PCI 64 and will replace the current ESS1868 AudioDrive for better wavetable synthesizer. To empty the PCI slot for this new card, I have to replace my original 100M pci network card with a very old Intel 8120 10M ISA network card.

Refurbished PC

Last two days I just stuck in a new project – to refurbish a vintage PC which I picked from a rubbish bin;)

After two days’ efforts, this only one desktop pc in my unit features:

-  AMD K6-II 450MHz CPU (I think it’s possible to overclock it)

- 192M SDRAM (all SDRAMs I can source at this moment)

- Creative PC-DVD Encore suite (now I can play full-screen smooth DVD no problem:)

-  USB 1.1

- Camera for video chatting

- Dual game controller (one is a vintage game pad connected to the vintage ‘game port’, another is a modified XBOX controller connected to USB)

- Internet connectivity

- Tracking ball as mouse

I’m currently running Win2K prof on this machine, and it’s smooth enough. It’s quite comfortable to surf internet with firefox 1.5. Since it’s the only computer in my unit which has two joysticks at once, it’s definitely a target platform for game emulators.  But actually the original purpose of restoring this machine is for MIDI composing.

Therefore, the next project is the pc-midi interface cable.

If I can source another ATX power supply, I will also replace the existing AT power supply for extra APM functions.