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Author Topic: Oak Technology Mozart 16 (1994) [FM] OPL3  (Read 4171 times)

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Offline chrisNova777

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Oak Technology Mozart 16 (1994) [FM] OPL3
« on: December 18, 2014, 04:49:24 AM »

with YAMAHA YMF262 chip OPL3

Quote
An Oak Technology Mozart 16 16-bit ISA sound card

An Oak Technology Mozart 16 16-bit ISA sound card, from when the CDROM drive interface had not yet been standardized. This card offers four separate interface connectors for IDE, Panasonic, Mitsumi, and Sony CDROM drives, but only one connector could be used since they all shared the same interface wiring.

A SoundBlaster 32 16-bit ISA sound card, from after connector standardization had occurred, with just an IDE interface for the CDROM drive.

When PC motherboard makers started to include onboard ATA interfaces in place of the earlier ISA plug-in cards, there was usually only one ATA connector on the board, which could support up to two hard drives. At the time in combination with the floppy drive, this was sufficient for most people, and eventually it became common to have two hard drives installed. When the CD-ROM was developed, many computers would have been unable to accept these drives if they had been ATA devices, due to already having two hard drives installed. Adding the CD-ROM drive would have required removal of one of the drives.

SCSI was available as a CD-ROM expansion option at the time, but devices with SCSI were more expensive than ATA devices due to the need for a smart interface that is capable of bus arbitration. SCSI typically added US$ 100-300 to the cost of a storage device, in addition to the cost of a SCSI host adapter.

The less-expensive solution was the addition of a dedicated CD-ROM interface, typically included as an expansion option on a sound card. It was included on the sound card because early business PCs did not include support for more than simple beeps from the internal speaker, and tuneful sound playback was considered unnecessary for early business software. When the CD-ROM was introduced, it was logical to also add digital audio to the computer at the same time (for the same reason, sound cards tended to include a gameport interface for joysticks). An older business PC could be upgraded in this manner to meet the Multimedia PC standard for early software packages that used sound (which required the sound card) and colorful video animation (which required the CD-ROM as floppy disks simply did not have the necessary data capacity).

The second drive interface initially was not well-defined. It was first introduced with interfaces specific to certain CD-ROM drives such as Mitsumi, Sony or Panasonic drives,[8] and it was common to find early sound cards with two or three separate connectors each designed to match a certain brand of CD-ROM drive. This evolved into the standard ATA interface for ease of cross-compatibility, though the sound card ATA interface still usually supported only a single CD-ROM and not hard drives.

This second ATA interface on the sound card eventually evolved into the second motherboard ATA interface which was long included as a standard component in all PCs. Called the "primary" and "secondary" ATA interfaces, they were assigned to base addresses 0x1F0 and 0x170 on ISA bus systems.