Building a new-ish DOS PC to mess with "authentic" old-timey sound production.
Motherboard is an industrial board I found on Alibaba. I needed a board with an ISA slot that supports DMA. This is not common anymore. Board CPU is a Celeron M and has 512MB of RAM soldered on board :-( It's got some nice amenities like an onboard Compact Flash slot. The board was first introduced to the market in 2012 so it's not new-new. But all my previous attempts to get a vintage machine running failed so I decided to find a new board with ISA.
Here's the sound card. It's an Orpheus II LT. It's a modern recreation of a Sound Blaster Pro, but it can also do AdLib and some other Windows-only junk. It's a 16-bit ISA card, hence the need for the ISA slot. Its benefit is that it is brand-new so no exploding caps, and has top-notch sound quality, no static or buzzing or anything else. It's got an authentic Yamaha OPL3 sound chip in it, which is the specific thing I wanted.
It's all going into a Mini-ITX case. The board is an industrial board so it doesn't have normal power connectors, but it can be powered through a single 4-pin Molex connector. It took quite a while to find a combination of parts to power this thing but I eventually found a small power supply that could do 12V 40W, with a standard barrel connector, and an adapter to convert the barrel connector to Molex.
I might add a PCI card with DVI/HDMI since this thing only has VGA, but I need one with good VESA support since it will be running DOS and I don't want the SVGA modes to run like crap.
The goal of all this is I love the sound of the OPL and emulation isn't quite good enough. There are DOS tracker programs that can control this thing. I want to learn how to program music both using a tracker, and from scratch in asm code.