Welp, I took off the jumpers and reseated them a few times and… it works! Kicking myself though, should’ve done that first 😖

Sbdetect and hwinfo are helpful programs to have around, but they both give me A240 as the I/O port, different from what people here have been telling me. Any reason for this? Or just something to not worry about

Anonymoose wrote on 2024-04-25, 18:44:

Sbdetect and hwinfo are helpful programs to have around, but they both give me A240 as the I/O port, different from what people here have been telling me. Any reason for this? Or just something to not worry about

This means that you should shuffle the JP1 jumpers until they give you A220. A220 is the most common setting, and everything else can cause issues with software not prepared for it. FM music playback works using the fixed the AdLib compatiblity port at 388, so software doesn't care whether the SB is at 220 or 240, but digital sound playback communicates with ports in the 22x or 24x range.

Yes, the default address for ISA Sound Blasters is 220h.
I only accept different address when it's the second sound card.

Also, as expected: DSP 2.01 = Sound Blaster 2.0 = T3 = up to 44 kHz PCM playback.

Good to know! As for the cdrom port, could I just add an IDE cd-rom drive to it? Or would I have to stick it into the parallel port?

Anonymoose wrote on 2024-04-26, 23:39:

As for the cdrom port, could I just add an IDE cd-rom drive to it? Or would I have to stick it into the parallel port?

No, that CD-ROM connector doesn't look like IDE.

You can connect an IDE CD-ROM on the same cable as the HDD, just set the HDD to MASTER, and the CD-ROM to SLAVE.

Anonymoose wrote on 2024-04-26, 23:39:

Good to know! As for the cdrom port, could I just add an IDE cd-rom drive to it? Or would I have to stick it into the parallel port?

No chance to get IDE drives running with that card. IDE drives use 16 data bits, and the card is an 8-bit card. As the CD-ROM port has 40 pins (like IDE), it might be compatible with either the Panasonic or the Mitsumi CD drive interface. Both of these interfaces are legacy interfaces that have been superseeded by IDE, and mostly found on single speed and double speed CD drives. There are a lot of Panasonic and Mitsumi IDE CD drives, they do not match to your card.

I found a post on VCFED, in which someone reports getting a Mitsumi-style external CD-ROM with a DB25 connection on it. It is likely, but not certain that this is the kind of drive that would work with your sound card.

Unfortunately, the only cd drive I have to test is an internal LG one from 2000. Interesting though that they look the same.

Anonymoose wrote on 2024-04-27, 15:49:

Unfortunately, the only cd drive I have to test is an internal LG one from 2000. Interesting though that they look the same.

A drive from 2000 with a 40-pin connector surely has an IDE interface as you already correctly identified. The connectors of drives using the old Mitsumi and Matsushita/Panasonic interfaces look identical to IDE connectors. There are a lot of sound cards (around 2 to 3 years newer than your one) with 3 different 40-pin connectors for the three 40-pin CD interface styles and a 34-pin header for Sony-style CD drives. As IDE was late to the party (but then crashed it), early "multi-CD" sound cards just hat two 40-pin connectors and one 34-pin connector.

I tried attaching the cd drive to the card just to see what would happen, and it turns out the cable the cd drive uses has 39 pins, I learned something new today.

Unfortunately, I have a new problem 🙁 I tried installing a soundblaster 2.0 driver for windows 3.1 (the SB driver found on winworld), and using the program test-sbc gives me an error code of 0100. The issue is very similar to this vogons post, but it ends on a cliffhanger.

Sound Blaster 2.0 test program Error 0108

I think TEST-SBC uses some undocumented DSP commands, which makes it fail on non-Creative cards.

Does the Windows 3.1 driver for SB 2.0 work with your card?
If not, the problem may be the same - try using the SB driver shipped with Windows instead.

Technically? On disk 3 in the WINDOWS folder there’s a setup.exe program and sndblst.dll but the exe only identifies the card and exits.

I could use the drivers that came with Win 3.1, but it’s only SB 1 and 1.5. Any differences?

Wait, there were native drivers for ES488...
https://web.archive.org/web/20000229161511/ht … vers/driver.htm

That works! Thanks! There’s options for Win 3.1 and 95 on the website. if I decided to go to 98, what could I do for that?

Windows 98 has drivers for ISA ESS chips built in.

Awesome! Thanks 😀

I've uploaded the software shipped with another card based on ES488:
12-bit sound card