WAIT, OH SHI--

It's Diamond Sonic Pro (or is it Sonic Sound rev. A5?) based on Sierra Semiconductor ARIA chipset! This thing is uber rare and no photos of it are available on the net.

Please take another photo so that FCC ID is seen.

It's somewhat similar to the Prometheus ARIA16 I had:

I bet you can use Prometheus drivers if you find none for your Sonic Pro, they seem pretty generic. Many games support ARIA directly, while hardware SB emulation can be turned on for those games without direct support.

If Prometheus drivers won't fit, then you are in trouble, because ARIA cards have to be initialized by a driver in config.sys before they start working.

Anyway, you've found an exclusive soundcard and now have the honor to photo, test and describe it first.

Interesting. I saw a add for a 486 and a Pentium 1 machine on Craigslist yesterday for $30 so I bite. they guy said the 486 had a Diamond card which puzzled me cause I didn't recall them making any ISA sound cards so I just assumed it was a PCI 486 board. when I first saw this card I just assumed it was an uncommon clone or something. anyways the 486 it came in was kind of odd in itself. its a ICL Ergolite DT486/66 which is a company I've never heard of. the PC has a "made in Finland" sticker which I don't think Ive even seen on...anything.

will those drivers work for pure DOS? everything I read says windows 3.1 or up. I'm surprised so many games support it. never heard of this chipset before.are the other sound cards with this chip more common?

The Pentium 1 machine is an unremarkable Compaq. only thing interesting about it was the hard drive still booted to Windows and according to the drivers there was once a Gravis Ultrasound installed....wish there still was.

There are many Diamond ISA sound cards, but what usually can be found is nothing special, based on ESS or Crystal designs.

I have neven seen any ARIA cards except for Prometheus ARIA16 and ARIA16SE. These seem to be most popular ARIA cards; they usually can be seen on ebay twice or thrice per year.
Wide support of ARIA cards can be explained: it is supported by popular game sound driver libraries like Miles AIL and HMI SOS.

Prometheus drivers work finely with DOS. You just run the installation software and it does everything for you.

Also, ARIA cards are supported by PX player. That means you can play MIDI and XMI files in DOS over your Diamond Sonic Pro. That is, if you find the suitable driver, because, as mentioned before, ARIA cards need initialization before they can work at all.

interesting. i'll give the card a try in the next few days and hopefully those drivers work.

so many switches and jumpers on this card. I wish I found a manual tucked inside the PC to go with it. any idea about those empty sockets. I assume the two by the SCSI controller are for SRAM possibly for the SCSI controller?
I don't even see that on many dedicated SCSI cards. would that actually make the built in SCSI pretty good?

I don't think so. The big empty socket is for another 512K ROM chip, and smaller sockets might be for SRAM (used for loading DSP code). There are similar empty sockets on Prometheus ARIA16 which has no SCSI onboard. Note that despite the same ROM size Prometheus ARIA16 is based on newer jumperless ARIA design and has newer ROM. That diminishes the chance that your card would work with Prometheus drivers.

But if the drivers won't work, you can try the third party ARIAINIT tool, let's see if it works for you.

Some I/O and IRQ info is here.

BTW, you pulled the card from a PC. Is there anything resembling ARIA drivers on hard drive? Is SOUNDCFG.SYS line present in CONFIG.SYS?

Re ICL: I shortly used an ICL machine in the 90s, IIRC also 486 DX/2 66. OEM design, had some strange BIOS features like logging the boots and other stuff (for security I assume). It came from a corporate environment.

Oh, and this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Computers_Limited

Happy for you soviet conscript!
Sound cards with ARIA chipset are super rare and expensive. Thank you so much for the hi-res pictures.

I grabbed this one from storage at a former office environment. did it look like this?

its a screw less case kind of like a MAC. also see that bay below the floppy drive. you can take that cover off but it seems its just for show. mine has no way to mount a drive there. not even any place to put guide rails or anything. its like they forgot.

Bristle, at the risk of looking dumb I cant get the drivers to install. i'm sure its just me. I'm trying to install them in a pure DOS machine. I unzipped them all into there own folders and transferred them to the C: hard drive but when I run install it asks a few questions then when it tries to install it searches my B: floppy drive and reports the B: drive is not ready.

I tried running Daggerfall without any drivers and the setup program locks up when it goes to test/ also locks up when I try to auto detect with it.

Beegle wrote:

Happy for you soviet conscript!
Sound cards with ARIA chipset are super rare and expensive. Thank you so much for the hi-res pictures.

NP, thats one of the things I love about PC collecting over Consoles. You can still learn something new and come across hardware that noone has really explored sometimes.

soviet conscript wrote:

I cant get the drivers to install. i'm sure its just me. I'm trying to install them in a pure DOS machine. I unzipped them all into there own folders and transferred them to the C: hard drive but when I run install it asks a few questions then when it tries to install it searches my B: floppy drive and reports the B: drive is not ready.

I don't quite remember. Perhaps you have to copy ARIA16 folder contents (which should be 756 Kb in size) to a diskette and run installation from there.

I mean this folder:

Also you can try ARIA16 SE drivers (two diskettes needed), since Prometheus ARIA16 SE and Sonic Pro should have the same SCSI controller: Future Domain TMC-950.

good news, it appears the aria16 drivers do work. I haven't tried the aria16 se ones but I suspect they would as well. the issues was they did need to be installed via floppy and I had to write the disks with winimage. cutting and pasting to the floppy did not work. for whatever reason the card locked up my Pentium 133 dos machine but the drivers seemed to install fine on a 66mhz 486 I have. I haven't been able to try the card with any games but as far as the sound test on the driver floppy I do get the sounds in testing so the card appears to work at least in some capacity.

the only Aria game I have on hand that natively supports the chipset is Daggerfall...unfortunately for whatever reason the only option I have when installing the drivers for I/0 address is 280 and 290 neither of these addresses are an option when setting up sound in daggerfall, highest address is 260.

Good news indeed.

For Daggerfall, you can select, say, I/O 260 and then edit the HMISET.CFG file manually. I don't know if it works, but it's worth the try.

Did you try the PX player? It should be able to work at any settings. It's default I/O for Aria is 290h. The command string is such:

1px test.xmi ariaxmid

I believe there are tons of games one can force to run with Aria since there are universal AIL (ariadig.adv and ariaxmid.adv), AIL/32 (a32ardg.dll and a32arxm.dll) and DIGPAK (aria.com) drivers. Some games support it out of the box, examples are TES: Arena and The Seventh Guest.

hey, sorry updating to this post has taken so long.

the PX played does not work. I get "cant open midi file TEST.XMI"

on the plus side I can get Arena to play sound with the card just fine. I may try 7th guest soon and possibly upload some sound files.

Maybe you can use these as well: http://web.archive.org/web/19980201092828/htt … onic-sound.html

Can you tell me if this card came in a multimedia kit?

EDIT: I saw that the files wont download, try to find them using google.

But i found this too:

http://ftp.uma.es/Drivers/TSONIDO/DIAMOND/SONIOUND/

Thanks, I'll try them out. No kit with the card, I found it in a 486 I purchased. Is there a list anywhere of games that natively support aria?

the links to those files are all dead 🙁

Okay, I made a video with some samples on YouTube. unfortunately the sound from the Aria came out as mono and is a bit low. I'm not sure why. maybe my plug wasn't all the way in or maybe it has something to do with the drivers or jumper settings on the card which I'm still trying to figure out. seeing as its the only example of the Aria on YouTube I guess it better then nothing. I used a AWE32 to compare though its a bit unfair as its properly mixed and in stereo. https://youtu.be/eaVbgDHs3EU

In case those with an ARIA card haven't seen this review in the 10/1983 issue of CGW.