Using Old or Alternate OSes With Your Gear

[cooltouch]

This discussion began in another thread, but since it was drifting the subject off-topic, as Brad Saucier recommended, I'm starting a new thread.

 

Win98SE was mentioned as a viable platform for older gear. So this is an option I'm gonna consider. Jokeyman123 provided us with a link to various Win98 editions:

 

https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-98/98-second-edition

 

I've used Cakewalk products for over 20 years for my DAW work. I bought a copy of Cakewalk's Pro Audio 8 back in 2000 and upgraded to Pro Audio 9, which I used to create, mix, and produce two albums worth of music. I was running Pro Audio 9 on a Win98 system and was reasonably happy with the performance, if not the stability, of my system. So anyway, I bit the bullet and upgraded my OS to XP, and was stunned to discover that the OS upgrade had broken PA9. The most expensive software I'd ever purchased, and it had become useless. And Cakewalk, instead of fixing PA9 so it would run in XP, came out with an entirely new product -- actually, it was PA10 with a new look, but they decided to rename it to Sonar. And they were asking an arm and a leg to upgrade to it from PA9. I balked. I was pissed that they decided to orphan PA9, so I just refused to pay their asking price. Well, in retrospect, that was pretty stupid because my music composition came almost entirely to a halt and this lasted for too many years. 

 

But now I'm interested in setting up a Win98 machine, not just so I can run PA9 on it, but so I can run a couple of old soundcards I have. One's a Soundblaster and the other's a Yamaha XG card. Both cards have synth chips on them, which was the way things were back then, back before software synths took over. With the Soundblaster card, its instrument quality was not bad, but there were a couple of instruments that were actually very good, and I have yet to come across one of them that is as good as the one found on this card. So for that single reason, I'd like to run a Soundblaster again. Now, as to the Yamaha card, well, it has that XG instrument set and many of them sounded quite good -- as I dimly recall -- it's been 20 years. I know I can find drivers for the Soundblaster, but finding a driver for that Yamaha card might end up being a challenge. Yamaha is not very good about supporting their old gear.

 

I mention "alternate OSes" specifically as it refers to Linux. I've dabbled with Linux over the years, but I've never attempted anything as serious as music compositions  --  or anything else related to music production. But from what I've picked up from various sites, there is something to be had in this arena., so I'm quite interested in finding out more..

 

 

 

[IanB]

I had a great Win98 rig. 300MHz PII, Abit BX6 Motherboard. It was able to run two, yes two, SoundBlaster Live!s by using some hacked EMU APS drivers. My DAW was Cubase VST 3.7x, a revelation at the time. Sometimes it ran out of horsepower but some optimisation of the audio got playback going again. I recorded a whole CD of songs with it, with the SoundBlasters acting as a drum machine and samplers using Soundfonts (plus guitar and vocals). I sold a handful of copies on MP3.com. Good days!

 

Unfortunately that machine was killed by a power supply failure. Luckily I had already built a new machine when that happened, an Athlon XP 1800 based machine. I still ran Win98SE on it; I actually liked that OS and had few stability problems. I have that machine sitting in a corner at the moment, it has Windows XP on it now. The same Cubase runs on it (after some tweaking) but the timing isn't stable and XP won't let me use more than one SoundBlaster Live! (it rejects the hacked drivers).

 

Earlier Windows has a lot going for it; much better out of the box MIDI handling and with Win7 (I think) they crippled the audio mixer (apparently at the behest of some music corporations to prevent easy music copying). As I said in the other thread, at some point I'd like to find a small Win98SE compatible motherboard to use with my SBLives and have that all running again. It was very easy and fun to work with.

[cooltouch]

Hey Ian, the motherboard I was using for my Win98 rig was a MSI, running a 1.1 GHz AMD CPU. I don't recall anymore which flavor it was -- or is. I still have the board/cpu stashed away somewhere. I really liked that pair. I can recommend this MSI board, but it is full-size, so probably not what you're looking for. I don't recall the model number, and I won't know it until I figure out where I put it. It's in a box somewhere . . . 

 

So I've just built a new system that is now running Win10. I ended up replacing everything but the case, so I was left with a fully functioning Win7 system, and fortunately I had a spare case and power supply, so I was able to resurrect the Win7 system I've been running for the past 12 years or so. I want to keep a functioning Win7 system for legacy hardware and software. And I have another system that has Win7 installed, but this is an older, slower system, so I was thinking about wiping its drive and installing XP on it. But now, after this conversation, I'm thinking that maybe I should just go ahead and set it up for Win98. Or maybe install a boot manager and have both OSes, I dunno.

 

I've been building my own PCs since 1993, and I've kept it all. So I've got everything from fast 486's to a Pentium or two and a few different AMD setups. I even still have at least one AT case and some AT motherboards, a couple of which have the old 16-bit ISA architecture. I think I have at least one ISA sound card, which might be interesting to resurrect. But I've run out of room, so I don't know if or when I'll ever get around to putting any of these old systems back into service.

[Random_Vibration]

Haven't messed around with Linux in a while but there are tools to make it a fairly good music production tool.  It is there if you don't mind changing the DAW software you use and getting hardware that is supported.

 

That being said, I would suggest to keeping separate computers for separate purposes and leaving them fixed at a OS and keep them off the web if you want to support old hardware under a old Windows version.  The "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" axiom applies here.  I run new Windows 10 machines with the latest processors.  I also still run Windows 7 on old machines that have been switched to support dedicated tasks.  They are kept in separate realms.  I don't try to do it all on an old machine and don't try to bring old software forward.  If everything works, leave it alone until it doesn't.

[Jokeyman123]

Right Random-dual-boot systems are ok, but crossing Linux and Windows Linux uses Grub to dual-boot, Windows uses it's own--hainvg done all this over time, I decided its easier to just have separate machines for each OS.

 

I use somewhat older laptops-which don't cost as much as new-and keep XP on one, 7 on another and Linux on yet another. For most of my-relatively simple-music software tasks, I don't need anything much faster than an i3 or i5 CPU-I have an old machine with a P4 and am surprised-clocked at 2.8Ghz, its still a dog. Multithread CPU's do make a huge difference for everything. Linux-if you are prepared-an amazing amount of musical functionality in almost any of its incarnations-although I found many versions are just as slow as Windows in execution. And you will have to learn about software repositories and entirely different driver setups-not so wonderful if you do all this in the same machine-any problems in windows booting up-has fouled up my Linux OS on the same machine-Windows doesn't play well with other OS, although I've gotten Wine to work with many Windows programs-its too much trouble for something that is not always very stable. Much tidier on a separate machine. some of the best music software for Windows as open source, was first developed on Linux-and if the developers decide they want to port it to Windows, they do. My Jazz midi sequencer, as crude as it is-looks about the same as my original Cakewalk software-I'm talking Cakewalk 3.0 I found and installed-and use-was open source developed, and even with every other DAW I've tortured myself with-when I need some quick cut and paste for midi-and want to add some audio tracks-this is still drop dead simple compared to say Sonar, Reaper and even Rosegarden has a pretty hefty learning curve. 

 

One other thing just came to me in my fog...check out Coolsoft's virtual synth engine-its fast, simple, loads soundfonts......tastes great, less filling....and the newer versions have the midi mapper Windows left out from Windows 7 on-or was it XP? I know it disappeared somewehere back when-and for my music tasks-the midi mapper from Coolsoft is still pretty handy. I wonder if Bill Gates knows how to play the piano, or ever tried to use Windows for anything...well never mind..... 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

[cooltouch]

This talk of old software that works well got me to thinking. What got me started with computer-based music composition was a little known software package called MidiSoft Studio. V6.0 was the last version and it is very unstable on Win7 or later. But it was reasonably stable on a Win98 platform.

 

Midisoft Studio is basically a notation-based sequencer and has a fair level of power to it. Sometime in the "naughties" Midisoft went out of business. Then there was another outfit that took over briefly, released an update to v6.0, then they vanished. Then a German outfit bought the rights to it and renamed it to Forte. In its new guise, it's still basically the same old Studio -- even the old Studio .mmm files can be read and opened. But where Studio had been affordably priced, those Germans must think they found a software goldmine because they're asking a lot of money for all but the most basic version of the software now. I'm not really interested in paying what they're asking, mostly because it would be a trip down memory lane for me, more than anything else.

[Jokeyman123]

I recall this program-I may still have it on one of my older hard drives-I'll check. probably small enough to upload right here-if I find it will. 

[cooltouch]

If you have a copy of the original CD, that would be great. I lost mine somehow. You can download an evaluation copy of Forte from its developers, but you can't save files with it, so other than just using it for something to mess around with, it's of no use.

 

[CYBERYOGI =CO=Windler]

The main mainboard of my Colani bigtower runs Win98SE on a DFI K6BV3+/66 mainboard with AMD-K6-3+@550MHz, 768MB RAM, Voodoo1+GeForce3 Ti220 graphics card and real ISA slots with 2 soundcards SoundBlaster AWE64+Gravis Ultrasound Classic.

[Jokeyman123]

I know this is old-I did not find my old version of Midisoft Studio. I have another hard drive or 2 around I haven't checked yet thought-the constraints ofother repsonsibilities have been taking my days over lately. How are you doing Cyberyogi, hanging in there? I can relate to your anguish-as long as i can do something, however small it may seem to others, I can be happy, or at least at peace with it. why music has kept me from going completely bonkers over the years. Even when life seemed like all the doors had closed and I've been there, somebody came along and said-wait you didn't check this one yet.  I'm still here, mangling sounds and compositions and torturing my wife with versions of music she's never heard, and doesn't want to-so I moved into-the living room, ha-ha!!! And I just read-scientists think there may have been life on Mars after all...maybe I'll go check it out....I always thought the Kardashians were not from this planet...

 

 

[Groove On]

For Linux, the Raspberry Pi 4 is an interesting alternative for studio recording. My main machine is a Mac, but I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4 for recording in Reaper and the slightly faster Odroid N2+ as a Pianoteq sound module. The processors aren't super powerful, so you really want to dedicate each small board computer to 1x specific music task. These small board computers all run off SD cards, so dual-booting just means means switching out the boot cards.

 

Some caveats:

- it is a completely different computing experience; tweaking and optimizing means using the command line interface,  digging into the OS guts and occasionally even dealing with code. But the Raspberry Pi 4 has a huge community of enthusiasts, so it's one of the best boards to for getting into Linux - if you're inclined.

 

- most commercial software developers have shown zero interest in porting their software to Linux (there are good reasons for this), you can literally count the commercial audio programs on your hands. And while there are a lot of good open-source options, you'll find the general software quality is lower than in the Windows/Mac world.

 

[Jay C]

Does using an Amiga 500 running OctaMED (via Workbench 1.2) together with your keyboad (through MIDI and all), in this case a XW-G1 synth, qualify for this thread ?

 

[pianokeyjoe]

Oh my,, I sure am glad I decided to look outside the classic Casio subforums today! Where to begin?! For most or all my music midi gear and Computers dedicated to music production(playing and recording for my personal enjoyment), I use LINUX and the related software for music for Linux. BEFORE 2017 I used Windows XP pro HACKED version to fit on 1GB SSD media, thus called XPe SP2(a customized stripped down version for custom made keyboards that use a computer inside as the brain-think Korg Kronos or Openlabs Neko). It is a 168MB ISO and after installation it takes up only 512mb depending on the drivers you need for a specific target device. Now I use LINUX in the same way and it is bigger foot print but VERY VERY specific and targeted to the hardware I want to use and apps I want to use only. Windows 7.. I used Win7 for FL Studio and Audacity. Like was mentioned above, the mixer app was crippled in Win7 which made recording music live, into Audacity, very hard or not possible in some cases. That was a deal breaker. Back to XP pro Hacked and LINUX. Now I read that there was issues with Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 in XP?? Not for me.. I have been using that sweet sweet tiny foot print 20mb software in my Embedded XP system and..wait for it..LINUX with Wine. There are issues with CW in general.. you can not get perfect synced midi tracks from the count of 1 and thus there is ALWAYS been a dropped note at count 1. I have always had to record a 4 count leader, to then start playing. That is for MIDI. I just follow the same rule with audio in CW so I can minimize my head aches. There is obviously better Daws out there like EnergyXT and Reaper that DO record and play all midi from count 1. So far all my hardware for the computers works with XP and Linux(M-Audio Delta 1010LT,Prosonus Audiobox 96,firebox,SB Live!,Audigy,Extigy, and SB32,EMU 0404, and Midisport 1x1). Linux is what I use to test hardware to see if it works or not when I buy it lol! No need to spend an hour installing the OS and drivers to test, just run a Live Linux MINT or MX LINUX session and BOOM! Works or does not work, done!  Windows 2000 was not very compatible for almost ANY music software or hardware so I was stuck not using 2k for music. Win98se was the last version of classic unstable WIndows I did use with SB Live, SB32 and Yamaha DB50XG on a Turtle Beach Aureal Vortex2 PCI card and ESS audio drive ISA card. I recorded alot of songs but the OS was always crashing so I could not continue. I did use a Casio PT1 and MT65 in 2 of my early works on that Win98se system. Before that, my Casio keyboards were only recorded on cassette tape decks with me singing. Nothing else.. Ahh the days.