PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Couple of mechanical problems on the way. The location of the USB socket of the extender board is such that there should be a clearance of at least 3-4 cm between the extender board and the mainboard but then only one of the two slots would line up with the last expansion board slot of the computer case. Also a standard SATA power connector is about 1 mm too tall preventing the PCI card from seating properly in the slot but there seems to be room enough to cut a slot on top of the plastic connector body without hitting the wires.

Angled USB 3.0 adapter:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adapter-Degree ... 3AY1XD6T2X

Partial success! After modifying the SATA power connector to allow the card to be seated properly in the PCI slot I managed to get at least one card at a time working.

BTW Does such a thing as low profile SATA power connector exist? I don't feel comfortable modifying standard SATA power connectors with a hacksaw. Especially when the wires are exposed after that.

Here's a picture of the problem. Just a millimeter or two shorter SATA powerconnector would allow both of the cards to be seated properly in the PCI slot.

Managed to get the second card to seat properly too after sawing off a larger chunk of plastic from the connector. Not pretty, but seems to work ok. Now waiting for temporary keys to verify the installation. Keep fingers crossed!

they do make low profile sata connectors. those are data cables, not power.
there aren't many full sized PCI cards these days, and the manufacturers of motherboards have too many things to fit on the pcb, so they design dumb things...

petehalo, no images came through in your recent posts.

In regards to low profile SATA power, just have a gander on sites similar to amazon & newegg for extender/splitters and see if one will suffice. Some are 'straight' and some are right-angled, so you might find a few that *might* work and order the likely candidates to test.

Not looking too good. I can only get one 6DSP card to work at a time and even that's totally unreliable. "Time out waiting for acknowlegement from DSP X" is the most common error message.

I found an old PC with XP Pro for sale locally at €100 so I'll fetch it tonight and I'll use it to see if the cards are ok before I spend more money and time with this project. I also found a guy who has a Scope 20 card and he's willing to sell it but hasn't decided on the asking price yet.

There's a M-Audio LightBridge 34/36 for sale nearby and the seller is asking 210 euros for it. Maybe I should buy it and use it to connect 16 channels of audio from my main PC to and from the vintage pc with my scope cards via ADAT. My main DAW Harrison Mixbus 32c don't seem to work with Scope ADAT at all (Reaper at least seemed to play ball with Scope for a short while before errors) so moving the Scope environment to separate computer would make sense in that respect too.

That’s what I do (external Scope machine) but I do recommend getting Scope stable before further investments.

I got three 6dsp cards working in Scope 5.0 on this XP machine. I need to modify the case a bit to accommodate the big 15dsp card. I need to install Reaper and do some testing with these three cards to see how stable this system is and the try to fit the big card in case.

Is there any benefits to have if I upgrade to Scope 7 from Scope 5.0?

petehalo wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 10:20 am Is there any benefits to have if I upgrade to Scope 7 from Scope 5.0?

YES! Support Sonic Core! 200eurons correspond to 2-3 programming hours --> v7.1

petehalo wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 10:20 am Is there any benefits to have if I upgrade to Scope 7 from Scope 5.0?

If you want to stick with XP, 5.0 should work fine.
On later versions of windows, 7.0 seems to run with less trouble.
Most DAW drop the support for 32bit, so this will force you to upgrade windows and so an upgrade makes sense.

V7 is improved over V5 on my XP rig, the need to set the correct card as master seems less and I'm more consistently able to hit DSP & PCI maximum loads.

Spielraum wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 12:08 pm

YES! Support Sonic Core! 200eurons correspond to 2-3 programming hours --> v7.1

Good point! But I have to work two days to earn that 200€ first.

Today I feel lucky I just made a deal to trade in my EHX Mel9 pedal that I haven't used in two years for a M-AUDIO Lightbridge FW interface with 4 ADAT inputs and outputs. Now I can have up to 32 channels @48kHz (or 16 @96kHz if I ever need to go higher than 48kHz) of audio traveling between my DAW computer and Scope computer.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to get the LightBridge interface to work in Win10 which is not surprising when the device is not officially supported in Win10. But I found something that is even better. An amazing application named ASIOLink Pro that I can use to pass 16 channels of audio over network from my DAW computer to Scope computer and back. I have an ethernet cable connected directly between DAW to Scope computers and it seems to work quite reliably.

great thread.
found this one too: https://www.forums.scopeusers.com/viewt ... 0&start=60 same topic maybe relevant infos.

I read that thread too but that case was bit different when there were a couple of PCI slot on the mobo and the extender was used to add a few more to the setup.

BTW The ASIOLink Pro is an amazing piece of software. Everybody with an interest in computer audio in Windows should take a look at it. Unfortunately the guy who coded it originally is now dead so there's no future development to be expected but it works pretty well as it is and best of all it's free.

yes, thanks for the ASIOLink Pro info. downloaded it and ->> boom!!!