Thought you guys might get a laugh out of this. Two days before I'm to leave on a work trip, my latest Trademe find shows up at my office. Don't have my still-badly-needed AWE32/64/EMU8000 card but there's some neat hardware in here that will be fun to play with while I wait...
^^ If the whole pic isn't displaying, right click & open it separately! There are seven(!) cards there.
So here's the haul from left to right. Three generic (bargain bin) mid '90s cards. Some Aztech thing, one based on an Analog Devices Soundport chip, and another unbranded one with a real OPL3 and a "3D sound on/off" switch on the front. These pretty grubby & tough looking, and honestly, I don't really care if they don't work.
Two ESS Audiodrives of different revisions. They look to be in reasonable shape. These could be pretty useful, they were known for their hassle-free compatibility back in the day & some of them had significantly better DACs than the contemporary Creative cards.
And here we have the real diamonds in the rough, either of these alone are worth more (*to me ) than I paid for the whole lot:
Holy crap! A real Soundblaster 2.0 (CT1350B.) I can't remember the last time I saw one of these! Looks pretty clean for its age too, all the caps seem to be OK and I don't see anything alarming or ugly at a glance.
I don't really know what to do with this but it's still cool. Well, I can run Trixter's 8088 Corruption if I ever feel the need to venture into the world of 8-bit PCs, but that's the only thing I can think of that requires the SB2.0 specifically. I love all the analog components on this thing rather than it being just a board full of ICs. Look at that ladder filter!
And finally a Soundblaster 16 (CT2830.) This one just might be old enough to avoid the infamous hanging MIDI note bug, no real way to tell until I plug it in. It's a bit grungy compared to the SB2.0 but I don't see anything that looks catastrophically wrong with it.
Anyway that's my excitement for the day. Managed to beat out no less than Mr. Berendsen for these even. Unfortunately I won't have time to try them out until after I get back, but even if none of them end up functional I'm only out the cost of a takeaway. I have high hopes though.