Yes, the machine will actually play MIDI music files. Remarkably, that did trick, and when I tried the sound capabilities of the ISA sound card installed on that old TOMATO motherboard running under Windows XP, there was excellent sound reproduction and there was also an excellent recording capability when an external microphone was attached to the sound card.An item still pending is the correct reproduction of MIDI encoded music files. However, just by tinkering around with the operating system I found out that you can actually coax Windows XP into accepting that old ISA sound card (after going into the Control Panel of Windows XP service pack 2 somewhere there is a place where you can actually select your sound system drivers from a list of options, and there you can pick up the drivers for the Sound Blaster 16 AWE32 sound card).
I surmise that kind of power supply was designed to power up old IBM-AT clones running under DOS with a monochrome monitor, and that trying to extract from it enough power to run the Sound Blaster Live! PCI card was just to much.Īfter much searching, I perceived the consensus that, for Windows XP, Microsoft did not really support ISA sound cards. Not only Windows XP failed to boot, as a matter of fact the initial BIOS screen normally provided by the motheboard did not show up, and the entire monitor screen (an SVGA 15' type monitor) would go blank almost immediately every time the PC was turned on.The main suspect, from the very beginning, was the power supply that came with the cabinet, an old 200 watts AT power supply. Except, of course, when I tried to add a Sound Blaster PCI Live! Sound card on an available PCI slot. And it worked! The machine was extremely slow, though, but that got corrected as soon as I increased the RAM memory to 512 Mb (with two 256 SDRAM sticks).Everything worked fine and well, and I was even able to upgrade the Service Pack 2 to Service Pack 3 via the Automatic Updates service provided by Microsoft through an Internet connection (I installed a US Robotics Fax Moden ISA card in an available ISA slot).
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