are you sure what you have is a soundscape? I have 3 of these cards and they dont look like yours...

are you using ssinit.exe to kick off the PNP config for the soundcard?

Mine are the gateway branded ones, but when i Look up pictures of the regualar ones, essentially they look the same.

As far as SB emulation goes, they werent too bad at all when I had mine running.

do any of the chips say opus or otto wavetable on them?

I doubt the Ensoniq Soundscape drivers will run that card because yeah it is very different. Soundscape cards use an Analog Devices DAC for most digital audio functions for example.

This must be one of the cards that came with multimedia kits right?

Lots of classic help threads about this card. Though the official Ensoniq cards can be a pain too.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/SPEA$20Media$20FX

Hum, have you tried the card on more than one machine? Just to make sure it is not some specific incompatibility with the machine you want to use it with? Also, have you tried playing with the FSB?

Is the one that kicks off if underclocked the SoundScape? If so, does it work 100% on an underclocked bus?

@Sev80; Pretty certain it's a re-badged S-2000, though SPEA V7 seem to have moved things around near the edge connector, I also think they have a slightly different sample ROM.

SSINIT is used, AUTOEXEC has this in it (with crap removed), PATH is set several lines earlier;

SET SNDSCAPE=C:\SNDSCAPE
REM - Now set after DIAGNOSE for real SB16 - SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T1
SSINIT /I

Interestingly SSINIT reports that it knows my card is a Media_FX.

I give up on the SB Emulation, I would prefer using a real SB or a PAS16 anyway if I could make this thing work next to it.

One chip says "OTTOR2" (Or "Otto R2" I guess) and there is a large Ensoniq branded one near the center of the card but I cannot see the silksceen in the image I have and aren't home as I write this... I seem to think it said "SEQUOIA" because I thought it read "SIGOURNEY" when I first glanced at it - But I have it on good authority that this is an S-2000 card.

@swaaye; I don't know it's history... Though I was planning to use it's MKE interface. Funny how none of those showed up in my research prior to buying the card... Google hates me I guess. The official drivers don't work either though, because the installer says it needs to be run in Windows and makes a batch file I have to execute, I execute said file and WFW loads only to spit out an error stating that whatever the batch file told it to load does not exist - and it is correct, the file doesn't exist at all. This goes for the copy I have of the CD I downloaded somewhere else and the VogonsDrivers one, though they seem to be nearly identical anyway. They are packed in such a way I can't just pull them off the disk and use them. There are two different Media FX cards apparently, mine is Type 1.

@alexanrs; Tried briefly on a Pentium board but used the same CF card to boot with, mostly as the 486 mobo is new so for all I knew that could have been the problem, same result. FSB doesn't do anything different to the SoundScape between 33MHz and 40MHz that I have noticed, it simply serves to break the video card... I will try underclocking the BUS to 20MHz when I get home in the next few hours (Guess I'll put the Trio 64 back in because the ShowTime VGA card can't run that slow) and report back with the results, but I don't really want to sacrifice CPU speed for the card, 50MHz (2.5x20MHz) POD doesn't sound like the high performance monster I had in mind.

I did mess with the ISA divisor though just to see what would happen, I aimed for around 8MHz for that.

The Ensoniq synth chipset of OttoR2, Sequioa, and the Motorola 68EC000 are typical of the Soundscape cards but that might be where the similarities end. It's interesting that SSINIT recognizes it.

BTW yes you can use a SB with a Soundscape card. You just don't enable the SB emulation and that clears up the Port, IRQ and DMA for a discrete SB card. I ran a SBPro2 alongside a Soundscape for years. The Ensoniq SB emulation is best avoided.

Maybe you should try Windows 95.... Try the official Ensoniq drivers. The quirk you've probably already seen is the drivers usually don't detect the right resource addresses. Easily tweaked in device manager though. I haven't used a Soundscape in 3.x in forever so can't help at all with that.

The SPEA V7 Media FX board referenced in the first post is identical to Reveal's SoundFX Wave 32. These are third-party cards based off of Ensoniq's chipset and original reference design, but should be compatible with the Ensoniq-provided drivers, given some tweaking...

Artex recently had some trouble with his Reveal board. I'm curious if the same workaround might be applicable in this situation as well:

Reveal Sound FX 32 / SC-600 / Ensoniq SoundScape Win 3.11 Woes

SoundFX you say? Very interesting that, because the ID String I referred to from SSINIT says "Media_FX/SoundFX" which pretty much confirms your statement to be correct.

I have a progress report! The Vibra 16 I was testing it with makes it mad, I do not know why but I removed it, I never much liked the Vibra cards and intended to replace it later anyway. I tired an SB Pro, but it did not work producing silence. As this machine replaces a fast 486 I don't have anymore, it occured to me that the PAS Plus which is still in that case is doing nothing with the crappy Pentium that is in there now so I nabbed it and shoved it into this system instead, I like the PAS's FM better than the SB anyway to be honest. Somewhere around here the Ensoniq drivers started working, don't ask me why, I know I pointed them to a blank SYSTEM.INI eventually though, I could always add entries to the real one manually if I need to.

Anyway, the Media FX works now, it is finnicky about it's DMA and very annoyingly cannot use any DMA channel above 3 (so it's obviously in 8-Bit space there) so whatever, I left it there and can only hope it isn't interfering with the onboard IDE. The PAS I can get working on it's own, I have that on DMA 7 and IRQ 7 emulating a Sound Blaster at 220h IRQ 5 and DMA 1, with the Ensoniq in the system (even when not initialized) the digital audio side of both PAS and it's SB section won't work. It did once, but I have no idea what if anything I did differently.

As for the video card, I have noticed another unusual behaviour, the LED on my monitor lights up orange indicating no signal despite an image appearing onscreen... I think I'll keep the Media FX now, but I think I've had enough of the video card being a pain in my assholes and it's slower than the ISA equivalent anyway, so I might just keep that as a display piece as it at least looks good, probably use the Trio 64 VLB for now and replace it with a PCI ET6000 later. Incidentally, I put a Matrox Mystique in just for lulz and the system goes very fast when benchmarked and leaves it's little sister (That being Hooker, using the next model Aquarius board down) behind by a few percent, so at least the important components seem to be doing what they are supposed to do.

As it is I just spent three hours trying to make the PAS work at all, because as it turns out, the bracket is used to ground the card's amp and it isn't in a case at the moment. I only noticed when I put it in a machine that has a case to find out whether it had died on me only to lean on the bracket - which wasn't screwed in - and see sparks fly off whilst hearing a pop in my headphones, at which point I latched onto what was happening and wrapped a wire around the bracket of each card before bolting said wire to the casing of my PSU. Speaking of wires, I set the SoundScape to Speaker Out and ran the line-out pin on the two jumpers into the PAS's CD Audio header so I don't need external cabling... Strange pinout on the PAS header, it's like GRGLG or some such.

I think I might go to sleep and try again tomorrow as I'm tired now, but I think I can get this working if I keep at it tomorrow. Of course, I'll probably get this mess fixed only to later discover something is wrong with the MKE CD-ROM header... If that happens I will use a SCSI drive with the PAS instead.

PROGRESS REPORT

The PAS is now working... Technically it always did. I started NSSI with the SS out of the machine and got an ominous message when looking at the "Multimedia" window which said "Another card may be mapped at the same port" so with only two cards in, it was pretty obvious.

Removing the SPEA ShowTime graphics card makes the problem disappear... How the hell did they screw it up? The QuickWorks 24i uses the exact same hardware for the most part - certainly has the same features - and that doesn't to this. Guess I'll find another card later then, I knew this thing was messed up.

From what you said the ShowTime seems to be a lot more finnicky than the Media FX. I'm guessing everything sounds good now, so congratz!

Play any games on it yet? What do you think of the MIDI? What is the capacity and date on the MIDI ROM chip?

Discovered the problem with the ShowTime, it has a Crystal CS4920 onboard which is an audio chip using the SB's address, no drivers for it seem to be included on the floppies I have or the CD on Vogonsdrivers, at least, that's what I've surmised from when the installer isn't trying to look for stuff in directories that don't exist (really silly ones like "C \"). Though indeed, the PAS+SS combo is total win now it works, I've got the audio quality and wavetable ability of the SoundScape and the nice bassy FM output from the PAS depending on what the software I am running is best with... Oh, and because of the way I wired it up, I can still get sound from both cards using the SPEAKER header on the PAS.

I briefly played Dark Forces, Duke 3D and Heretic (the latter being to test the PAS's SB emulation out) and it sounds pretty epic, I'll never like anything more than the GUS for several misplaced reasons, but it's possibly going to be a close second. I like it enough that I'm actually tempted to drag out my older CakeWalk disks and install that so I can play with the synth myself. I'm glad the drums aren't over loud and sharp/dry like the ES1370 ones were.

The ROM is dated 1992 and is 2MByte. I think "9320" implies that this particular chip was made in 1993, Week 20 and the text next to it seems to imply Version 1.00... Interestingly it is socketed, though I don't plan on pulling it out.

Feel kinda bad for repeatedly throwing profanities at the card now. Still, all my favorite machines seem to be the ones that were a pain in the ass to set up in the first place.

Thanks for all the help, I'll come back here if I have anything more to say, such as if I can get the CS4920 to do anything, probably won't though as I can't find drivers anywhere and I doubt it is actually Sound Blaster compatible as well as the previously mentioned slow video performance. I've tried other generic looking Crystal ones but they do nothing. Sucks that I have to lose the MPEG/AVI processor.

Well, two minor things. First up is one someone may be able to help with but its not terribly important; My MKE interface is not working, I have set the jumpers correctly for MKE drives and the drive and cable are known as working as I removed them from my K5 where it was controlled by a SB16. The driver for the CD interface loads and detects the Ensoniq interface correctly, then the MKE driver loads and detects the drive correctly, MSCDEX then loads up and also reports everything is fine... It apparently is not fine because as soon as I try to do anything with the CD Drive I get a rather nasty ARF and Current Drive no longer valid. I tried replacing my CDMKE.SYS with the generic one I had used in the K5 (I never used the official Creative one on that, so it's not limited to the SB16) but it does the same thing. I also tried using the SPEA drivers for the card as they work now for reasons explained below (their installer requires Windows 3.11 but does not install Windows drivers and brings up silly insert disk messages during install despite using a CD) but they don't change anything here.

So if anyone knows anything about that it'd be good. Otherwise, meh, I'll turn the interface off and use the PAS's SCSI capability instead, probably be faster anyway and the Ensoniq CD driver eats over 200KB of conventional RAM - more than nullifying the benefits of the card not requiring a TSR for audio I think.

My other gripe is one I can't get help on. I knew I should have quit while the going was good. The ShowTime card I managed to improve, the SPEA installer suddenly worked and I set the Line Refresh to the default value, it was already at that AFAIK but it was mandatory and the only setting I could mess with... Anyway, the performance improved - like really improved - it was operating nearly as fast as my STB LightSpeed probably would on the slower BUS but obviously the thought of having an MPEG decoder on a 486 machine was somewhat interesting and I just had to mess with that before taking the card out for good. I got Windows MCI drivers set up and everything and loaded up a video file and walked off to get a drink while the machine thought about that, my monitor is faulty and likes to fade to black (requires a sharp thump to make it fade back in and re-focus the image) so when I came back and found a black screen I just assumed that the monitor had broken itself again and whacked it hard enough to bring it back... Nothing happened. I pressed the keyboard wondering if I had left APM enabled... Nothing happened. I scratched my head and noticed a nasty smell. Being scared of CRT displays due to a rather nasty experience that almost cost me my eyes a few years ago*, I yanked the monitor's power cord out of the socket and looked at it for a moment wondering why the smell was still getting worse. I shut the computer off as no drive activity was going on and I figured it would be fine.

Some time later I came back to the machine, had a look at the monitor, nothing seemed to be burnt so I powered it back up and switched the computer on to find everything apparently doing what it was supposed to. There was, however, something unusual that I couldn't put my finger on, not least of which was that I'd been playing Duke Nukem II with working sound effects for about half an hour with the graphics card in, so I ran a few tests on things, one of which was the STTEST utility for the graphics card, it displayed several video modes, S-Video and Composite appeared to be doing their job and then the screen went black and nothing else happened. I hit space a bunch of times, nothing. Hammered escape thinking the program is probably as shoddy as everything else SPEA came up with and the test results appeared, wait, those can't be right can they? Let me take the PAS and the SS out just to be sure... Yeah... Apparently I don't have a VIPER chip anymore, nor do I have the CS4290 or a few other things that came back as OK, I think I found the source of that smell. Interestingly, after I ripped the card out, the SPEA Media FX drivers started working for the sound card, which implies to me that the two products could not be used together reliably, at least on this motherboard.

Why did I write this? That card was expensive, I hope that by jotting this down I can warn anyone researching the card in the future that blowing money on it is not a good idea. To summarize, the ShowTime;

• Has a non-Sound Blaster audio device onboard occupying IRQ5, Port 220h and Port 388h... Possibly also DMA 1 as that one yielded most errors with software for other devices with the card installed. This device cannot be disabled and the resources cannot be changed.
• Yields pretty poor performance in DOS. Windows performance unknown, does potentially starting a fire count? It's blazingly fast!? 😲
• Has the worst drivers in the world, second only to some of the crap ATI has dumped on the world. This is assuming you can even install it.
• Actually doesn't have great picture quality, at least on mine, my knackered out testbed S3 Trio 32 looked better.
• Probably is one of the hottest cards I have seen from 1994, this thing seriously throws out heat... Wondering if this is a German thing as every German peripheral I have ever owned runs hotter than hell... Sucks... Aber keine Sorge, denn Ich liebe dich immer noch Deutschland! 😉
• To cut a long story short, it's just a pain in the ass, you may as well get something else and if you reall want video decoding, get a later card like the Rage or a generic PCI decoder card.

Anyway, I've got my eye on some other cards now, going to try and cash out the money the council owe me tomorrow so I can pay off my debt to the electric company and grab another card, though I might be a bit upset if it doesn't match the color of the mobo and other cards, I've never had a system set up like that before, it looked good. Not too important though, I'd rather it be pink with yellow spots and work well than be color co-ordinated and work badly. Wondering whether to go overboard again or just settle for something normal... Might have to go silly because the rest of the machine is.

* The CRT incident from around ten years back involved a mildly cracked (but working) screen which got warmed by a digital board below the tube and caused it to implode, seems it had no implosion band so the glass flew out at high velocity. By pure luck I had wheeled my chair to one side to mess with a Trigem Pentium that was on the desk next to the Compaq Presario the monitor was attached to, so the glass flew past the side of my head, it made some nasty indentations in the wall behind me though... Funny though, because I'm happy to shove my face over an untested board full of tantalum capacitors and hit the power button. It's a wonder I dare touch this stuff really though, because I'm scared of batteries as well, then again, I think inverters are fun and I'm sure they have the potential to be more dangerous.

You can probably tell, I'm tired, so I'm rambling. But it's my thread and like I said, maybe down the line, someone will find my documentation o what I've experienced with two less common components useful if it turns up in a Google search somewhere down the road.