I wonder if there were "audio quality" issues when those chips have to share circuitry with the remaining board. That may have been the reason Creative wanted to make dedicated cards to have more control over the delivered audio quality. Otherwise, I agree, Creative could have become the monopolist for onboard sound solutions.
@@bitsundbolts Not an expert myself but I'm designing a USB headphone DAC and have been reading up -- there's definitely something to this. Audio signals degrade pretty easily, so unless they could put all the audio components right by the outputs, you're going to struggle with quality and that area is crowded enough as it is.
they had really bad quality for their price and the sound was not as great as the popularity. Plus, all the work was done by E-mu, which creative bought out...
@@jdbertel33 One board I have which boasted high quality audio, actually has several slots removed and the audio circuitry seems a lot more isolated on the board with lots of space around it. And it used a riser with some filtering on it, rather than the ATX panel. It really is a great sounding board, using burrbrown (!) opamps and AD1 dac's. Too bad its socket 478 with a 400mhz bus speed limit.
The newer chipsets started having AC97 support and then motherboard makers simply needed to add a simple DAC chip (codec). Considering most of Creative's chip offerings also needed a separate codec why would any motherboard makers bother with them?
That's a really unique board, and your trace repair work looks excellent. I guess I'd be curious if this is exactly the same as an original Live! with SB16 emulation and such.
I have a few of them (2-3), I need to revive the machine, which was the Blaster PC back around 2001 my family bought 3 of them from Tiger Direct, we had Pentium 3 800Mhz chips in them, I still have at least one of the cases, it had a breakout on the front for Midi, Coax / optical audio, gameport, and more. It also had a remote and an FM tuner ( which I never exactly got to work )
I want to post something about it eventually, but I might have an extra board once I find and test them all again, might be a good project for this winter@@bitsundbolts
I actually have the M004, well according to the RetroWeb my Shuttle HOT-661 was also sold as Creative Blaster PC M004 it is funny how that is also a 440BX chipset board with 4 DIMMs and quite narrow.
@@bitsundbolts yeah my Shuttle doesn't have onboard audio. And the M004 doesn't either as far as the manual goes. But other than that it looks like the M003 was the same board just with a Live! chip and one less ISA thus all PCI was moved down one slot. Even the caps around the RAM look more similar between M003 and 661V3 than between 661V1 and 661V3.
10:00 what is even sadder, the owner is putting the board back to the scrap yard😂 Just kidding, but couldn't stop thinking how many retro collectibles are being churned thru scrappers everyday.
Curious to see what BIOS options are there, and how sound quality compares to a dedicated one. I remember especially earlier onboard sound-cards being noisy as hell.
The BIOS is seems is quite standard. There is an option to enable the "Onboard Sound Chip" (9:46) and it looks like the SoundBlaster Live! appears in the System Summary Screen (9:39).
I agree. I see so much unique editing/attention to detail in these videos that I don't see done elsewhere, not to mention the excellent content in each. I expect to see viewership skyrocket for this channel in the future - excellent quality all around!
First, you need to make a full video about "Mountain Motherboard", that geeky heaven must be shared with the world! Second, great job! So nice to see the board coming back to life!
I never knew this existed. I mean at the time I had a k6-2 for awhile and sort of missed the slot 1/A era before I upgraded. Kind of fascinated creative made this motherboard. I would love to see it. I had a creative live card at the time. I had used sound blaster a lot growing up. Honestly when I got my current system. I remember seeing gigabyte had an x370 motherboard with creative x-fi mb5. I thought if I find a motherboard with that built in, that is the motherboard I am going to get, and i'm going to eliminate my sound blaster . Well, I couldn't find an x570 that fit that, so I got an asus motherboard. Which does have very comparable features to sound blaster. I ended up getting another sound blaster card for the features and headphone amp.
I'd try the fastest parts you can put on there & give a game or two with eax support a try. Like the retail version of half-life or the expansion opposing force. For os i'd try either windows 2000 or xp. Think a slocket adapter & a coppermine should do ok on this motherboard as long as jumpers are set properly, though depends on what the chipset supports & maybe the date code of the bios if its listing that. As for old hardware, i don't have much around myself (Late 1997 system with a cpu upgrade atm too a k6-2+ at 400 mhz, voodoo 1 4 mb, matrox mystique 4 mb & soundblaster 32 pnp i think it was.) But i did spot a pair of slot 1 or it was a slot 1 & a slot a motherboard in the junkyard. Couldn't take a closer look at them though as there were too many folks around to grab stuff unfortunately so they might take some damage as things gets tossed down there.
Neat looking board and obviously very rare, didn't see many black PCB's back then and I remember the high end Soundblasters with their black boards looking so cool. I too do not remember this at all, I watched someone else discussing the 'downfall' of Creative as a brand in the late 90s and it does strike me as true that for being such a huge name in sound cards they pretty much seemed to avoid competing in alternative markets, video cards were an exception of course but on-board sound chips from Crystal, Realtek etc at this time really began to take over.
Still a proud Creative user, rocking the Sound Blaster ZXR from 2012. Onboard audio is still terrible in 2023, especially when you use high-end headphones that need proper power.
Son zamanlarda deli gibi bu tarz eski sistemleri, anakartları ve işlemcileri izliyorum. Çok iyi bir iş çıkartmışsınız. Tebrik ederim. Umarım ben de sağlam bir P2-300 256mb ram ve windows98 se içeren bir sistem kurabilirim.
Yes, that is about right (including shipping). I'm also not yet familiar with 3D printing, due to available time. Those trays are a bit bigger than an Ender 3 S1 Pro can print (this is one of my possible printers I would consider for myself to learn)
Phil, this tray size will be something like 150g of filament, and just some machine time. I have a bunch of my own design for my CPUs, and have printed about 40, but I also spray them with some Licron Crystal to add some dissipative (anti-static) properties. My pins also don't touch any plastic - I have air gaps around the pins. The print quality displayed the video seemed mediocre, but you don't need these things to be pretty. $25 seems decent, although you may find people locally that would do these in bulk in similar finish quality for $15 USD each. $3 in filament, 3kWh in electricity, and their overhead/profit.
Awesome! I have a Slot on mobo and a Slot A motherboard. I actually don't care for them because they are so chunky putting a CPU on what looks like a game cartridge.
Does the Soundblaster use the PCI bus ?... Does it connect through the Southbridge or the Northbridge ? Do those ISA slots get a -5v rail when a vintage PSU is connected ? Is that a Soundblaster version with good DOS support ? This looks like a fabulous Win98 mobo, but less so for DOS. I have one of the rare IBM ThinkPads with an onboard SoundBlaster chip... It's amazing, except for the dang Passive Matrix screen.
I think Windows 98 will be a good match. I have no answers to your other questions yet, but I believe that the Live! chip is integrated in a similar way as a dedicated PCI board would be.
You can't go wrong with Windows 98SE on a system like that. Creative did release Sound Blaster Live! drivers for that particular OS. The only thing is that the game port seems to have broken off...
If you can somehow get a Pentium 3 in here and a decent gpu in the AGP slot, lots of fun to be had with windows 98 I guess, with the AGP slot you can run some of the better stuff. Whenever I play with older Windows I never really have any fun when I'm done, either it being a physical, virtual, or emulated machine, but I enjoy the process it brings me back to decades past.
that would be cool to have honestly i would rip out a motherboard from a perfectly working gateway or maybe use the slightly damaged case i have in my garage for a board liek that
Thanks for posting this - I recently got mine out of storage and amazed it still works ! I was searching for info and as you mentioned in your video, there is not much out there. Mine is set up with a P-III and Windows Me - so probably hadn't touched it in 20 years =)
Oh wow! Nice! The owner told me that he had to replace some audio capacitors because one channel was quieter than the other one. He fixed it by replacing the small capacitors in the audio section. It's a very nice board! Congratulations that you've kept it for such a long time!
Did I know? I still have mine. In the original case! I rigged up a switch to power on different hard drives. One for Windows 98se and one for XP. The catch is never flipping it hot! NEVER!
No specific brand - only of my random purchases I don't remember from where (AliExpress or Amazon). I used 0.1mm (which I believe is enameled) wire. The coating makes it a bit harder to solder, but it goes away quickly.
Was USB in the BIOS settings? I would probably not mess with it. PCI USB cards are so common and cheap. I bet it is not really more expensive. But finding an ATX I/O shield without the USB already removed will be a challenge.@@bitsundbolts
Rare, unique board, I didn't even know it exists. Pcb color of the board remind me of asus first special motherboard which is cusl2-c black pearl which I have in my collection 😀
This is cool though. I didn't know they made a motherboard. Kind of reminds me of the nforce boards. I do have one of those. It's a shame intel killed them.
It is like looking into an alternate pre-integrated sound chip future. I really did like the slot CPU design from a "easy upgrade for the end users" standpoint. I also get that it is not good for high-speed bus activity. And having the cache on the die is way better than off.
@@Ambiphonic That doesn't seem right. Because the P4 was released in 2001. That I know because it was at the same time as star trek enterprise and they were hot (literally hot) garbage cpus. It was so bad that the P3 800 was better than the best P4 which was a 1.8 I believe.
@@awilliams1701 Well, it is. February 28 1999 is date of launch of P3. And if you think about it, not that many ppl probably had a P2 (so we kinda can't name this as an era of P2 even), because it was last gen cpu and wasn't cheap
Oddly, Creative missed the opportunity to become a monopolist in the supply of sound chips for motherboards, with Realtek taking its place for years.
I wonder if there were "audio quality" issues when those chips have to share circuitry with the remaining board. That may have been the reason Creative wanted to make dedicated cards to have more control over the delivered audio quality. Otherwise, I agree, Creative could have become the monopolist for onboard sound solutions.
@@bitsundbolts Not an expert myself but I'm designing a USB headphone DAC and have been reading up -- there's definitely something to this. Audio signals degrade pretty easily, so unless they could put all the audio components right by the outputs, you're going to struggle with quality and that area is crowded enough as it is.
they had really bad quality for their price and the sound was not as great as the popularity. Plus, all the work was done by E-mu, which creative bought out...
@@jdbertel33 One board I have which boasted high quality audio, actually has several slots removed and the audio circuitry seems a lot more isolated on the board with lots of space around it. And it used a riser with some filtering on it, rather than the ATX panel. It really is a great sounding board, using burrbrown (!) opamps and AD1 dac's. Too bad its socket 478 with a 400mhz bus speed limit.
The newer chipsets started having AC97 support and then motherboard makers simply needed to add a simple DAC chip (codec). Considering most of Creative's chip offerings also needed a separate codec why would any motherboard makers bother with them?
Great that it dit got saved
Sound Blaster 16XV to SB Live!. Slot 1 really did get a wide range of Creative's chips.
Perhaps some sound quality tests between the onboard and an addon live? perhaps using something like RightMark or whatever works.
This is probably an OEM version of a well known board. We should discover which one.
Top quality soldering and eciting skills there.
Thank you!
That's a really unique board, and your trace repair work looks excellent. I guess I'd be curious if this is exactly the same as an original Live! with SB16 emulation and such.
I'll see what I can figure out while the board is still with me. Thanks for watching!
Waiting for new videos 😉
I have one that was left behind in a house on a property we acquired. I think Fry's might have sold them back in 2001.
You're very lucky!
It's so cool to see someone like you grow! Awesome content, keep it up!!
Thank you!
I have a few of them (2-3), I need to revive the machine, which was the Blaster PC back around 2001 my family bought 3 of them from Tiger Direct, we had Pentium 3 800Mhz chips in them, I still have at least one of the cases, it had a breakout on the front for Midi, Coax / optical audio, gameport, and more. It also had a remote and an FM tuner ( which I never exactly got to work )
That's really cool! Having a full Blaster PC with a case, remote, and obviously this board is really special!
I want to post something about it eventually, but I might have an extra board once I find and test them all again, might be a good project for this winter@@bitsundbolts
You know how to contact me :) I'd love to do more with this type of hardware!
Great work, thank you for restoring it to glory.
Nice rework!
Thank you!
I actually have the M004, well according to the RetroWeb my Shuttle HOT-661 was also sold as Creative Blaster PC M004 it is funny how that is also a 440BX chipset board with 4 DIMMs and quite narrow.
Huh? M004? I did find the HOT-661 on The Retro Web, but it doesn't seem to have onboard audio from the pictures.
@@bitsundbolts yeah my Shuttle doesn't have onboard audio. And the M004 doesn't either as far as the manual goes. But other than that it looks like the M003 was the same board just with a Live! chip and one less ISA thus all PCI was moved down one slot. Even the caps around the RAM look more similar between M003 and 661V3 than between 661V1 and 661V3.
I have PGA370 AT motherboard with built in ISA Vibra16
10:00 what is even sadder, the owner is putting the board back to the scrap yard😂
Just kidding, but couldn't stop thinking how many retro collectibles are being churned thru scrappers everyday.
I hope to find and save some of them!
Ha hallo
Hallo!
Oh, nice! I've read about this board but don't think I've seen it in a video yet...
Curious to see what BIOS options are there, and how sound quality compares to a dedicated one. I remember especially earlier onboard sound-cards being noisy as hell.
The BIOS is seems is quite standard. There is an option to enable the "Onboard Sound Chip" (9:46) and it looks like the SoundBlaster Live! appears in the System Summary Screen (9:39).
I'd like to call attention to that transition from recording the screen to direct captured footage, that was smooth as butter holy moly.
Thank you! And here is the shortcut: 9:22
I agree. I see so much unique editing/attention to detail in these videos that I don't see done elsewhere, not to mention the excellent content in each. I expect to see viewership skyrocket for this channel in the future - excellent quality all around!
Thank you for your kind words!
Never even had an idea about such a Creative board. Looks cool for a Slot 1 board and great that you managed to bring it back to life :)
Good that there were only a few traces that needed to be reconnected! I have also never heard about such a board before.
First, you need to make a full video about "Mountain Motherboard", that geeky heaven must be shared with the world! Second, great job! So nice to see the board coming back to life!
Thank you! I will try to get some footage of this magical place 😉
I had that Blaster PC, One of my favorite PC Cases of all time!
I never knew this existed. I mean at the time I had a k6-2 for awhile and sort of missed the slot 1/A era before I upgraded. Kind of fascinated creative made this motherboard. I would love to see it. I had a creative live card at the time. I had used sound blaster a lot growing up. Honestly when I got my current system. I remember seeing gigabyte had an x370 motherboard with creative x-fi mb5. I thought if I find a motherboard with that built in, that is the motherboard I am going to get, and i'm going to eliminate my sound blaster . Well, I couldn't find an x570 that fit that, so I got an asus motherboard. Which does have very comparable features to sound blaster. I ended up getting another sound blaster card for the features and headphone amp.
What an interesting board, glad you could save it. Great repair job!
Thank you!
I'd try the fastest parts you can put on there & give a game or two with eax support a try.
Like the retail version of half-life or the expansion opposing force.
For os i'd try either windows 2000 or xp.
Think a slocket adapter & a coppermine should do ok on this motherboard as long as jumpers are set properly, though depends on what the chipset supports & maybe the date code of the bios if its listing that.
As for old hardware, i don't have much around myself (Late 1997 system with a cpu upgrade atm too a k6-2+ at 400 mhz, voodoo 1 4 mb, matrox mystique 4 mb & soundblaster 32 pnp i think it was.)
But i did spot a pair of slot 1 or it was a slot 1 & a slot a motherboard in the junkyard.
Couldn't take a closer look at them though as there were too many folks around to grab stuff unfortunately so they might take some damage as things gets tossed down there.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Из ретрогруппы с приветом!
Neat looking board and obviously very rare, didn't see many black PCB's back then and I remember the high end Soundblasters with their black boards looking so cool. I too do not remember this at all, I watched someone else discussing the 'downfall' of Creative as a brand in the late 90s and it does strike me as true that for being such a huge name in sound cards they pretty much seemed to avoid competing in alternative markets, video cards were an exception of course but on-board sound chips from Crystal, Realtek etc at this time really began to take over.
Excellent work, it is awesome to bring back a unique retro piece like that one.
The owner could do a video of it working at its full potential.
Still a proud Creative user, rocking the Sound Blaster ZXR from 2012. Onboard audio is still terrible in 2023, especially when you use high-end headphones that need proper power.
@Disposed-ej3ow Got that ZXR for only €140 while it retailed for €250, so it was quite a steal. Headphones arn't super high-end, just the AKG K601.
Son zamanlarda deli gibi bu tarz eski sistemleri, anakartları ve işlemcileri izliyorum. Çok iyi bir iş çıkartmışsınız. Tebrik ederim. Umarım ben de sağlam bir P2-300 256mb ram ve windows98 se içeren bir sistem kurabilirim.
I had a look at 3D printing this CPU tray, it comes to $25 for one, is that right? I'm not familiar with 3D printing and maker prices 🙂
Yes, that is about right (including shipping). I'm also not yet familiar with 3D printing, due to available time. Those trays are a bit bigger than an Ender 3 S1 Pro can print (this is one of my possible printers I would consider for myself to learn)
Thanks!@@bitsundbolts
Phil, this tray size will be something like 150g of filament, and just some machine time. I have a bunch of my own design for my CPUs, and have printed about 40, but I also spray them with some Licron Crystal to add some dissipative (anti-static) properties. My pins also don't touch any plastic - I have air gaps around the pins. The print quality displayed the video seemed mediocre, but you don't need these things to be pretty.
$25 seems decent, although you may find people locally that would do these in bulk in similar finish quality for $15 USD each. $3 in filament, 3kWh in electricity, and their overhead/profit.
@@masejoer Thanks for the pointers.
Awesome! I have a Slot on mobo and a Slot A motherboard. I actually don't care for them because they are so chunky putting a CPU on what looks like a game cartridge.
Does the Soundblaster use the PCI bus ?... Does it connect through the Southbridge or the Northbridge ?
Do those ISA slots get a -5v rail when a vintage PSU is connected ?
Is that a Soundblaster version with good DOS support ?
This looks like a fabulous Win98 mobo, but less so for DOS.
I have one of the rare IBM ThinkPads with an onboard SoundBlaster chip... It's amazing, except for the dang Passive Matrix screen.
I think Windows 98 will be a good match. I have no answers to your other questions yet, but I believe that the Live! chip is integrated in a similar way as a dedicated PCI board would be.
SB Live is PCI and does not have native Dos support. Driver based Emulation is ok and is better than many sound chips, which isn't saying much.
You can't go wrong with Windows 98SE on a system like that. Creative did release Sound Blaster Live! drivers for that particular OS.
The only thing is that the game port seems to have broken off...
Шардже "specialists" broken this board. need to test this board on sound quality.
If you can somehow get a Pentium 3 in here and a decent gpu in the AGP slot, lots of fun to be had with windows 98 I guess, with the AGP slot you can run some of the better stuff. Whenever I play with older Windows I never really have any fun when I'm done, either it being a physical, virtual, or emulated machine, but I enjoy the process it brings me back to decades past.
I remember my first GeForce v/c had a cute short name "Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro"
that would be cool to have honestly i would rip out a motherboard from a perfectly working gateway or maybe use the slightly damaged case i have in my garage for a board liek that
Need to patch or modify the bios for full support of the P!!! Range of processors
not that rare... There where also boards with a build in Voodoo2 chipset.
Thanks for posting this - I recently got mine out of storage and amazed it still works ! I was searching for info and as you mentioned in your video, there is not much out there. Mine is set up with a P-III and Windows Me - so probably hadn't touched it in 20 years =)
Oh wow! Nice! The owner told me that he had to replace some audio capacitors because one channel was quieter than the other one. He fixed it by replacing the small capacitors in the audio section. It's a very nice board! Congratulations that you've kept it for such a long time!
my ford lian board i have is near impossible to get info about
That fix you made looks perfect
I've never seen such a board....I had all the weirdest boards for Socket 7.....but never one of the weird Slot 1 boards
1:05 to be fair, many boards on the retro web have that page empty.
Did I know? I still have mine. In the original case! I rigged up a switch to power on different hard drives. One for Windows 98se and one for XP. The catch is never flipping it hot! NEVER!
It was sold by TigerDirect exclusively (if I remember right). Max RAM is 1GB.
Do you know if the person you fixed this for has the driver CD for the machine ?
I don't think he has the CD. He found that board at a scrapyard.
Underrated content, keep doing good videos. Im sure you will have better views and subs soon :)
Hope so! Thanks!
Uhm, is that plastic used for your printed CPU tray ESD safe?
No, but nothing that some Licron Crystal spray, or anti-static foam can't solve. Cheaper than buying dissipative or conductive filament.
Thanks for saving this board.
if you find a creative labs banshee its a programable 3d card. and the last multicore made.
audigy 2 gold may still be the highest quality rendering besides turtle beach. 24-bit sound processing seems to be where we left off...
yo BuB ! what is the wire you use to patch up the traces? any specific brand or style? thanks!!
No specific brand - only of my random purchases I don't remember from where (AliExpress or Amazon). I used 0.1mm (which I believe is enameled) wire. The coating makes it a bit harder to solder, but it goes away quickly.
he should have given it to you because of all the work you've done to the board..
It's ok - I have a feeling that this won't be the only rarity I will get from him to show on my this channel 😉
Windows 10 for the os lol
amazing work! Great to see you got it back to live 😊
Thank you. Follow-up video is coming tomorrow
what a gem
Good job man.. good job.
Great repair
Thank you!
Great work!
Nice work.
My nerdy nostalgia is happy :)))
Glad to hear that!
Antix Linux?
Strange that a BX ATX board was shipped without the USB Ports populated. Still looks nice. Kudos for the Rep
Yes, this seemed odd to me as well. It would probably work if one would just solder the ports there.
Was USB in the BIOS settings? I would probably not mess with it. PCI USB cards are so common and cheap. I bet it is not really more expensive. But finding an ATX I/O shield without the USB already removed will be a challenge.@@bitsundbolts
Yeah, I totally agree. I will not modify the board at all - I won't even update the BIOS to a later version.
Outstanding soldering!
Thanks!
Rare, unique board, I didn't even know it exists. Pcb color of the board remind me of asus first special motherboard which is cusl2-c black pearl which I have in my collection 😀
This is cool though. I didn't know they made a motherboard. Kind of reminds me of the nforce boards. I do have one of those. It's a shame intel killed them.
That board is so beautiful, glad you were able to breathe life back into it. :)
That is a cool board. I used to play with all kinds of slot 1 machines, never seen one of these.
It is like looking into an alternate pre-integrated sound chip future. I really did like the slot CPU design from a "easy upgrade for the end users" standpoint. I also get that it is not good for high-speed bus activity. And having the cache on the die is way better than off.
Great video! Would love a follow up video testing the dos audio capabilities of this board
awesome! 👍
Thank you!
awesome stuff! glad you were able to save that motherboard
I didn't know that existed! I've been using Creative products in 90s and early 2000s and never heard of that.
Glad you are aware of the Blaster Board now!
What a weird board, never saw or even heard of one in my time. I can't believe you got it to POST!
I can't believe it either! That splash screen with "Blaster PC" gave me goosebumps when it showed up the first time!
awsome repair! if you would've streamed it, i for sure would've be there and watch the repair live :)
Some day I hope to make live streams!
Hi. Do you try to patch bios for P3 CuMine support?
I'll probably not do any BIOS flashing on it. I'll keep the BIOS as is for the owner to decide what to do with it.
Well done repair job!
Thank you!
This would be older than 25 years actually. 25 years ago was the P3 era.
In 1998 the P3 is not yet launched
@@Ambiphonic That doesn't seem right. Because the P4 was released in 2001. That I know because it was at the same time as star trek enterprise and they were hot (literally hot) garbage cpus. It was so bad that the P3 800 was better than the best P4 which was a 1.8 I believe.
@@awilliams1701 Well, it is. February 28 1999 is date of launch of P3. And if you think about it, not that many ppl probably had a P2 (so we kinda can't name this as an era of P2 even), because it was last gen cpu and wasn't cheap
Wow this Is a nugget