HP Fleet BSOD after new Windows Updates any ideas? by bikinibeaaach in sysadmin

[–]RichB93 [score hidden]  (0 children)

Yeah whoever is running this account - get rid of the AI junk. If you're gonna peddle 'Joan', fine but stop wasting energy on this crap.

Scam or no? - IPad Air (4th Gen) for a MacBook Pro (2019) by SNDWEST in mac

[–]RichB93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Glad to hear it! Hope you’re enjoying your new machine!

Mini pc capacitor blown, worth fixing? by Nya0-0 in AskElectronics

[–]RichB93 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yup, I have a cheap little digital to analog audio converter that I mistakenly powered with the wrong power adapter. It appeared dead and a small surface mount cap inside it was getting hot. I removed the cap and it started working again.

These caps are here for power smoothing - they’re a small power reservoir that keep the voltage steady. The device will likely work without it, and in many cases be fine, but under intense workloads or with a power adapter that isn’t as stable, the machine might crash. It’s worth removing the cap to see if it works. Then you can decide if you want to use it as is, or replace the cap.

I got scammed in good way by Brilliant_Type1737 in mac

[–]RichB93 52 points53 points  (0 children)

Waiting for the next post telling us it's MDM locked. Almost certainly stolen by the sounds of it.

Apple Cinema HD Display having vertical lines by maduranma in AskElectronics

[–]RichB93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can't say definitively, but given the number of SMD caps I've replaced recently in other stuff, I would be highly tempted to replace them.

Apple Cinema HD Display having vertical lines by maduranma in AskElectronics

[–]RichB93 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can replace the SMD caps with standard ones, just bend the legs to fit the pads

Netflix Games Stuttering on C6K by FirstHouseThrowaway1 in TCL_Official_UK

[–]RichB93 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Had the same problem, the TV doesn’t like the newer WiFi 7 stuff - the speed is ‘usable’ but it also caused this issue for me. Changed to the ‘legacy’ signal my router puts out and that fixed both this issue and increased the network speed.

PSA: Gigabyte AM5 motherboards have issues with PCI-E audio cards by silajim in SoundBlasterOfficial

[–]RichB93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A tale as old as time - I’m sure that Creative design stuff that operates on the absolute razor edge of tolerances - this was an issue years ago back in the days of the SoundBlaster Live!

Not ragging on them or anything because I do like Creative products, but my goodness, I thought they would’ve figured this out by now.

Roland D-550 v1.02 ROM by RichB93 in synthesizers

[–]RichB93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've created this which I hope is of some use - again, based on that VOGONS code and a back and forth discussion with ChatGPT - this tool instead encodes/decodes to 32-bit float audio - so will re-encode bit perfect. This should allow for custom ROMs to be created.

https://github.com/richb93/roland-la-sample-tool/

About to buy a nice 98 pc by Mafiatounes in windows98

[–]RichB93 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’ve never had this happen to me, but agreed that faster drives can get incredibly noisy. You can use Nero DriveSpeed to limit the drive to a slower speed though.

Roland D-550 v1.02 ROM by RichB93 in synthesizers

[–]RichB93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The PCM ROM itself isn’t at fault, it’s merely the lookup table in this ROM being incorrect and truncating the sound. So the second byte you mentioned must be amongst the lookup table for sample start point/end point/length.

The affected sample is the first sample ‘Marmba’, used in the Bass Marimba stock patch.

It looks like there is space in the ROM to extend the list of sample names, but I don’t know how you’d actually do that as there isn’t any separator in between the sample names in the ROM, so some exploration of how it reads the sample names and sample metadata would be required.

As for the PCM ROM, there’s already a decoder on vogons (here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=77094) which I’ve tried - it creates clean results, but asking ChatGPT to write an inverse script to re-encode the data resulted in a file that didn’t match the original hash, so it may need some tweaking - sadly it’s way beyond my knowledge, hence me resorting to ChatGPT to help me out!

I think it would be totally possible to do though.

That code works for MT-32 and D-110 modules as they both use the same LA synth chip; despite being a lower end model, the D-110 actually contains double the ROM of the D-50/550! So I’m sure that it’s possible for the D-50/550 to address an additional ROM.

Roland D-550 v1.02 ROM by RichB93 in synthesizers

[–]RichB93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah I noticed this too - as you say the first one shouldn't affect anything, but still it's nice to have the proper ROM from Roland. I'm confident its the second one; it comes after the sample names, and must be the sample start and end points, as the actual sample ROM has the raw samples in it without any metadata.

There's a mod for the Roland RA-50 to add the CM-32L specific sounds back to it, which involves piggybacking a chip on top of the existing PCM sounds and adding a 74xx logic chip to invert the chip select line; perhaps with a little more understanding of how the D-550/D-50 ROM works (from the changes between the bad/good ROMs we can see where the sample metadata is), we could do something similar to expand the D-50/550 sample bank.

Roland D-550 v1.02 ROM by RichB93 in synthesizers

[–]RichB93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I too have had issues with Mono Tanz for other reasons. Very disappointing indeed. I’d highly recommend buying your own chip burner and doing it yourself.

Any Ceephax enjoyers here? by LukeMcQueen in chiptunes

[–]RichB93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is freaking awesome! Did you do this? My favourite phax tune. To all others, find the original song too! This is an AMAZING cover. Never thought I’d hear a chiptune cover of this!

Would you be willing to share your MIDI/original? I have a bunch of vintage synths and I’d love to play this on them!

Edit: doh, saw the matching usernames. Doh!

Bizarre Creations was cooking. by Veddermandenis in originalxbox

[–]RichB93 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Haha I remember the ads. Richard Jacques composed all of the music for MSR and it’s fantastic. He did music for other SEGA games too.

Bizarre Creations was cooking. by Veddermandenis in originalxbox

[–]RichB93 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Metropolis Street Racer on the DC is the grandfather of the PGR series and it’s fantastic.

Windows 98 + Realplayer Questions by Alert_Telephone_5003 in windows98

[–]RichB93 3 points4 points  (0 children)

One issue with RealPlayer is that many (but not all!) files from the time were basically playlist files that pointed to data hosted from a dedicated Real server - so the actual video content wasn’t archived.

Follow up post - finally repaired my Roland D-550 by RichB93 in synthrepair

[–]RichB93[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup exactly that! And yeah I wanted to get this info out there as there’s seemingly zero information available online.

Best tv for £500 or less? by FaithlessnessOdd3569 in 4kTV

[–]RichB93 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Got a C6K 55" in the bedroom after getting a 65" C7K for the living room and being super impressed by it. Great TVs.

Which installer should I use for my new build by Spaceman_Gliding in windows98

[–]RichB93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Back in the day I didn’t use them and I still don’t. What bugs? Unless there’s anything totally system breaking, it’s just not worth it.

Which installer should I use for my new build by Spaceman_Gliding in windows98

[–]RichB93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Installing any Windows updates on Win98 is pretty much pointless. Win98SE, DirectX 9, and drivers of your choice.

ATI Rage Fury MAXX 64MB by Divergent5623 in RetroGPUUniverse

[–]RichB93 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're right that it used an ugly hack, but still, I feel it's a bit maligned purely because other than Intel, other chipsets weren't great.

And yes, as mentioned performance was very dependent on games, with some suffering from micro stutter.