shock__
Joined: 23 Jan 2011
Posts: 4
Location: NRW, Germany
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Posted:
Tue Jan 25, 2011 4:07 am |
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So hi, it's shock__ aka Shockwav3 ... 25 yo, from near Duesseldorf, former "sysadmin", now upcoming student of social education (long story) and general retro computing enthusiast (mostly homecomputers, formerly).
Some of you might already know me from the German DOSForum, VOGONS or possibly mobygames where I currently started to write up reviews of "forgotten" games (only reviewed "Mutation of J.B" and "The hidden below" [first German FPS] so far)
As for myself, I do consider myself a soundcard collector and DOS enthusiast. Sadly I don't own an AT/XT since those tend to be really rare and expensive here. But I currently have a really nice ISA/VLB based 486 machine that gets some use, along with a few slightly more modern MMX/Pentium Pro based rigs. My current sound card collection prolly isn't that big nor interesting compared to some really awesome cards some of you have, but gives a nice overview of the "low end market" already I guess (if you wanna split paths with some of your cards, let me know).
Interesting tidbits would be the Creative Gameblaster/CMS (which was never as agressively marketed over here like it was in the USA with radioshack being around), an original AdLib (1990 Version), boxed MV Thunderboard, boxed Disney Sound Source, Soundblaster 1.5 and 2.0 and various variants of the PAS16, Gravis Ultrasound and Ensoniq Soundscape cards.
Oh and recently I built a multistandard Stereo-Covox based upon PCSTGIF7.ZIP on perfboard (and even managed to find the original designer, who's employed in FPGA development by now).
Also spent some time a few months ago to build a hardware based "Disney Sound Source wrapper" for simple selfmade Covoxes, but that's currently catching dust, as I managed to find a proper software wrapper which mostly does the job.
Last but not very least, I might currently be able to get my hands on a _really_ rare old piece of hardware, which will of course be reverse engineered (if wanna you call "drawing schematics from a massmarket product" that way) by me, so it can get emulated in DOSBox or cloned if you're good with a soldering iron. Some of you might have heard of the "Innovation SSI 2001" back in the day, as it appears to have been mostly forgotten by the internet. It's a former AdLib competitor based upon the MOS/CSG 6581 chip (soundchip used in the C64) that's supported by roughly a dozen games. Already managed to track down 2 persons who still have such a card, a guy who programmed for it when we was with Spectrum Holobyte in the 80s as well as the president of the company that produced the card.
Apart from above x86 computers I still have a few homecomputer based systems (VIC20, C64, Atari ST (in various configs), Amiga 1200 (towered), ZX Spectrum +2 and a ZX Spectrum based DIY clone from russia with a soundcard which could be considered a low end GUS).
Be prepared to read from me on and off in the future  |
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