mikeb Posted February 6, 2006 Report Share Posted February 6, 2006 I've built a new system to replace my old Duron. I've been thinking about what I might be able to do with it since I don't need it anymore. Something music related or otherwise. I don't know but I'm feeling experimental. Suggestions? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
el-bee Posted February 6, 2006 Report Share Posted February 6, 2006 1. Clean install win98se and strip to bare minimum with 98lite (www.litepc.com)2. Install drivers (ASIO etc).3. Install your favourite softsynth and make it autostart on bootup4. Add knobs etc. with the Midibox-project5. Box the thing up with a case of your choice6. Enjoy your new hardware synth :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Attila Posted February 6, 2006 Report Share Posted February 6, 2006 What is the configuration of the PC?You could use it as a home jukebox. Get an LCD display (at least 2x16 - bigger is better), build an IR reciver (I suggest this one: www.cesko.host.sk/girderplugin.htm), hook it up to your stereo and you have a good MP3 player.Or if it's a stronger PC, you could use it as a HTPC. I suggest this minimal config:700MHz CPU128MBs of RAM (256MB should be a LOT better)20GBs of HDa DVD-ROM drivea graphic card with TV-outand alternatively a TV tuner card.Install Win2K or XP (only with 256 megs of ram), and some HTPC application, such as PowerCinema or Intervideo Home Theater.Or give it to me ;), I would pay the postage, if you are in the EU... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moebius Posted February 6, 2006 Report Share Posted February 6, 2006 1. Clean install win98se and strip to bare minimum with 98lite (www.litepc.com)Not clean enough :) - Install lite, and then Unofficial w98SP2..Use Exhelper, shexview, mmview and RegSeeker to get rid of components You don't need. For the music computer, you don't need Directx!! Even for the FX = .. and only Audio related DMedia/ActiveShow components, not the bloody codecs.2. Install drivers (ASIO etc).3. Install your favourite softsynth and make it autostart on bootup4. Add knobs etc. with the Midibox-project5. Box the thing up with a case of your choice6. Enjoy your new hardware synth :DPeace and fast old windozes, no networking!!Moebius Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smashtv Posted February 6, 2006 Report Share Posted February 6, 2006 I have a small army of "doorstop"(P2-133) PCs here doing the stuff that my macs don't like...Two drive different CNC machines (much tinkering to keep wintendo from interrupting the ports)...One has IC-prog and MIOS Studio, That one with it's JDM has spawned thousands of MIDIboxes as a PIC burner...One is set up for AVR development, with a STK500 dev board and extensions connected. It has mostly collected dust since I came across the MB several years ago...One is set up with no hard drive (has eeprom drive) that matches the SBC lighting controllers I have built (gathering dust too, last change in firmware was to add some fixtures that are a bit off the DMX timing spec. early last year)Whoop almost forgot the one on the bench that works as a 32 channel logic probe and is interfaced to my Fluke 45 for burn-in testing of various things. I'm planning to add a custom MIDIbox test rig and harness to this one, so I can help some of the guys who get truly stuck while building.Cool thing is I bought all of these systems (and a few spares, including one I actually use for a doorstop) including 15" monitors for $100 about 5 years ago.If I had a 600+mhz duron doorstop here, it would become a tivo replacement within a few hours, recording all the kids shows with as many tuner cards as it could cope with....... ;)Considering all the spam and DDOS attacks on me lately I'm considering loading two network cards in one to bring it up as a linux firewall.....Anyone else harnessing the massive power of a doorstop in an odd way? ;DBest!Smash Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raphael Posted February 6, 2006 Report Share Posted February 6, 2006 I've also6 old PCs runnig for various things:1. Firewall and router (P90)2. Linux server (printserver, fileserver, DHCP.... P233)3. PIC-Programming and MIDI-Test (K6-333)4. - 6. Machines with various OS (mainly Windows CE, VxWorks and other Real-Time Systems) for testing embedded software I'm developping (K6-550, P2-450, PIII-733)SmashTV wrote:Whoop almost forgot the one on the bench that works as a 32 channel logic probe Hey Smash, what hardware (and software) do you use for logic analyzing? My old Tektronix analyzer plugin (Series 7000 based 7D01) died some weeks ago :'( and Ì'm looking for a PC-based alternative. Raphael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smashtv Posted February 6, 2006 Report Share Posted February 6, 2006 Hey Smash, what hardware (and software) do you use for logic analyzing? My old Tektronix analyzer plugin (Series 7000 based 7D01) died some weeks ago :'( and Ì'm looking for a PC-based alternative. RaphaelIt's just some self-built hardware and a qbasic exe knocked up on a slow day at work (back in the coinop tech days)...I would not call it an analyzer at all, it really is more of a multichannel logic probe (with latching). I built it to speed troubleshooting on digital pinball machines, where I could stop the clock at will to observe states. This box made finding a switch wiring/diode fault in a 70-280 switch matrix much easier to pinpoint. ;)The design would not be good at all on anything you could not freeze the clock, or where timing is relevant at all (pretty much everything!)I wrote test roms for most of the WPC series of machines to display I/O and exercise the drive matrix, and that put me on top of the game until I quit that biz. 5 rom chips fit in the tool kit way better than my probe thing too.... ;)I miss wrenching on the pinballs sometimes.... :'(Best!Smash Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jidis Posted February 7, 2006 Report Share Posted February 7, 2006 Install lite, and then Unofficial w98SP2..Use Exhelper, shexview, mmview and RegSeeker to get rid of components You don't need.Man, thanks! I've been a 98lite head for years, but hadn't heard of those last ones. Think I'll be going fishing in a minute. :Dyou don't need Directx!! Even for the FX = .. and only Audio related DMedia/ActiveShow components, not the bloody codecs.I had always assumed that was needed for some audio apps or decent screen draws under Windows, but I usually go with 8.1 or even the bundled 6.x(?) of 98. If I built a portable recorder rig with an actual screen and a Windows install, I'd be afraid not to put it on there (for performance). I'd probably have some video codecs too. Is it really safe to go without it?If I did a jukebox or "fake AV component", I may even try to go DOS only. I've been hanging out in the dark lately (DOS) and have been looking at some of the MP3 players like DAMP. I'm also getting way too many retired machines piling up here, but most of them aren't as nice as Mikeb's Duron. I was thinking recently about doing a small box for MP3's, maybe even with an LM380 or something to drive small speakers.I'm looking for absolute minimal OS, no screen, no keys or mouse, all onboard periph's (maybe even S/PDIF out), and maybe an LCD (probably an external LCD and speakers, plus a line out). With externals, I guess you could just stick the little box on the floor somewhere. I'd want batches to take me into a player on boot.After some countless days and nights in DOS, I managed to get TCP/IP and a NIC happening in there with the whole C drive root shared and showing up on the other machines in 98,2K,and XP (horribly undocumented). I ultimately would like to be able to throw it on the neighborhood and move new files off and on remotely, or rearrange the playlists. I also really want fixed media storage, like a USB flash drive. I tried mine on two or three machines here with some "bootable USB flash" instructions on the web, but couldn't get it happening. Neither the old or new machines would spot it as a removable boot device, let alone even see it from the BIOS. I don't know what I was doing wrong. The tutorials all made it sound like the hard part was setting up the MBR and getting boot files on it. If you can't see it, I guess that's the least of your problems. :'(Anybody done it?Also, I've got a nice body for a remote LCD here with 4 buttons. The WinAMP LCD code for the HD44780 and buttons had two shift register based wiring alternatives for a lower number of lines. I wanted the smaller of them, and had it worked out to get all the lines to and from the controller and computer port on a CAT5 cable. For only four switches, you can go straight to the port pins with no matrix. I never got WinAMP to see any sign of button activity. I don't know if I had the WinAMP LCD command key prefs set wrong, didn't fully understand the wiring, or if I had done it right, but the WinAMP LCD code or their ASCII schematic was just screwed up (the project has been dead a while). I *think* I checked the buttons with a port monitor or something outside of WinAMP too.If anybody thinks they might know the shift reg./button system for COM ports, or better yet, has any experience with that software, I'd greatly appreciate it. The doc. was here: http://www.markuszehnder.ch/projects/lcdplugin/hd44780_howto.txtI also was disappointed to see that the data exchange didn't include ID3/track names while in "stop" mode or anything. You had to start playing a song before it would show up on the screen, which was pretty pointless. I think he (they?) did leave the C source laying around, so someone else could probably fix that, but not me.I'll probably look for another player anyway, since I don't want the Windows overhead, but this remote was pretty easy and I bought a few of the chips, so I'll probably do another for Windows MP3 control somewhere. If anyone knows of a good small one right off, for DOS (or even Linux), which would scroll through song names on a button-equipped LCD like that, that would help too.Sorry for the minor change of subject, but I'm stumped. ???George Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
moebius Posted February 7, 2006 Report Share Posted February 7, 2006 Man, thanks! I've been a 98lite head for years, but hadn't heard of those last ones. Think I'll be going fishing in a minute. :DMy pleasure - Hmm.. It's -06 and I'm finally getting grips on this system to customize it for optimum feature/performance ratio.I had always assumed that was needed for some audio apps or decent screen draws under Windows, but I usually go with 8.1 or even the bundled 6.x(?) of 98. If I built a portable recorder rig with an actual screen and a Windows install, I'd be afraid not to put it on there (for performance). I'd probably have some video codecs too. Is it really safe to go without it?Well. I did try this with a box with Cubase 3.7 and Wavelab. You'll need DXMedia/ActiveShow audio streaming components for DirectX fx plugins, but nothing more. Desktop/apps runs fine and fast with no DirectX installed. Video playing is no no without DirectDraw.This "performance" thing is really subjective. I think my computer shows better performance without DX stuff. I think that's directly related to the registry size. As long as you don't delete files (grr.. I do that too, bye bye ie.exe, jscript.exe, vbscript.exe.. ;) you can play with the registry nearly as much as you like. Just run scanregw before doing massive, brutal (I just LOVE that word in the registry editing context) edits and backup your registry. In the worst situation You'll need to boot to dos and extract stuff from the latest working registry backup cab.It might not sound like fun - but it's worth it, I think! With some tinkering you might shrink registry size to half and enjoy the benefits and the speed up and not even make anything broken in the process :DMoebius Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikeb Posted February 8, 2006 Author Report Share Posted February 8, 2006 Attila, the pc is Duron 750mhz, 364 ram, 30gb hd, cd-rom and cd-rw, i forget what the video card is, I believe 64mb something or other. I thought about building a Myth TV system. However, what I've read suggests that the processor may be a little weak if I want to pause live. I do really like the idea of the MP3 jukebox, and the softsynth with the 98lite...I had never considered that! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MMorph Posted February 8, 2006 Report Share Posted February 8, 2006 Anyone else harnessing the massive power of a doorstop in an odd way? For heating, eh? After moving up to my current location I stuffed up all the comps (including couple old 19" servers) into one single room. Soon I found out that I don't need to keep the heating on at all in that room. Actually the room temperature was higher on that room than in any other in the house. So to cut down the less or more massive housekeeping costs I got rid of most computer hardware..Considering all the spam and DDOS attacks on me lately I'm considering loading two network cards in one to bring it up as a linux firewall........but can't live without this! Things like OpenWrt and some cheap wireless router does the dirty job fine enough in home use and allows plenty of flexibility. Actually having a "better" firewall hardware was no good anyways if you got flooded with a pipe large enought to fill up yours... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jidis Posted February 9, 2006 Report Share Posted February 9, 2006 FWIW-I had my second Linksys router get zapped by something a couple years back and wasn't into getting another one, so I looked into some of that Linux firewall/router software. I ended up getting IPCop or something to run on some old piece of crap Pentium 90 which didn't pull much current or make much noise. With 2 cheap NIC's in it, it did just fine issuing addresses to other machines with DHCP and TCP/IP running, and I know very little about networking and much much less about Linux. It also did a pretty nice auto-start and would recover and re-launch smoothly in the event of power loss, so you could probably run it on a raw box with no outside periph's. The interface and config was also easily accessible from your other machines. I don't do any wireless anywhere, but there may have been a way to do that as well.Could make for another good additional use for a shoebox computer with no input or screen, if you already had it serving duty as a jukebox or something. Then it would also be easier to dump your tracks to it from the "real" computers. If it had a decent sized drive in it, it might also be able to serve as an external safety backup for Ghosting the other machines over the network, in case anything ever died. (plus the images wouldn't be hogging up your main rig)@Moebius,Thanks again for the tips! I usually check my 98's reg.'s periodically with regclean, but I guess I've always underestimated the affect on the performance, and didn't realize the connection between the reg. "size" and that. I'll start trying to trim back to see what happens. I really wish I knew more about all that ridiculous s*** they've got us running in XP (or even 2K). I'm stuck in those most of the time now, due to the current Nuendo's, and Universal Audio has even dumped 98 for the Powered Plugin cards on the last version upgrade. I looked through that "services.msc" chaos, as well as some of the sites, like Black Viper's, but there's way too much unknown stuff with poor descriptions, and things that you know none of your applications really need, but they were compiled to expect them or something. I do my personal 98Lite machines with IE removed like yours and I hit that same bump a lot. Totally "non-internet related" apps will want IE or some "html help" component for some help file or "read me" crap that the developer probably just happened to use. Wish I had the x86 assembler knowhow to jump over that crap and keep going.I hear you on the fascination with 98 tweaks. I'd be running it in the year 2016 if the machines and developers would let me. Lots of audio people will kill you for saying stuff like that. I guess 98 just liked us. On any "newer" machines I could get it to run on, like AthlonXP's and 1GHz P3's, there's no way to describe the feel of it. My 98Lite installs were usually in the 150Meg range, even after all my apps and utilities went on, and the corresponding Ghost images were around 70Megs. *That's* a friggin' audio computer. They never crashed either and I never had any noticeable problems with audio throughput or MIDI timing. Come to think of it, everything was fine until the software people started to pull the rug out from under me a piece at a time.BTW- I recently dumped a giant thread in the UnicorNation forum about some of this same stuff. I was wishing in there that one of the DAW biggies would someday do a DAW software package with it's own core OS, so it would just take you straight into the app with no overhead, even if it meant a limited amount of supported hardware, or some driver mods and collaboration with some of the third parties. Also wished that MS would actually put out a version of their current OS which deserved the name "professional". They seem to have it backwards. The higher up the XP ladder you go, the more bloat crap they lock to your ankle. The real XPPro should have looked like DOS, and would load your necessary hardware drivers, take you directly into a single, important app and then get out of your way for the remainder of the trip. There are likely businesses and professionals who would pay lots to have them cut that system down for them, but it looks like it's headed the opposite way. Shane Brooks has probably done a lot with XPLite, and may have done the best he could, but to really make it work, I suspect MS would need to have a big part in it. Thinking about some of the recent briefcase and portable DAW discussions today, I was also wishing someone would do recording software exclusively for linear tracking and playback, with the understanding that we would all later import the stuff into our usual plug-in filled apps with the fancy GUI's for the mixing part. If your machine runs slow or crashes on that part, who cares? Even with mixing here, there are times when I wished I had a GUI which was just a monochrome "Tic-Tac-Toe" looking grid of labeled parameter boxes with text entry, that you could tab or arrow around on. A recording package like that, with no virtual pots or faders, numeric readings for levels, some basic transport buttons or track arm boxes, and maybe simple meters or just clip lights, seems like it would at least go over with live people or maybe even home recordists who didn't want to learn a sequencer. If it really did run in that type of environment, imagine how fast and solid it would be. If someone who had already written lots of audio engine and i/o code did it, any bugs that it initially managed to have, probably wouldn't even make it through the first beta build or two. Better yet, have an ASIO compatible DAW package with not only a minimal GUI, but with the option of NO GUI. No screen, no nothing. Just the CPU/board of your choice, PS, soundcard and removable drives, with adequate support for all the current control surface personalities. Maybe even a COM port LCD interface for computer or app status, like with Thorsten's stuff, or an included COM or USB remote keypad with a small screen. Could cover anything from people doing live two track recording of band practice on a retired computer, to someone doing high-res 48 track work with no margin for error.Take CareGeorge Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DrBunsen Posted February 22, 2006 Report Share Posted February 22, 2006 There's a VST thing that will allow you to use another PC as a remote host for VSTs and VSTi's over 100MB Ethernet. Cubase and Nuendo will also let you do it over Firewire. The remote PC runs headless, you call up your VSTs from your main workstation, and the audio signal is piped to and from the remote box.Viola, extra DSP power!Okay so all this is off the top of my head, so I can't remember the actual name of the thingy, and I might have a detail or two wrong, but that's how I remember it. I always thought it would be fun thing to do with a few Mini ITX boards Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jidis Posted February 22, 2006 Report Share Posted February 22, 2006 There's a VST thing that will allow you to use another PC as a remote host for VSTs and VSTi's over 100MB EthernetYeah, I've been fascinated by that lately, but don't really have much need for it here right now. The two big ones seem to be Wormhole and FXTeleport. They've gotten sort of ridiculous lately, and have moved way beyond a VST System Link or Remote Desktop type thing. Someone on a beta list I'm on, networks with producers and people from the sessions he works in, and they all listen to, and work in a wireless, remotely synchronized Nuendo session on a main machine at a large studio, from multiple locations, while discussing the changes. He said he'll go out on his balcony at home and work on edits on the main session at the studio, from a laptop. I'm guessing it may even be gigabit ethernet or something.Weird stuff. :oOne of my short term goals is just to get remote (wired) MIDI control of a couple mastering and EQ plugs from the tracking room here. That room has a fairly nice consumer stereo system in it with big speakers, which stays on a mirrored optical out from my control room mix bus. I usually go in there to double check things on a wider spread, with some better low end capability, after I've gotten a suitable mix in the smaller control room. It almost always ends up leading me to some tweaks, so I have to literally run back and forth making minor "trial and error" changes. >:(Take care,George Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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