Help with identifying a sound card \ VOGONS

Help with identifying a sound card

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First post, by iulianv

Posted on 2011-02-21, 18:56

iulianv Offline

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I' ve recently got my hands on what appears to be an Aztech 16-bit ISA sound card. Sorry for the poor quality of the attached photo, I'll try to describe it: upper-right square chip is labelled AZT-NXPMIX0592 (with jumpers J4 and J5 next to it), lower-left square chip is an AZTSSPT0592-U01 (with jumpers J1 and J2 next to it) and upper-left square chip is an Intel N80C51BHP.

There are also jumpers (JX1 and JX2) right next to the LINE and MIC outputs, there is a TDA7284 in the same area and there is also a YMF262-M.

Now, Win98SE detects and installs it as "Soundblater Pro or compatible", and only one channel seems to work - I don't know if this is because the card is faulty, or Windows did not detect and/or install it right, or there are some misconfigured jumpers, but I'd surely like to find out 😀.

I couldn't find any "named" Aztech sound card that matches the connector / chip / jumper placement on this one - maybe there is someone who could help me out here with a model name or a proper driver... many thanks in advance.

Reply 1 of 11, by h-a-l-9000

Posted on 2011-02-21, 19:09

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It's the same layout as this one
http://www.bandi.co.kr/board/view.php?&bbs_id … e=44&doc_num=88

1+1=10

Reply 2 of 11, by iulianv

Posted on 2011-02-21, 20:13

iulianv Offline

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Well, I can't seem to find any picture / layout on that page, but I'll definitely test the drivers.

I also found another thread here on Aztech sound cards, with some other links to driver pages, which I'll also test on mine.

The only photo that I could find on the Internet is here: http://www.pc-schnulli.de/hardw/skisa/azskisa.html (mine seems to be the first one - model is unknown there as well).

Reply 3 of 11, by h-a-l-9000

Posted on 2011-02-21, 20:20

h-a-l-9000 Offline

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You can't see a picture as I have that card (has a sticker 138-MMSD802) and the driver there works with it. Actually it's SBPro compatible and doesn't need drivers once the ressoruces are set up. Not sure why you'd want to torture it with Win98 though.

1+1=10

Reply 4 of 11, by iulianv

Posted on 2011-02-21, 20:26

iulianv Offline

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Win98 is all I had at hand for testing when I got it, but the card will go in a 486DX2-66 / MS-DOS / Win311 system that is coming together these days... I'm a bit worried about the one-channel-not-working issue though, I hope it's just some wrong setting or a driver issue, and not something "deeper" that's gone faulty on the card.

Reply 5 of 11, by h-a-l-9000

Posted on 2011-02-21, 20:28

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Is the channel missing on both line-out and spk-out?

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Reply 6 of 11, by h-a-l-9000

Posted on 2011-02-21, 20:30

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Oops, looks like it has no line-out. In that case turn the wheel and move the plug a bit, maybe bad contacts.

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Reply 7 of 11, by iulianv

Posted on 2011-02-21, 20:31

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It only seems to have one output, labelled "SPK". I guess the difference between amplified and non-amplified output is made by a jumper (either J4 or J5 - the other one is probably used to route speaker output through the card), but it's not clear to me which is which yet, so I didn't change anything there...

Turning the volume wheel only produced noise on the working channel, nothing was happening to the "muted" one. When I assemble the test computer again I'll try playing with the connector, to see what happens...

One other thing that I'm confused about is the JX3 jumper - "CLOSE: EEPROM SETTING, OPEN: FACTORY SETTING" is written on the PCB. Which one to use? Same jumper with same function seems to be described differently for different Aztech models that I could find online...

Reply 8 of 11, by h-a-l-9000

Posted on 2011-02-21, 20:37

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J4 is for PC speaker, J5 controls PC speaker volume iirc. The output is hardwired. JX1 and JX2 have to do with mic input.

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Reply 9 of 11, by h-a-l-9000

Posted on 2011-02-21, 20:39

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Factory setting is probably A220 I7 D1. EEPROM is what got configured through the setup tool.

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Reply 10 of 11, by iulianv

Posted on 2011-03-01, 11:40

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Successfully installed the drivers and got MP3s playing in DOS with DAMP 😀. Pretty noisy though, which doesn't seem to happen in Win95 (only tried Quake2 there to test some 3dfx cards)...

Reply 11 of 11, by h-a-l-9000

Posted on 2011-03-01, 12:56

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It can help to plug it in as far away as possible from other cards. Also, metal shielding on the soldering side helped a lot.

On the other side, noise was not that uncommon with most of these old cards.

1+1=10

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