Pionex PC Audio Driver Mystery

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Ethanator611
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon May 01, 2023 11:25 pm

Pionex PC Audio Driver Mystery

Post by Ethanator611 »

I'm gonna tell this like an ongoing story so bear with me for a moment.

I live in a very rural area so I have to drive the trash to the dump myself rather than there being any sort of collection service and in the corner is a dedicated area for whole electronics, It's mostly filled with air conditioners but every now and again has some PCs thrown out by companies and regular people alike in wildly varying conditions like a house fire "survivor". So I decided to start grabbing them to bring them home, harvest the parts, and take back anything I can't use to repair other machines. nobody's stopped me so far. two weeks ago I came home with a large variety including a Windows Vista era Machine that I'll play with at a later date and the subject of today this Windows 98/NT labeled machine
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I'm big into hardware and love having some older ones around just to have compatibility options and just have the experience of the machine as a whole, so after looking this machine over a bit I thought: Why don't I make this a dedicated win9x machine? After all, I have some games that even XP doesn't play super nice with. I got two 9x machines out of this but the other one is missing any graphics processing and needs a new case even if I really like this front panel design so it will have to wait until a later date.
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With a Pentium 3 inside, Integrated Audio, and integrated graphics (Yes I'm well aware of the underwhelmingness of that but I just need something that boots for now) this seems like it should be a piece of cake to get going I plug everything up. It's running Windows XP sadly not the OS I had in mind so I guess we'll have to install 98SE by CD, good thing burning CDs isn't at all difficult though I accidentally burnt a retail iso instead of an OEM bootable one so there goes one of my CD-Rs in the bin.
This PC feels like it took days to boot, it took so long I nearly thought it wouldn't. What a horribly slow install!
Seems this PC originally had its work in faith, 40GB HDD absolutely loaded with religious imagery, power points, and music, which lets me test the sound at least which is outputting just fine.
Strange it seems to think there's a Celeron in this, not a problem really but I thought it had a Pentium 3, Is this an old hardware thing or have I been tricked?
I've had my fill here, It's time to scrap everything and start new with win98SE. install goes off without a hitch and I'm running in less than half an hour! Sure wish Windows XP installed that fast... or any modern Windows for that matter. Only 3 devices with missing drivers, this shouldn't be tough at all. we can bring that number down to two by removing this network card, I won't be connecting this to the internet, and if I do it certainly won't be through a landline. well without any sort of CD for the original tower I've gotta scour the internet for the missing drivers couldn't be that hard.. right? Well first we start by googling the tower, that's gotten me places before. It's a Pionex... there are a lot of numbers back here, guess I have to google them all.
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nope. nope.. nope... Not one of these comes up with a result even somewhat relevant. "Pionex office PC" comes with a few pictures of two delisted store pages and an eBay listing for the monitor which just happens to be hanging out next to it. all info on this PC is as good as wiped off the face of the earth. Not a great position to be in as a dumpster PC but fine I'll just have to look deeper!
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Taking it apart we see the insides, looking through the wires takes a little effort but there it is "M6TWG revision 1.2" googling that gets me somewhere not many results but a couple of sites with manuals and this website holds drivers! That chipset driver looks a little.. recent to be for this board though right??

There are two audio drivers I guess this board shipped with two possible audio chips. Indeed It's between an Analog SoundMAX AD1881 or an Aureal AU8810. I burn them all to a CD and move them over to install and just like that no problem with the display finally high-res, high-color, 3D acceleration even!? Maybe I just have low expectations because of my unfamiliarity with hardware of this age but I'm quite impressed maybe this thing could play a few games after all.
Moving on to the others the chipset driver... isn't compatible? well makes sense, I knew that date was suspicious. for now, I'll move on to audio and- that failed too. Not incompatibility but just a file move error. This does not bode well at all for me. Maybe I have the other audio chip. This setup... doesn't start at all... I'm starting to get very worried. I don't even have an idea why it just doesn't start.

back to googling... soon enough I come upon this old forum site talking about the board it links to the manufacturer's website. Now that's what I'm talking about! Just hit that download button and- weirdChamp
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The website might still be hanging on but the FTP server they hosted these files on is long gone meaning that these files might be lost forever. With nothing left do to I get desperate enough to ask for help on Reddit of course I get the usual types who didn't even bother to read and just wanted to dunk on somebody for being stupid by telling me something I already outlined in text but I get a few who actually help including one fella who came with a miracle cure a web archive of the manufacturers OLD driver page burn these to the CD too, gonna have to start taking notes to differentiate all the numbers on this CD.
Back on Windows 98, we get success on the chipset after a restart looking at dxdiag we've got a Pentium III now, was that just a false report before? anyways we're left with just one device, a "PCI Multimedia" clearly on-board audio. I kinda just have a feeling it's probably the SoundMAX chip so I install the Analog SoundMAX AD1881 driver and LETSGOOO LETSGOOO all I have to do is restarts and!
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monkaS

maybe I just made a wrong call, or maybe it's the Aureal AU8810 instead, so I open those up, click on the icon, and-
monkaW

It won't open, with no errors, no failures, just nothing, even directing Windows to the folder with the driver prompt doesn't come up with anything for either driver. With this, I've hit a brick wall. The only thing keeping this machine from being just what I need is a sense of hearing. It runs Frogger here great in Software mode and it doesn't support both hardware modes because of.. transparency? it does boot in MMX mode with a few errors but works well in-game, I can even use the headphone jack of the CD drive to listen to music on its own while it plays.
I should mention I also installed the 98FE SoundMAX Drivers and that put a name to the chip but cause errors I'm pretty sure using the 98FE drivers when there are SE driver available isn't the smartest of moves so it may be a fluke
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I wanted to narrow this down more by seeing if I could find exactly which chip between the two it was but looking at the motherboard closely I'm not really sure which of these chips is actually sound hardware if I had to hedge a guess I would pick this one maybe? but the numbers don't tell me much...
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This is as far as I've been able to make it so far, I've run out of drivers and settings to throw at the wall and maybe I just don't know enough about Windows 9x as I should, but I'm at least a little proud of the research I've been able to put in so far in attempting to make it work. I read through a motherboard's manual in its ENTIRETY for the very first time! I'm still bummed that I can't play Frogger with sound effects included.
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SONIC122
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Re: Pionex PC Audio Driver Mystery

Post by SONIC122 »

try checking the internet archive for drivers and stuff like that, if your lucky you might be able to find what you are looking for.
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Ethanator611
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Joined: Mon May 01, 2023 11:25 pm

Re: Pionex PC Audio Driver Mystery

Post by Ethanator611 »

SONIC122 wrote: Mon May 08, 2023 1:18 pm try checking the internet archive for drivers and stuff like that, if your lucky you might be able to find what you are looking for.
I've tried

Searching for the Motherboard leaves me with either at best some magazines and if made broader a whole lot of CDs for boards I don't own. searching Pionex gets me more nothing and some more magazines.
The only archived thing is the Biostar driver website as listed in my original post.
one fella who came with a miracle cure a web archive of the manufacturers OLD driver page
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SONIC122
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Re: Pionex PC Audio Driver Mystery

Post by SONIC122 »

Ethanator611 wrote: Mon May 08, 2023 8:23 pm I've tried

Searching for the Motherboard leaves me with either at best some magazines and if made broader a whole lot of CDs for boards I don't own. searching Pionex gets me more nothing and some more magazines.
The only archived thing is the Biostar driver website as listed in my original post.
thats crazy, maybe try swapping parts that you cant find drivers for, for parts you can find drivers for. you will at least have a fully working retro PC. maybe sell the non-drivered parts for some extra $$$ as "cant find drivers" parts.
you might also try finding somebody online that might be able to write a driver for you, but that might take a while. your options are limited my friend, and I dont know anything at all about retro PCs, so there is nothing I can do to help with the software side. good luck!

edit: just do what Matt did on the purble place stream, just look up the game sound effects on youtube, so the sound effects have absolutely no relation to the actual game. arthurDance
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Ethanator611
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon May 01, 2023 11:25 pm

Re: Pionex PC Audio Driver Mystery

Post by Ethanator611 »

SONIC122 wrote: Tue May 09, 2023 1:20 pm thats crazy, maybe try swapping parts that you cant find drivers for, for parts you can find drivers for. you will at least have a fully working retro PC.
Sadly It'd be more economical just to start from scratch, so I think I'll look into grabbing a video card for that other machine I have. In the meantime, I'll see if I have more luck with Windows NT drivers instead.
SONIC122 wrote: Tue May 09, 2023 1:20 pm you might also try finding somebody online that might be able to write a driver for you, but that might take a while.
Maybe someday in the far-off future, but I've got other things to worry about for now.
SONIC122 wrote: Tue May 09, 2023 1:20 pm edit: just do what Matt did on the purble place stream, just look up the game sound effects on youtube, so the sound effects have absolutely no relation to the actual game. arthurDance
I've got at least the music out of Frogger which I prefer to the SFX-only approach my WinXP machine took.
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