Hey there!

Since the page for my humble bootleg collection wasn’t very responsive I revamped it a bit =)

bootleg collection (jensma.de)

PS: I started to add cheat devices, since they are kinda unauthorized by the console’s manufacturer. So they’re kinda like bootlegs, I guess?

Another quick one 🙂

I took this RF modulator replacement and changed it a bit: C64-Video-Enhancement/analog_only at master · c0pperdragon/C64-Video-Enhancement · GitHub

Most of the components are THT now, aligned the PCB to sit centered on the board and added a jumper to disable the audio in of the SID on longboards.

Just another quick one:
I wanted to use a small flash IDE in a desktop PCI. Unfortunatly those devices really aren’t meant to be mounted in an ATX case, so I wound up a small adapter. The power for the flash HDD comes either from the PCI port or an external source. Kicad project files and gerbers are attached, in case you want to replicate this project 🙂

Download

Just a quick note: If you’re testing old chips regularly you might want to have a look at the Retro Chip Tester Professional!

(This article isn’t sponsored, I’m just amazed by this device 🙂 )

PS: The first test was successful, woohoo!

Housing

I put the RCT in a fancy housing:

You can get the housing at Mouser. But you have to customize it yourself 🙂

I also replaced the LCD with an OLED.

The ports and switches on the backside are mounted with several adapters und pcbs:

The SD card pcb was glued in place with a 3D printed block underneath to support it. That’s a bit unfortunate, but the pcb itself has no mounting holes.

Hey there,

I’m currently building a tiny DOS gaming PC and needed a sound card for it. Unfortunatly there aren’t many PC/104* sound cards available so I spun up my own.

*= PC/104 – Wikipedia, basically a form factor standart

Since I wanted a sound card that was compatible with most standards so I can play as many games as possible with it I desided on the Avance Logic ALS100 Plus+. The IC is pretty well documented what made designing the sound card much easier.

It’s features are:

Compatibility
• Adlib
• All Sound Blaster Pro applications
• All Sound Blaster 16 applications
• MPU-401 UART MIDI
• PC Speaker
• Sound Blaster ADPCM
• Yamaha OPL3 FM Synthesizer

That’ll cover every game I’m interested in. The PC speaker is mixed in with the audio out by the IC, that’s pretty cool.

The hardware specifications of the new sound card are as following:

Hardware specifications
• Software selectable DMA lines (0, 1, 3)
• Software selectable interrupt lines (5, 7, 9, 10, 11)
• PC/104 ISA Plug and Play bus interface
• DMA interface with FIFO
• Enhanced Game port
• 8-bit or 16-bit stereo digital audio from 4 kHz to 48 kHz
• 3D Sound Effect Processor
• FM/wavetable synthesis via OPL3
• Wavetable connector
• Stereo Line-Out

Design and development

If you’re just here for the design files and aren’t interested in the failures I’ve had designing the sound card just skip to the end 🙂

At first I took the specifications directly from the PC/104 consortium for the measurements: PC/104 – PC/104 ConsortiumPC/104 Consortium (pc104.org)

Then I read the manufacturer’s design sheet to build a sound card for the ALS100 Plus+ and added some minor noise cancellation.

First fail:

Yeah well, the IC is a bit bigger than a PQFP-100 (10% bigger to be exact). Meh. I tried to shorten the legs but ultimatively ordered another PCB. Bummer.

Second fail:

If you thought I would learn from my first mistake – think again! Yeah, so the OPL3 is also wider than a normal SOIC-24. This time I shortened the legs and soldered it down and went to testing (I shifted the IC down in the photo to better visualize the difference).

Third fail:

8bit- and 16bit-audio worked straight of the box so was the PC Speaker, but the FM synthesis was garbled. Staring at the schematics revealed another pretty stupid mistake:

If you havn’t spotted it yet: I switched around the adress lines. I cut the traces on the pcb and rewired them and FM synthesis was finally working.

Fourth fail (more like a foreseen issue):

There was a faint hum in the audio when plugging in a wavetable daughterboard. The soundcard has a digital and an analog ground which are connected at one point:

That’s fine and dandy – but the wavetable did just the same, so it created a ground loop. I removed the resistor on the sound card and the hum was gone 🙂

The dimensions for the wavetable daughterboard are approximately like this:

While testing I used a Dreamblaster X2 which fits nicely. Also pictured: The fix for fail #1 and an OPL3-clone.

Downloads

Gerbers: Download
Schematics: Download
iBOM: Download
Drivers: Download
kicad symbol and footprint of the PC/104 board: Download
BOM* with links to mouser.com: Download

*= Missing from BOM:
• PC104-Connector, available on mouser.com
• OPL3, available new old stock from various suppliers
• ALS100 Plus+, unfortunatly EOL since the late 90s, so you have to desolder it from a working sound card.

I snatched a nice luggable for a low price. Unfortunatly the auction listing said “untested” – we all now what that means 🙂

So of course – plugging in the AC cord and switching it on does nothing. I took some pictures of the repair for your viewing pleasure 🙂

The outer inspection relvealed nothing speacial. There is a flap for some extension cards and an old style AT connector for the keyboard. Next I’ll pop it up.

The build quality is.. uhm, questionable I guess. No cable management and all the connectors are glued in place.

Next step: Pull all the components out.

The battery pretty much jumped into my face when moving the power supply. And there is quite a lot of gunk and even plastic spirals rolling around in the case.

Nicely packed RAM banks, no math coprocessor (wasn’t expecting one anyways) – but overall pretty nice! So let’s get the mainboard out of there and see what the battery did to it…. fingers crossed!

Ew! The keyboard connector sucked up all the batterie’s evil juices. And well, some splatters here and there on the mainboard. Let’s pop the cell out.

Yep, it smelled just as bad as it looks. The positive rail under tha battery is heavily corroded and some of the thick rail above the nasty blob has been eaten away. Ew.

I desoldered the keyboard socket and threw it in highly acidic vinegar and put it after half an hour in an ultrasonic cleaner. It was squeky clean after that.

The positive battery trace was cleaned with a glas fiber pen, same goes for the attacked thick trace. After that I refreshed the exposed copper with some solder.

Next up I measured the voltages of the PSU:

The PSU was spot on. So I checked the motherboard and stumbled upon a short between +12V and GND.

If you’ve been dealing with technology from around the 90s you already know the culprits.. tantalum capacitors!

The first cap I removed was shorted, oh oh. So I desoldered all of them and tested them – about all of them were dead.

I replaced all the upright tantalums, plugged everything together and…

Woohoo! It booted fine! So let’s see if the hard disk works.

Yep, it is pretty loud but works fine. 20MB capacity full of uninteresting documents and Lemmings! Nice.

So knowing the electronics are okay I had a closer look to the casing.

This is how the left hinge for the display looks like.

Holy smoke, what happened here? At first I thought it just snapped over time, but there are weird marks all over it – like someone tried to stab it with a knife.

Some goes for the “brakes” of the hinges. Just have a look at them!

I scrubbed them clean and 3D printed the missing bit of the hinge. Unfortunatly all I had at hand was maroon resin, but you won’t be able to see the hinge anyways 🙂

That green stuff is lithium based grease for increased hinge slipperyness, if that’s a word.

The desoldered battery was replaced with three industry grade NiCd cells and velcroed to the HDD caddy.

The HDD was replaced with a CF card mounted to the expansion bay for easier access.

Yeah well, the CF card is sticking out and the sliding door for the expansion cards won’t close this way. Unfortunatly I forgot to take a photo of it, but I 3D printed an adapter to move the CF card further in.

The jumpers on the CF adapter were already set correctly – to a single master disk.

So after mounting the CF card I tried to boot the machine. Well, the BIOS will detect the CF card automati.. no. No automatic detect for HDDs on this BIOS. So I googled and found “IDTHEIDE” (download here) – a tool that will find the correct cylinders/heads/sector count of an HDD.

I tried to put the program to a floppy disk and boot from it – no dice! The floppy drive was pretty much dead. So I tried a gotek flashed with flashfloppy and put an image of the floppy on it.

The tool worked perfectly! It detected the HDD straight away and all I had to do is to write down the values and put them into BIOS.

After entering the correct values the CF was recognized correctly. Next up I installed MSDOS6.22 I’ve got for free from the web archive. I backed up Lemmings from the original HDD and put it back to the CF card – it worked! But no sound, meh.

So I shuffled through my stuff and found a nice Sound Blaster 16, put it in and installed it. No problems there! Booted up Lemmings again, this time with glorious sound!

There was a serial Mouse included in the auction for this machine. Plugged it in, installed the Microsoft Mouse Driver 11 (if I recall correctly) and booted Lemmings again to test it. Worked fine!

I installed Win3.11 just for fun – it runs okay but sometimes crashed. Guess it wants more than the 2MB RAM the mainboard currently has.

Lets have a last look at the innards before closing this beast:

I had to install an HDD adapter plate for the now missing HDD. An installed HDD gave structural strength to the assembly to the left. If left out, the assembly to the left tends to sink down.

Finally I put the backplate on and screwed it down.

Sheesh. When screwing the backplate down one of the inserts lifted straight out. Glued it down with epoxy after that.

At least, this beast was finally done. Next up are some specs.

I’ll print out the BIOS settings and put them between the screen and the keyboard. Just in case.

PS: I tested tested the RAM and pretty much everything else 🙂

Thanks for reading!