Athlon Companion Cube

Well sometimes you just can't tick all the boxes you want to. That cheap little sound card above that I bought just for the gameport? No go. It installs fine, works "fine" as a sound card, but will not acknowledge a device connected to the gameport. Unlucky combination of OS and chipset at play? Who knows.

So I dug into the stash and pulled out some other PCI sound cards.

- ESS Maestro-2: Same behaviour.
- Aopen AW744 (a very good quality Yamaha card): Same.
- SB Live SB0100: Works! For what it's worth, no driver experimentation required for this one - XP picks it up natively. But it's exactly the kind of full size card I didn't want in that PCI slot.

As a final pissing of hard earned into the wind, I grabbed this relatively svelte ALS4000 which looked to be decent quality. Sadly, same deal as the first three cards.



So my grand scheme of running that lovely Forte in the PCIe slot with a cheeky gameport mule in the gap has basically been shot down. I really want that gameport for my wheel too, as this is such a great Grand Prix Legends rig. So I might as well just run the Live or Audigy on its own, rammed up against the GPU. This is all the case window's fault.

 

That's disappointing! You might have already look at this but what about gameport -> USB converters? I have no experience with them so it might be a crap idea but if they did work and you could hack up an internal connection + bracket then it might work...?

 

They've crossed my mind, and it's now something I should take a closer look at. Necroware's project looks pretty good:

https://github.com/necroware/gameport-adapter