Offline
Jelly Stone park, MD USA

Well, I've been going through some old PII PCs to try building a SoundBlaster/tracker box. Ive got a SB32 (the very ECO model of the SB AWE32) enroute so I'm looking for a home to put it in.
One of the boxes, a Sony Vaio PCV-150 desktop, seemed like a good choice. I fired it up and went through its hardware. I found that it has a Yamaha OPL3SAx Wdm driver loaded in Device Manager. The sound manager listed midi devices are the MS GS wavetable, a Yamaha FM synth and a Yamaha MPU-401. Anyone seen a desktop Mobo with onboard sound hardware using an OPL? Could this be a similar  design to one of the Vaio laptops? Look alot like a SoundBlaster install.
Another issue I have is it's running ME, and I'm not sure how well ME will do with DOS apps, ( no DOS support in ME, AFAIK) so I'm thinking of downgrading to Win98SE. Hoping that Win98's drivers will work, would like to see if I can use the on board OPL. Been scraping the Web looking, but Sony doesn't seem to have any chipset drivers for the mobo, and don't know if there is a SB card driver I can use instead.
Any thoughts?

Offline
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

There were a few boards that used built-in SB and I'm sure some of them had OPL support. There's an easy way to find out. Load up an FM tracker and play a song.

Offline
Jelly Stone park, MD USA

Thanks. Working towards that, messing with the HD ATM.

Offline
Jelly Stone park, MD USA

Just to wrap up this thread, I got the Vaio setup. Had a little issue that turned out  to be a bad Win98 install, Seemed to work fine but couldn't detect any PnP cards ( took  half a week to figure that out). After the second install, Win98 detected the on-board YMF715 as well as the SB32 ISA card and installed drivers for both. YEA \o/ 

Had a small glitch with the 2 game ports, the on board port got installed first and took the resources before the SB card. Had to disable  the one, Install the other (it could only use ADR 201) then enable and install the first using the next higher ADR.

I was worried that Adlib Tracker would have a problem with the Win98 drivers but works just fine from a dos prompt. Even uses the YMF 715 as it should; I was prepared to have to edit the config file.

Happy camper, now just have to learn the Adlib interface, only got F3, F5 and F7 down so far.. I have to say the YMF sounds SO much better then the Vibra CQM 'OPL 3' on the SB32 (don't settle for a SB32 go for the AWE32). I can't comment on how YMF stacks up to a OPL 3 card, but I'm well satisfied. This was the best junk 'puter I've gotten my hands on.

If anyone needs the Yamaha and Sound Blaster drivers, I've found the direct links to the Support pages so you don't have to mess with the numerous 'Driver Download' sites,(had to spend an afternoon cleaning my HTPC, stupid Adware!)
Yahama OPL SAx
http://www.yamaha.co.jp/english/product/lsi/download/
Sound Blaster AWE32
http://us.creative.com/support/download … 9&y=11
The Creative Labs files are easy to find but the Yahama site doesn't have direct access to the archived drivers.
Enjoy